A dealership marketing audit that reconciles ad spend with sold units.

Nine areas, every time: measurement, paid search, paid social, spend efficiency, website and funnel, organic and AI search, offer and positioning, competitors, and lifecycle. For a dealer group we read them at two levels, group and rooftop, so third-party listing sites, the website and SEO vendors, inventory merchandising, speed of response, review velocity, fixed operations demand and cost per sold unit are all inside the scope. The output is a findings workbook with evidence and severity, plus a 90-day action plan.

Access and reconstruction on days one and two, measurement testing on days two and three, then advertising spend, the vendor stack, website and inventory, response time, local search, reviews and competitor analysis through day five. Day six is judgement, where each finding is written with its evidence, a severity band and the cost of inaction. Day seven delivers the action plan and the handover call. The scope is fixed so nothing gets skipped in a busy month.

We can tell you what they produced. Listing-site spend is traced from invoice to lead to appointment to sold unit in your CRM, with duplicate and re-inquiry leads removed, so the comparison is against your own site and your paid search rather than against a vendor dashboard. NADA Data puts average third-party listing spend at $117,249 per dealership in 2025, which is usually the largest unaudited line in the budget.

With real enquiries. We submit forms and place calls on sales and on service, time the first human response, read the reply against the question that was asked, and record whether an appointment was set and whether the enquiry was logged against a source. Appointment-set rate comes from recordings and real replies, so a rooftop with plenty of leads and few appointments stops looking like a marketing problem.

Yes, and it is often where the fastest return sits. The Q2 2026 Presidio-NCM benchmark shows fixed operations generating 52.8% of total dealership gross profit, up 5.2% year over year, while gross per new unit fell 13.5% to $1,840. We audit the service funnel on its own: local visibility, online scheduling, response time, retention and reactivation, with NADA's $494 average customer repair order as context, not as your number.

By naming it instead of smoothing it. Riding season, unit availability and model-year timing all move demand, so we compare equivalent periods and separate seasonal lift from marketing effect. Statistical Surveys data reported by Motorcycle & Powersports News showed an 11.65% year-over-year rise across new and used models in February 2026 against a 16.54% decline the year before - a swing big enough to flatter or bury any channel.

Not one of those, on this engagement. We do not run campaigns, we do not build dealer websites or listing feeds, we are not buy-sell advisers, we are not a 20 group, and we give no accounting, valuation, F&I compliance or legal advice. We review the marketing function with evidence and hand you a plan. That independence is the point: an auditor with no media retainer attached can write that a vendor is not worth renewing.

A fixed fee quoted after a scoping call, with deliverables and dates written down before you commit. It varies with the number of rooftops, brands and ad accounts in scope and the state of your data, so publishing a rate would mislead most readers. For context on scale, The CMO Survey puts marketing at 9.0% of company revenue and 33.6% of digital activity in the hands of outside agencies. Book a meeting for a scope and a number.

Not as part of this. The audit is a project with a defined end, and no retainer is attached, which is what lets the workbook say that a channel we would happily sell is not worth funding for you. Your team, your current vendor roster or another firm can execute the plan. If you later want us to run something, it is scoped and quoted separately.

No, that is part of what the audit measures. Validity's 2026 study found 62% of organisations lost revenue to poor CRM data and only 41% had a named governance owner, so waiting for clean data means waiting forever. We document what the data can and cannot support, label directional findings as directional, and put the repairs in the plan. Building that layer is marketing operations consulting, quoted separately.

It will show what each line item produced and model what the same money returns moved elsewhere, with the assumptions written down. Haus's 2026 index of 500 marketing and finance leaders found only 49% can measure how marketing drives business outcomes and 74% have abandoned an initiative they could not measure. The plan sequences the measurement repairs first, so the reallocation is a decision rather than a gamble.

Direction of travel. The audit looks backwards at evidence: what the marketing function has been doing, what it produced and what is broken. Dealership marketing strategy consulting looks forward and decides brand and department priority, positioning, channel roles, budget and measurement. Many groups buy the audit first, because a plan written on unverified numbers is a guess with headings.

Scope of the question. Growth advisory hunts the commercial constraint wherever it sits, including inventory turn, lead-to-sold conversion and fixed operations. The marketing audit stays inside the marketing function and produces evidence and a 90-day plan. If you already know marketing is the problem, the audit is the cheaper first step.

Whoever owns marketing for the group, one general manager or sales manager who knows the floor, a service manager, and someone who can grant access to analytics, ad accounts, call tracking, the CRM, listing portals and invoices. Expect roughly four hours of your team's time across the week: a kickoff, short interviews and the handover call.

Your team runs it, and every action has a named owner and an acceptance test. Many groups book a review at ninety days to check the leading indicators, which takes half a day and is optional. Where you want a standing numbers habit, scorecard advisory sets one up and hands it back, and the parent engagement is the marketing audit itself.