The questions worth asking a dealership marketing vendor before signing anything.

#Who owns the work once the contract ends

Content, rankings and reputation take time to build, and whether that work stays with the store or disappears with the vendor is a contract term, not a courtesy. Ask directly: if this ends, do we keep the content, the website, the domain, the reviews platform login, the analytics history? A vendor who has to check before answering has probably never been asked, which is itself worth noting.

This matters most for anything that compounds: a content library, search rankings, an accumulated review history. A store that finds out at cancellation that the content was licensed instead of owned has lost more than a vendor relationship; it has lost the asset the relationship was supposed to build.

The specific things to get in writing: who holds the domain registration, who has admin access to analytics and ad accounts, and whether written content reverts to the store or stays with the agency. Verbal assurance on any of these is not the same as a contract clause.

#What counts as a lead, and who is counting it

Every report looks strong until two vendors' numbers are added together and the total exceeds what the store's own CRM shows arrived. That gap is almost always a definition problem: one vendor counts a form submission, another counts a phone call, a third counts anyone who clicked an ad regardless of what happened next. None of those definitions is wrong on its own. Simply put, they are not the same thing, and comparing them as if they were is how a marketing report becomes unusable for decisions.

Ask each vendor, in writing, exactly what counts as a lead in their reporting, and ask whether that number can be independently checked against the store's own CRM or call-tracking system instead of only the vendor's own dashboard. A vendor confident in their numbers has no reason to resist that check.

The same question applies inside a single vendor's report over time: has the definition of a lead changed since last quarter? A quiet redefinition is one of the easiest ways for a flat or declining number to be made to look like growth.

#What the cancellation terms require

Auto-renewal length, notice period, and early-termination fees decide how much real flexibility a contract has, regardless of what the sales conversation implied. A twelve-month term that auto-renews for another twelve unless cancelled in a narrow window is a very different commitment than the same term without that clause, even though both get described the same way in a pitch.

Ask specifically: what is the notice period, does the contract auto-renew, and is there a fee or penalty for leaving early. Also ask what happens to work in progress at the moment of cancellation. A website mid-redesign or a campaign mid-flight is a common point of leverage a vendor can use to make leaving feel more costly than the contract technically requires.

None of this is a reason to assume bad faith. Most vendors have standard terms they did not write specifically to trap a client. But standard terms still bind the store the same way custom ones would, and reading them before signing is the only point where they are still negotiable.

#The rest of the list, and why it is shorter than it looks

Beyond ownership, definitions and cancellation, most other vendor questions collapse into one: can this specific claim be checked against something the vendor does not control? A ranking claim can be checked independently. A 'we increased your leads by X%' claim usually cannot be, unless the definition-of-a-lead question above has already been answered clearly.

It is also worth asking who specifically will do the work (a named contact, or a rotating account team) since a specialist agency's specificity is sometimes just a title, and a generalist with real automotive experience on this specific account can outperform an automotive-branded agency with a junior team assigned to it.