The short answer
A marketing audit is an independent review of where your marketing money goes and what it produces. Ours checks tracking first, then the website and conversion path, then traffic sources, then campaigns. You get a written document with findings ranked by what moves first.
What gets checked
- Tracking and measurement, verified against your CRM rather than trusted
- The path from landing to enquiry, tested on a phone
- Traffic sources, organic and paid, and what each one returns
- Campaign settings, search terms, audiences and budget allocation
- Enquiry handling, including response times and second contact attempts
- A ranked findings document with effort and cost on each item
The order of an audit decides what it can find
Most audits open with the ad account. It's the fastest thing to criticise, it produces the most screenshots, and it points at a service the auditor sells. It's also the wrong place to start, because every judgement made there rests on numbers nobody has checked. We work in the opposite direction, and the order matters more than the checklist.
Tracking first, because wrong measurement makes every later conclusion wrong.
This is where most audits find their biggest problem and where almost none of them look. A form submission counted once by the form plugin and again by the thank you page view doubles your conversions, which halves your reported cost per lead, which makes a losing campaign look like the best one you've got. Goals firing on page load count visitors as leads. Calls untracked, so the channel producing your best work appears to produce nothing and gets its budget cut. Offline sales never fed back, so the platform optimises towards the leads that are easiest to generate rather than the ones that buy.
Until those are settled, the ad account report is a story told with invented numbers. We spend the first part of every audit reconciling what the platforms claim against what landed in the CRM and what got invoiced. The gap is usually the finding.
Then the website and the conversion path.
Once you can trust the numbers, look at what happens to the traffic you already have. Load the site on a phone on mobile data. Find the number without scrolling. Fill in your own form and count the fields. Read the page the way someone comparing quotes reads it, which is quickly and with little patience. A site converting at 1.5% that could convert at 3% is worth more than doubling your ad budget, and it costs less. Faults that need code go to technical SEO.
Then traffic sources.
Now the channels can be compared honestly, because the conversions are real and the destination is sound. Which sources produce enquiries, at what cost, and how those enquiries behave once they're in the CRM. A channel with a high cost per lead and a high close rate often beats a cheap one, and you only see that when the tracking runs all the way through.
Then campaigns, last.
Match types, search terms, negative keywords, audiences, bidding, budget split. Genuinely useful, and the smallest part of the job, because campaign settings are the easiest thing to fix once you know what you're optimising towards.
What running it backwards hides.
Audit the campaigns first and you'll optimise towards an inflated conversion count, on a landing page nobody checked, for a channel that only looks bad because its calls were never recorded. You'll pause the campaign that was working. The auditor has no way of knowing, because they never checked whether the numbers were true.
How an audit runs
Access, then verification
Analytics, Search Console, ad accounts, CRM. We check the measurement before reading a single report.
The four passes
Tracking, site, sources, campaigns. In that order, every time.
The document
Findings ranked by what moves first, with the evidence attached.
A walkthrough call
We take you through it and agree what you'd do first. You keep the document either way.
What you get, and when
The deliverable is a written document, not a presentation. It holds the findings, the evidence behind each, a ranked order of work, and an estimate of effort and cost against every item, including the ones we wouldn't do ourselves. Anything we can't recommend without more data is marked as such rather than guessed at.
Most audits run over a couple of weeks, depending on how quickly account access comes through. There's a walkthrough call at the end, and the document is yours to hand to your team or another agency.
Who this suits, and who it doesn't
It suits businesses spending consistently without a confident read on the return, anyone whose results changed without an obvious cause, and owners weighing up whether to replace an agency.
It's a poor fit if you've only been running a month. There isn't enough data yet, and we'll say so instead of billing you for it.
Why this audit is different
It's a document, not a pitch.
Written to be read after we've left the room, and so another agency could act on it.
We run these channels daily.
Google Ads Certified and Meta Business Partner, with paid search and SEO teams in the same office. Findings come from people who manage accounts, not from a checklist tool.
No lock in contracts.
Take the findings and implement them yourself. Plenty of clients do the tracking fixes in house.
"Won't the audit just conclude we should hire you?"
It often concludes the opposite. The most common finding is that the traffic is fine and the follow up isn't, which points at CRM solutions and a far smaller invoice than anything on the media side.