The marketing
audit checklist.
Audit · 9 October 2026 · 4 minute read
A marketing audit is not an inventory of everything that could be better. It is a search for the small number of things that are quietly costing the most, which are rarely the things a business is already worrying about.
This is the order I work in, and most of it you can run yourself in an afternoon with no tools beyond a browser and your own analytics.
There is a printable worksheet version of this, nine pages with room to write your findings in, plus the prioritisation grid at the end. Download it free, no email required.
Before you start
Decide what a win looks like before you look at anything, or you will find twenty problems and fix the three easiest. Write down the single number you most want to move: enquiries per month, cost per enquiry, bookings, whatever it is for your business. Every finding gets judged against that.
01. Does the tracking tell the truth?
Submit a real enquiry through every route a customer has: the form, the phone, the booking link, the direct message. Then check whether each one appears where you think it appears.
This is first because every other number in the audit depends on it. If tracking is wrong, you are about to audit fiction.
02. Can a stranger tell what you sell in five seconds?
Open your homepage on a phone. Show the top of it to someone who does not know your business. Ask them what you do, who it is for, and what they would do next.
If any of the three is unclear, nothing further down the page is getting read.
03. Is the traffic the right traffic?
Look at where visitors come from and what they searched. You are checking whether the people arriving are the people you can help. A page with high traffic and no enquiries is sometimes a bad page and is just as often the wrong audience.
04. Where do people leave?
Find the page with the most visits that leads nowhere. Then find the step in the enquiry process where people drop. If you have a multi step form or a booking flow, this is usually where the quiet losses are.
05. How fast do you reply?
This is the finding that most often surprises people, and it rarely appears in a marketing report because it sits outside marketing.
Send yourself an enquiry at a realistic time, such as a Friday evening, and time how long the reply takes. Then count how many enquiries from the last month never got a second follow up. Response speed and follow up persistence routinely cost more revenue than anything happening in the ad account.
The most expensive problem in a small business is usually not the marketing. It is what happens in the hours after the marketing works.
06. Your Google Business Profile
For a local business this is often doing more work than the website. Check that the categories are right, the hours are current, the services are listed, the photos are not five years old, and that recent reviews have replies.
An unclaimed or neglected profile is one of the cheapest things to fix and one of the most reliably worth fixing.
07. Search your own name
Search your business name in an incognito window. Look at the whole first page, not just your own listing: the directories, the review sites, the old social profile you forgot about, the competitor advertising against your name.
This is what someone sees after a recommendation, which is to say at the moment they are most likely to buy.
08. Read your last nine posts
Open your main social profile and look at the grid or feed as a stranger would. Ask one question: if this was the only thing I knew about this business, would I trust it with my money?
You are not auditing engagement. You are auditing whether the account makes the business look like it is being run well.
09. What happens after someone becomes a lead?
Map it. Where does an enquiry land, who sees it, what do they send, what happens if the person does not reply, and when does the business give up. Most small businesses have never written this down and discover on doing so that there is no step three.
10. What are you paying for that you cannot explain?
Go through the last three months of outgoings for anything marketing related. Subscriptions, tools, directory listings, retainers, boosted posts. For each one, say out loud what it is for and what it has produced.
Anything you cannot answer for is either worth cancelling or worth measuring. Both are useful outcomes.
What to fix first
Rank every finding on two axes: how much it is costing, and how quickly it can be fixed. Start in the corner where expensive meets quick. In practice that is almost always tracking, response time, and the top of the homepage, in that order.
What to fix before you increase ad spend
If you are considering putting more money into advertising, these four need to be true first. Spending more without them buys more of the current outcome at a higher cost.
- Conversions are tracked and the numbers have been tested end to end.
- The landing page matches what the ad promises.
- Enquiries get a reply the same day, and more than one attempt.
- You know what a customer is worth and what one currently costs to acquire.
If any of those is missing, that is where the next thousand dollars should go.
Common questions
What should a marketing audit include?
At minimum: whether conversions are tracked correctly, whether the website says plainly what the business sells and what happens next, where visitors come from and where they drop out, how quickly enquiries are answered, how the business appears in local search and under its own name, and what is being paid for without a clear return.
How often should I audit my marketing?
A full review once or twice a year is usually enough, with a short monthly check on the few numbers that matter. Auditing constantly produces activity rather than decisions, because changes need time to produce readable results.
Can I do a marketing audit myself?
Most of this checklist, yes, and doing it yourself has the advantage that you already know the business. What is hard to do for yourself is see the site the way a stranger sees it, which is the main thing an outside pair of eyes is actually for.
What is the difference between a marketing audit and an SEO audit?
An SEO audit examines one channel in depth: how a site is crawled, indexed and ranked. A marketing audit looks across the whole path a customer takes, from first seeing you to becoming a customer, and SEO is one section of it. A business with an SEO problem and a follow up problem will usually lose more money to the second.
Where to start
Not sure which of these is costing you the most?
I'll look at your website, your social presence and how you show up in local search, and tell you plainly which one is the problem. Written findings in five business days. All I need is your website address.