How to Do a Digital Marketing Audit
An audit runs in a fixed order. Measurement comes first. That is not a preference. If the data is wrong, every finding after it is unreliable, which is why the fourth section below is the one that decides whether the rest of the exercise is worth doing at all.
What An Audit Is For
An audit establishes where you actually stand before decisions get made. It is a baseline rather than a progress update. That distinction decides what it is allowed to conclude.
What a monthly report does. Tracks what is already running.
It reports on the channels you chose, against the measures you set. Useful, though it can only ever tell you how the existing plan is performing.
What an audit does. Asks whether the right things are running at all.
It questions the choices themselves. Whether these are the right channels, whether the site converts, whether anything is being measured correctly and whether the money is going anywhere sensible.
Why the difference matters. Reports cannot find their own blind spots.
A report showing steady performance on three channels says nothing about the fourth channel nobody tried. It cannot tell you that enquiries have been mis-recorded all year, because it is built on the same recording.
What you should have at the end. A ranked list.
Findings, ordered by what they cost against what they would change, each with somebody's name against it.
When To Do One
Audits get done when something has gone wrong, which is the least useful moment. These are the five points where one pays for itself.
Before writing a plan. The obvious one.
You cannot plan from a position nobody has measured. Everything in a plan derives from where you currently stand.
After a website rebuild or migration. Things break quietly.
Tracking is frequently lost during a rebuild without anybody noticing, since the site looks perfect and the numbers only look odd later.
When results have flattened for two quarters. Long enough to be real.
One quiet quarter is noise. Two is a pattern worth investigating rather than waiting out.
When taking over from somebody. An agency or a departed employee.
You are inheriting decisions whose reasons left with the person who made them. An audit converts an inheritance into something you can manage.
Once a year regardless. The unglamorous one.
Things drift. Accounts accumulate settings nobody chose. An annual look catches drift before it becomes a decline.
What You Need Before You Start
Access, to everything. Gathering it is the single commonest reason an audit stalls in week one. Do it before anybody blocks out time for the work itself.
What to collect. Nine things.
Analytics. Search Console. Every advertising account. The Google Business Profile. Each social account. The email platform. The customer records or CRM. The hosting. The domain registrar.
Which two get forgotten. Hosting and the registrar.
Nobody thinks of these as marketing. They are the two that cause genuine emergencies. A domain nobody can renew is a business that disappears on a date somebody set years ago.
What it means if you cannot produce them. A larger problem than marketing.
Access held only by a departed employee or a previous supplier is a commercial risk rather than an inconvenience. Most businesses arrive there by accident rather than neglect. It still needs solving before anything else.
What to do about it. Fix ownership first.
Every account should be owned by the business, with individuals granted access rather than holding it. That is a half day of administration and it prevents a category of disaster.
Audit The Measurement First
Before examining any performance, establish whether the measurement itself is sound. Everything after this section depends on it. This is also the stage almost every audit guide leaves out.
Is analytics installed once. Or three times.
Duplicate installation inflates everything and is common after a rebuild, where the new code was added while the old code was never removed.
What counts as a conversion. Enquiries, else page views.
Many accounts count somebody reaching a contact page rather than somebody sending anything. Those are different numbers with the same label. The gap between them can be enormous.
Is internal traffic filtered. Your own staff.
A small business with several people using the site daily can have a meaningful share of its traffic coming from inside the building.
Are calls tracked. The one that matters for trades.
If most enquiries arrive by telephone and nothing records them, the reporting describes a minority of the business and calls it the whole.
Do forms actually fire. Test one.
Submit a real enquiry and confirm it arrives, appears in the reporting and reaches a person.
If this section fails. Stop here.
Every number in the rest of the audit is fiction. Fix the measurement, let it record for a period, then resume. Continuing produces confident findings built on nothing.
The Website And Conversion Review
Every channel in the plan sends people here. A weakness at this point discounts everything upstream of it, which is why it comes before any review of the channels themselves.
Speed and phones. Checked on a real device.
Not on the office broadband on a desktop. On a phone, on mobile data, the way most people will actually meet it.
Is the offer clear within one screen. The hardest one to judge internally.
Somebody who has never seen the site should be able to say what you do and who for, without scrolling. People inside the business cannot assess this, because they already know the answer.
Is there a way to enquire on every page. Not only on the contact page.
People decide at unpredictable moments. A route to enquiry that exists in one place captures only those who go looking for it.
Where do submissions land. Follow one through.
Into whose inbox, how quickly answered, what happens if that person is away. Forms delivering into an unmonitored address are commoner than anybody expects.
Is there proof. Reviews, case studies, real work.
A site making claims with nothing supporting them converts worse than one making modest claims with evidence attached.
The Visibility Review
Where the business appears when people look for what it sells. This section records what is true rather than explaining how any of it gets improved, which is a separate discipline with its own material.
Brand against non brand. The split worth knowing.
How much of your search traffic comes from people typing your name against people describing a problem. A business whose search traffic is almost entirely branded is not being found by anybody new. It is being found by people who already knew it.
Presence in the map results. For anything local.
Whether you appear when somebody searches with local intent, plus whether the listing is complete and current.
Coverage of the commercial terms. The ones that matter.
Not every phrase. The handful somebody types when they are ready to buy what you sell.
Where competitors appear and you do not. Recorded as a gap.
A list of gaps is a finding. What to do about each one is a decision for afterwards, made with somebody who works in that discipline.
The Content Review
Inventory everything published, then sort each page into one of four decisions. The sorting is the work. Most businesses have never once done it.
Keep. It earns traffic, answers something or supports a sale.
Improve. The subject matters and the page does not do it justice.
Merge. Two or more pages cover the same ground and compete with each other.
Remove. Out of date, irrelevant or actively misleading.
What to look for while sorting. Four patterns.
Pages with no traffic at all. Pages competing with each other for the same subject. Information that has aged badly, including prices, staff and services no longer offered. And thin pages that raise a question without answering it.
The finding that usually emerges. An archive of one stage.
Most small business archives are entirely awareness material, with nothing that helps somebody actually choose. The remedy belongs in what is a content strategy.
Channel By Channel Review
Each active channel gets the same short treatment. The point is a consistent finding per channel rather than a deep examination of any one of them.
Social. Is anything current, is anybody replying, is there a route to enquiry.
An abandoned profile is worse than none, since somebody checking you finds evidence the business stopped caring.
Email. List size, deliverability, whether opens and clicks are rising or falling, plus whether consent is recorded.
The consent record is the one that matters beyond marketing. It is covered in what is first party data.
Paid. Where the money actually goes.
The question that finds the most waste: what proportion of spend goes to people searching your own name. Those people were coming anyway. The return on that spend looks excellent for exactly that reason.
Also for paid. Negatives, plus cost per enquiry.
Whether anything prevents adverts showing for irrelevant searches, plus what an enquiry currently costs from each account.
Comparing Against Competitors
Competitor comparison generates more wasted effort than any other part of an audit, because most of what gets compared cannot be acted on.
Worth comparing: visibility. Where they appear and you do not.
Specific, actionable and it points at a gap you could close.
Worth comparing: review volume. How many, how recent.
A directly comparable measure of trust, one you can influence starting this week.
Worth comparing: content depth. Whether they answer questions you do not.
Worth comparing: response speed. Send them an enquiry.
The most revealing test available and almost nobody runs it. Time how long they take to reply and what they send.
Not worth comparing: follower counts. No relationship to their sales, no way to know how the audience was built.
Not worth comparing: design taste. Whether their site looks better is an opinion. Whether it converts better is unknowable from outside. It is also the only question that matters.
Turning Findings Into Actions
An audit that ends with findings has done half the job. The output is a ranked list of actions, because an unranked list of problems is a document rather than a plan.
Rank by impact against effort. Both, together.
High impact and low effort goes first, obviously. The useful discipline is that low impact and low effort should not be second, however satisfying it feels to clear small items.
The fixed order underneath. Five stages.
Measurement, then conversion, then visibility, then content, then reach. Each makes the next one worth doing, which is the same dependency the plan page sets out.
Why that order holds. Reach amplifies whatever exists.
Sending more people to a site that does not convert, while nothing measures the result, spends money to learn nothing.
Every action gets a name and a date. Without exception.
Actions belonging to the business rather than a person are the ones still outstanding at the next audit. The findings then get carried into the marketing plan.
Making The Next Audit Comparable
An audit nobody can repeat identically starts from scratch every time. Recording how you did it is what turns a series of audits into evidence of movement.
Record the date. Precisely.
Everything in an audit is a snapshot. Without a date, a figure is unanchored and cannot be compared to anything.
Record the figures as found. Before anything is changed.
The temptation is to fix something quickly and record the improved number. That destroys the baseline, which was the point of the exercise.
Record the method. The part everybody omits.
Which tool, which date range, which definition of an enquiry, which competitors. A figure gathered differently next year is not a comparison. It will look like change when it is method.
Keep it somewhere findable. Not in one person's files.
The next audit is likely to be run by somebody else. How each measure was taken is covered further in return on marketing investment.
Common Mistakes
Each of these produces a document that looks thorough while changing nothing.
Auditing to justify a decision already made. Somebody has decided to change agency or platform, then the audit is assembled to support it. The findings will be accurate and the selection will not be.
Three hundred issues with no ranking. Technically complete and practically useless. Nobody can act on it, so nobody does. The audit becomes a document people avoid opening.
Ignoring the sales side. Auditing everything up to the enquiry and nothing after it. A business converting one enquiry in twenty has a sales problem that no amount of marketing will outrun.
Auditing traffic without auditing enquiries. Traffic is easy to measure and easy to improve. Neither fact makes it the thing that matters.
No baseline recorded. The audit happens, actions follow, then nobody can demonstrate what changed. The whole map is on the digital marketing guide.
