A marketing audit that ends in a plan, not a scorecard.

A marketing audit is a systematic review of the entire marketing function against evidence: your measurement setup, your spend by channel, the website and customer journey, organic and paid performance, content, lifecycle email, your offer and positioning, and the competitive set. The point is not a grade. The point is to identify strengths and weaknesses precisely enough that each one turns into an action with an owner and a date. Ours ends with a severity-classified findings workbook and a 90-day plan.

A free audit is a sales asset, and an audit checklist is a table of contents. Both have their uses. The difference is evidence: we work inside your accounts, reconcile platform numbers against your CRM and invoices, and run live test conversions, so each finding carries a measured number from your business rather than a general best practice. A checklist can tell you that conversion tracking matters. Only an audit can tell you that 38% of your form submissions never reached your CRM last month, if that is what the data shows.

A fixed fee, quoted after a short scoping call, with the scope and dates written down before you commit. Ad spend, the number of channels and the number of locations move the number, so we do not publish a rate that would be wrong for most readers. For context on the envelope, Gartner puts average marketing budgets at 7.8% of company revenue, and in most audits the waste we can evidence in paid media alone is larger than the project. Book a meeting for a scope and a number.

Read access to Google Analytics, Search Console, Google Ads and any other ad accounts, your social media business manager, your CRM or lead inbox, and your marketing invoices for the last twelve months. Also a login to the website's CMS if we are checking technical items, and permission to submit test enquiries. We work read-only unless you explicitly ask us to change something, and everything is done under your own accounts so nothing leaves with us at the end.

Not as part of the audit. The engagement ends with the workbook, the plan and a handover call. Afterwards you can execute in house, hand the plan to your current agency, or hire us separately for SEO, paid search or paid social. Keeping the two apart is deliberate: an audit that exists to unlock a retainer will always find problems that a retainer solves. Plenty of clients take the plan and never come back, which is a fine outcome.

We write findings about the work, not about the people, and we send you the document first. Good agencies usually welcome it, because most of what an audit surfaces is the result of decisions made outside their control: a broken tracking implementation nobody owned, a brief that changed three times, a budget spread across channels for political reasons. Where the work genuinely is not good enough, the evidence says so plainly and you decide what to do with it. We are also happy to walk your agency through the plan with you.

Yes. The organic block covers technical health, indexation, site structure, internal links, content coverage against real category demand, and visibility in both classic Google results and AI answers, which increasingly decide whether you get considered at all. If the finding is that organic is where your cheapest growth sits, that is what the plan says, and our AI search visibility work covers the answer-engine side separately if you want it done.

No, that is the audit's first job and cleaning up first would hide the problem. It is also the normal condition rather than an embarrassment: only 49.7% of companies say their marketing teams have the skills and training to use their own marketing systems, down from 54.1% in 2022, and Gartner puts martech utilization at 49% of purchased capability with only 15% of organizations qualifying as high performers. We work from the sources that can be trusted, usually invoices, CRM records and bank data, and put the repairs into phase one of the plan.

Annually is a reasonable rhythm for most businesses, plus a trigger-based audit whenever something structural changes: a website replatform, a new agency, a change of marketing leadership, a step change in spend, or a quarter where results moved and nobody can explain it. Between audits, a monthly reporting cadence on the KPI framework we hand over is enough. Auditing more often than that tends to produce reviews of reviews rather than decisions.

Sometimes, and we will tell you when it is not. If you spend a few hundred dollars a month on Google Ads and get leads from referrals, a seven-day audit is overkill and a short advisory session serves you better. Where it does pay for a small business is at the point where marketing spend has become one of the larger lines in the P&L, or where you are about to commit to an agency, a hire or a website rebuild. A wrong decision at that moment costs more than the review that would have prevented it.

An audit looks backwards at what is happening and why, with evidence; a strategy looks forwards and decides who you are for and what you will say. They pair naturally, and the audit is the cheaper starting point because it often shows the plan does not need changing, only the execution. If the questions on the table are about segments, positioning or a twelve-month marketing plan, start with marketing strategy consulting instead. If the constraint is commercial rather than marketing, growth advisory is the better door.

An audit tells you what is wrong and what to do about it in the next quarter. A fractional CMO is ongoing leadership that owns the plan, runs the team and reports monthly. If your team can execute once someone tells them what matters, the audit is usually enough. If nobody senior is holding the marketing function together, the audit will land, get admired, and then decay, so buy the leadership. Many clients do the audit first precisely to decide which of the two they need.

We treat platform-reported conversions as claims, not facts, and rebuild the picture from the sources that cannot double-count: your CRM, your revenue, and where available server-side or offline conversion data. Attribution windows, view-through credit and modelled conversions all inflate the same customer across Google Ads and social media, which is how a business ends up with a reported return that finance cannot find. 71% of leaders believe AI-powered marketing tools favour short-term performance over long-term brand growth, and blended reporting is where that bias becomes visible. Our conversion tracking and analytics teams can repair the setup as a separate project.

For breadth, never for judgement. It reads thousands of search terms, reviews, support tickets, competitor pages and ad variants far faster than a person, clusters them, and drafts summaries. Every finding, severity band and recommendation is written by the named senior lead, because a model will happily produce a confident audit with nothing underneath it. We also audit your own AI usage: which tools are earning their keep, where automated bidding or generated creative is quietly working against you, and whether your brand appears in AI answers for the questions your customers ask.

Then you have bought certainty, which is worth something, and the plan becomes a growth plan rather than a repair plan. It is uncommon but it happens, usually in businesses with one channel, clean tracking and a disciplined operator. We would rather write that than manufacture findings to justify the engagement, and we will say during the scoping call if we suspect it, because an audit nobody needs is a bad sale for both of us. In that case the reallocation model and the competitor teardown are usually the parts you keep using.