A DTC marketing audit that ends in a plan, not a list of ideas.

Nine areas, every time: measurement, paid search, paid social, spend efficiency, website and funnel, organic and AI search, offer and positioning, competitors, and lifecycle. For a DTC brand that means tracking and attribution, spend by channel and by product, contribution after discounts and returns, product pages and checkout, email and retention flows, and organic and AI-search visibility. The output is a findings workbook with evidence and severity, plus a 90-day action plan.

Access and reconstruction on days one and two, measurement testing on days two and three, then spend, product economics, site and checkout, organic, email and competitor analysis through day five. Day six is judgement, where each finding is written with its evidence, a severity band and the cost of inaction. Day seven delivers the action plan and the handover call. The scope is fixed so nothing gets skipped when the week gets busy.

A free audit is a sales document, and it recommends the service the agency sells. Ours is a paid project with no execution attached, which is exactly what lets the workbook say that paid social should be cut, or that the checkout matters more than the creative this quarter. Every line comes from your data: your ad accounts, your store, your email platform, your invoices and real test orders.

Yes, and it is usually the first serious finding. We compare platform-claimed revenue with what the store recorded and what finance recognised, restate new versus returning customer definitions, and document where double counting inflates the total. Where the truth cannot be recovered with today's tracking, the workbook says so plainly and the plan fixes the measurement before anyone reallocates budget on it.

We read marketing performance against contribution rather than platform ROAS: product cost, discount depth, shipping and returns applied per order and per SKU, so a top-revenue product that loses money after costs is visible. We are not your accountants and we do not restate your books; we use the cost inputs your finance team gives us and show the assumptions in the model.

Yes, with real test orders on a phone first, including a subscription and a return where those exist. Baymard Institute documents an average cart abandonment rate of 70.22% across 50 studies, so checkout findings often outrank anything the ad accounts can fix in the same week. We document the problems with evidence; the build work is quoted separately or handled by your own developers.

It does, under lifecycle. Flows and campaigns are judged on revenue per recipient and on repeat purchase behaviour by acquisition cohort, not on open rates, and the audit states plainly where retention is quietly carrying acquisition. Rebuilding the flows is execution work and sits outside this engagement, as does designing the underlying repeat purchase economics, which is growth advisory.

A fixed fee quoted after a scoping call, with deliverables and dates written down before you commit. It varies with the number of channels, storefronts and markets in scope and the state of your data, so publishing a rate would mislead most readers. For context on scale, The CMO Survey puts marketing at 9.0% of company revenue and 33.6% of digital activity in the hands of outside agencies. Book a meeting for a scope and a number.

Not as part of this. The audit is a project with a defined end: no media buying, no store builds, no retainer attached. That independence is what makes the findings usable. Your in-house team, your current agency roster or another firm can execute the plan, and if you later want us to run something it is scoped and quoted separately.

No, that is part of what the audit measures. Validity's 2026 study found 62% of organisations lost revenue to poor CRM data and only 41% had a named governance owner, so waiting for clean data means waiting forever. We document what the data can and cannot support, label directional findings as directional, and put the repairs in the plan. Building that layer is marketing operations consulting, quoted separately.

Growth is exactly when waste compounds, because every mistake is being funded at a larger scale. Haus found 74% of senior leaders have abandoned or scaled back an initiative they could not measure and 71% say AI optimisation favours short-term performance. An audit gives you the evidence to keep funding what works and stop funding what only looked like it did.

Direction of travel. The audit looks backwards at evidence: what the marketing function has been doing, what it produced, and what is broken. Ecommerce and DTC marketing strategy consulting looks forward and decides product and cohort priority, positioning, channel roles, budget and measurement. Many brands buy the audit first because a plan written on unverified numbers is a guess with headings.

Scope of the question. Growth advisory hunts the commercial constraint on growth wherever it sits, including contribution margin per order and per SKU and repeat purchase economics. The marketing audit stays inside the marketing function and produces evidence and a 90-day plan. If you already know marketing is the problem, the audit is the cheaper first step.

Whoever owns growth or marketing, someone from finance who can supply product cost and returns data, and someone who can grant access to ad accounts, analytics, the store platform, the email tool and invoices. Expect roughly four hours of your team's time across the week: a kickoff, short interviews, and the handover call. We work from read access wherever possible.

Your team runs it, and every action has a named owner and an acceptance test. Many brands book a review at ninety days to check the leading indicators, which takes half a day and is optional. Where you want a standing numbers habit, scorecard advisory sets one up and hands it back, and the parent engagement is the marketing audit itself.