Marketing audit checklist: 30 things to check before you spend more

Before you raise your marketing budget, run a marketing audit checklist across the six places money usually leaks: tracking, website, local listings, paid ads, email and follow-up. The 30 checks below take an afternoon if you have the logins at hand. If more than five of them fail, spending more right now will mostly buy you more of the same leak.

Mark each item as yes, no or "don't know." A "don't know" counts as a no. Not knowing whether a conversion is tracked is the same as it not being tracked, as far as your budget is concerned.

Tracking and data (checks 1 to 5)

1. GA4 is installed on every page and you can see traffic from the last 30 days.
2. Form submissions are tracked as conversions in GA4 and in any ad platform you use.
3. Phone calls are tracked, at least clicks on the phone number, ideally with call tracking numbers.
4. You own the accounts. GA4, Google Tag Manager, Google Ads and Meta Business Manager are registered to your business, with you as an administrator.
5. You know where last month's customers came from. Not a guess: a number for each source.

If checks 1 to 5 fail, stop here and fix them. Everything else on this list depends on data. A proper GA4 and Tag Manager setup costs $550 with me and is the cheapest fix with the biggest effect.

Website (checks 6 to 12)

6. On a phone, a stranger can tell what you do, where, and how to contact you within five seconds.
7. There is a tap-to-call button visible without scrolling.
8. Each main service has its own page, not a single list of everything.
9. Pages show prices or price ranges, or at least explain how pricing works.
10. There is proof: real photos, reviews, examples of work, years in business.
11. Forms are short and actually deliver to an inbox someone checks. Send a test now.
12. The site has a privacy policy and basic accessibility (readable contrast, alt text, keyboard navigation). ADA-related demand letters are common in the US, and fixing the basics is cheaper than responding to one.

Local listings and reviews (checks 13 to 18)

13. Your Google Business Profile is verified, with the correct primary category.
14. Hours, including holiday hours, are accurate.
15. You have recent reviews, and you reply to them, good and bad.
16. Your name, address and phone are identical on Google, Apple Business Connect, Bing Places, Yelp and industry directories.
17. Profile photos show your actual work and team, not stock images.
18. You have a simple routine for asking for reviews, without incentives that break platform rules or the FTC's guidance.

Paid ads (checks 19 to 24)

19. Every campaign has a clear goal (calls, forms, bookings), and it is the conversion the campaign optimizes for.
20. You have checked the search terms report in the last month and added negative keywords.
21. Ads send people to a relevant landing page, not the home page.
22. Location targeting matches where you actually work.
23. You know your cost per lead for each campaign, not just cost per click.
24. The budget per campaign is large enough to learn. Many small campaigns starving for data rarely beat one well-funded campaign.

For a deeper paid search review, see my Google Ads account audit checklist.

Email, SMS and past customers (checks 25 to 27)

25. You have a list of past customers with contact details in one place.
26. You have contacted them in the last three months with something useful.
27. Emails include a physical address and an unsubscribe link (CAN-SPAM), and texts go only to people who gave consent, with STOP honored (TCPA). Rules change, so check with your attorney if you are unsure.

Follow-up and sales (checks 28 to 30)

28. New inquiries get a human reply within an hour during business hours.
29. Missed calls get a text back automatically.
30. Leads who do not book right away get at least two follow-ups.

How to run the checklist without fooling yourself

Do it with the screens open, not from memory. Owners are often sure a form works because it worked when the site launched, and then a test shows the messages have been going to an old employee's inbox for a year. The same goes for tracking: "we have Google Analytics" often means a tag that was installed once and never connected to any conversion.

If you can, ask someone outside the business to do checks 6 to 11 on their own phone. Friends and family are too polite, so ask them to time themselves: how many seconds until they found your phone number, your prices and your service area? Their hesitation is more honest than your own review, because you already know where everything is and they do not.

Finally, write down the date and your score. The second time you run the checklist, the difference between the two scores tells you more than either score alone.

How to read your score

The scores are my rule of thumb, not a scientific scale. The real value is the list of "no" items, sorted by cost to fix. Cheap fixes with a big effect, such as a broken form or a missing call button, go to the top of next week.

When to get an outside audit

A self-audit catches the obvious. It misses what you cannot see from inside: how your offer compares to competitors, whether your ads target the right searches, whether your pricing page scares people off. A professional marketing audit covers those too. Mine costs $1,900, including a written strategy with priorities and a budget. If you only want a quick technical look at your site, the free website audit is a good start. And once the audit is done, a 90-day marketing plan turns the "no" list into a schedule.