Marketing audit

Run a marketing audit before raising the budget

A marketing audit answers one blunt question: where does the money you already spend go, and what comes back? Before raising an ad budget or paying for a new website, it pays to know which part is broken. In my experience, it is often not the part the owner suspects.

A familiar story: the owner is convinced the ads stopped working. The audit shows clicks are steady, but the mobile contact form quietly broke after a plugin update two months earlier. More budget would have bought more broken visits. A short repair fixed it.

How I run it

I begin where your customer begins. On a phone, I search for your main service the way someone in your city would and note what shows up: your Google profile, the Maps pack, competitors, ads, reviews. Then I follow the path into your site and send a test inquiry to see how long the reply takes and what it says.

After that I open the accounts:

• Google Ads and Meta: what you pay for, which searches and audiences trigger the ads, and whether conversions are counted once, twice or not at all.
• Analytics: whether GA4 and Tag Manager record real inquiries, calls and purchases.
• Listings: Google Business Profile categories, services, photos and review replies, plus Apple Business Connect, Bing Places, Yelp and the directories that matter in your trade.
• The CRM or inbox: where leads land, and how many simply vanish.

Google Ads accounts get extra scrutiny, since that's where most trackable spending usually goes.

What you receive

Every finding lands in one of three buckets: urgent, this quarter, or not worth touching. Next to each one you'll see the problem, a rough cost in dollars or lost jobs, and who should handle it. Small things you can handle yourself in an afternoon are marked that way.

From there the findings feed the marketing strategy, which adds customers, channels, budget and KPIs. The pair is sold together for $1,900. The detailed breakdown is on the strategy pricing page.

Problems I find again and again

• Ad accounts owned by a former agency or an ex-employee, so the owner cannot see their own history.
• No call tracking, even though most customers phone instead of filling in a form.
• A Google profile with the wrong primary category or a service area that misses half the metro.
• A privacy policy copied from another site, or missing entirely, while the site collects emails and phone numbers. Depending on your state and size, laws like the CCPA may apply, and marketing texts need consent under the TCPA.
• Leads answered the next morning. In home services especially, the first business to call back tends to get the job.

Fixing them is rarely expensive. Spotting them is the hard part.

Who does the work

The deadline is written into the agreement before I start, so you know the presentation date from day one. Your part is small: share access, answer a few questions about sales and customers, and join the Zoom call at the end. Calls are scheduled in your morning, which is afternoon for me in Europe. I do all the checking myself. No junior analyst runs a tool and pastes screenshots into a template, which is why the fix list stays short and specific.

An independent view

When the person running your marketing also audits it, that is a self-review. It may be honest, but blind spots are hard to see from the inside. I have no stake in which channel you keep, and if your current setup works, I will say so. For a fast outside opinion first, the free audit covers the most obvious issues in 30 minutes.