What a paid marketing audit should contain

Every agency offers a free audit. The output is a PDF with red and green checkmarks, a few screenshots of your ad account, and a proposal on the last page. It is a sales pitch, and there is nothing wrong with a sales pitch, except that it is called an audit.

A real audit is work. It takes senior time, real access to your accounts, and a few weeks. It leaves you with a document you own and can act on with or without the people who wrote it. That is why we charge for ours, and why the fee is credited if you go on to work with us. What follows is what we think a paid audit has to contain to be worth paying for.

One: a tracking teardown, before anything else

Every number in the rest of the audit depends on whether the tracking is honest. So the first section answers: what can the accounts see, and what can they not?

• Which conversions are firing, on what action, and whether any of them fire on page load instead of on submission.
• Whether phone calls are tracked and attributed, or invisible.
• Whether Meta’s conversions API and Google’s enhanced conversions are in place, or the accounts are running on pixel data alone.
• Whether the CRM or booking system can be reconciled against the ad platforms, and by how much they disagree.

If the tracking is broken, the audit says so first, because it changes how every other finding should be read.

Two: where the media budget actually goes

Not the campaign names. The search terms, the placements, the audiences, and the hours where the money went over the last 90 days, ranked by cost, with a judgment on each. In a specialty pharmacy account we audited, over 40% of search spend was going to informational queries. The account had zero negative keywords. Nobody had looked.

The section should name the leaks in dollars, so the client can see what fixing them is worth.

Three: what the creative is doing

Which ads are carrying the account, which are being paid for and producing nothing, and how long since anything new was tested. Creative fatigue is visible in the data if anyone looks: rising cost per result on the same ad, falling click-through, the same three assets running for six months.

The audit should also say whether the creative can be made in the volume the account needs. An account waiting on a vendor for one new video a quarter is an account that cannot learn.

Four: the pages

Every page ad traffic lands on, opened on a phone, on a slow connection, and judged on four things: does it have one job, does it match the ad, is the phone number where a person looks for it, and how fast does it load. Landing page conversion rate to a qualified action, by page, with the fix for each.

Five: a rebuilt funnel map

One page showing how the ad, the page, and the conversion should connect for each service line or product, and what is currently missing. This is the document a client can hand to any team. It should not depend on the agency’s tools or the agency’s people.

Six: a 90-day plan with numbers

Month by month: what gets fixed, in what order, what it costs, how much creative it needs, and the cost per result the client should expect to see if it works. Ranges, not promises. A plan without numbers is a wish list.

Seven: a decision memo

Whether the agency that wrote the audit should be the one to run the plan, and if not, who should. A paid audit can say no. A free audit never can, because the proposal on the last page is the point.

What it should cost and how long it should take

Ours is $4,500, fixed, three weeks. Week one is access and learning the business. Week two is the teardown. Week three is the presentation, live, to whoever needs to hear it. The fee is credited in full against the first retainer month if the client signs within 30 days. If the audit finds nothing worth fixing, we say so and return the fee.

The details are on the Audit page. If you are comparing audits, use the seven sections above as the checklist. If a proposal cannot show you where each one will be, it is a pitch.