Marketing audit

Why a marketing audit comes before any new spend

A marketing audit answers a simple question: where does the money you already spend go, and what comes back? Before adding budget to ads or rebuilding a website, it's worth knowing which part is broken. In my experience it's often not the part the owner suspects.

A typical case: an owner is sure the ads stopped working. The audit shows the ads bring the same number of clicks, but the contact form on mobile has been broken since a plugin update, and nobody noticed for two months. More budget wouldn't have fixed that. A ten-minute repair did.

How I run the audit

I start where your customer starts. I search for your main service the way a person in your city would, on a phone, and note what they see: your Google profile, your competitors, the ads, the reviews. Then I follow the path into your website and send a test enquiry 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 properly or double-counted.
• Analytics: whether GA4 and Tag Manager record real enquiries, calls and purchases, and whether a consent banner is in place where it should be.
• Google Business Profile: categories, services, photos, reviews and replies, plus listings on Apple Maps and Bing Places.
• The CRM or inbox: where leads land and how many quietly disappear.

If you run Google Ads, I go deeper than a general checklist, because that's usually where most of the measurable budget sits.

What you get at the end

The findings are grouped into three piles: fix now, fix this quarter and leave alone. Each item says what's wrong, why it matters in dollars or lost customers, and who can fix it. Small things you can do yourself in an afternoon are marked as such.

The audit then becomes the first chapter of a marketing strategy: customers, channels, budget and KPIs. The two together cost $2,400 CAD. Detailed pricing for the strategy work is on the strategy pricing page.

Common findings in Canadian small businesses

Some problems come up again and again:

• Ad accounts registered to a former agency or an employee who left, so the owner can't see their own history.
• No call tracking, even though most customers phone rather than fill in a form.
• A Google profile with the wrong primary category or a service area that misses half the region.
• A cookie banner that blocks nothing, or no privacy policy at all, which matters for PIPEDA and especially Quebec's Law 25.
• Leads answered the next day. For trades and home services, the business that calls back first usually gets the job.

None of these need a big budget to fix. They need someone to spot them.

How long the audit takes and who's involved

The timeline is written into the agreement before I start, so you know when the presentation happens. Your part is small: share access, answer a handful of questions about sales and customers, and join the Zoom call at the end. I do the checking myself. There's no junior analyst running a tool and pasting screenshots into a template, which is why the fix list is short and specific rather than eighty generic warnings.

Audit by me or by your current provider?

An audit by the same person who runs your marketing is a self-review. It may be honest, but it's hard to see your own blind spots. I have no stake in which channel you keep, and if your current setup works, I'll say so plainly. If you want a quick outside opinion first, the free audit gives you the most obvious issues in 30 minutes.