How to Conduct a Marketing Audit
Evaluate every aspect of your marketing to identify gaps, eliminate waste, and unlock growth opportunities.
A marketing audit is a comprehensive examination of your entire marketing ecosystem: strategy, execution, channels, content, technology, and results. It reveals what is working, what is wasting money, and where the biggest opportunities for improvement lie.
Most companies never conduct a formal marketing audit. They layer new campaigns on top of old ones, adopt new tools without evaluating existing ones, and accumulate years of tactical debt that drags performance down. An audit clears the fog and provides a fact-based foundation for strategic planning.
This guide walks you through a structured nine-step audit process. Whether you are a new marketing leader inheriting a department, a business owner wanting accountability from your agency, or a team preparing for a strategic pivot, this framework will surface the insights you need to move forward with confidence.
What You'll Learn
- Structure a marketing audit that covers all critical areas
- Evaluate website, content, social, email, and paid performance
- Benchmark your performance against competitors
- Identify the highest-impact improvements to prioritize
- Create an action plan from audit findings
Before You Start
- Admin access to all marketing platforms and analytics tools
- Historical data from the past 12 months minimum
- Clear understanding of current business goals and targets
Step-by-Step Guide
Define the Audit Scope
Decide what the audit will cover and what it will not. A full marketing audit examines strategy alignment, brand consistency, website performance, content effectiveness, social media, email marketing, paid advertising, marketing technology stack, and competitive positioning. For each area, identify the specific questions you want answered. Are we reaching the right audience? Which channels deliver the best ROI? Where are we losing potential customers? Setting scope prevents the audit from becoming an endless analysis project that never produces actionable recommendations.
Time-box the audit at two weeks maximum. Perfection is the enemy of progress. An 80-percent-complete audit delivered on time is far more valuable than a perfect one that arrives three months late.
Gather All Data
Compile data from every marketing platform into a central location. Pull reports from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, your CRM, email platform, social media analytics, ad platforms, and any other tools you use. Include financial data: total marketing spend by channel, cost per lead, cost per acquisition, and revenue attributed to marketing. Organize data by channel and time period for consistent comparison. Request access to any tools managed by agencies or contractors. Gaps in data are themselves an audit finding that needs addressing.
Create a shared spreadsheet with tabs for each channel. Standardize metrics and date ranges across all data sources so comparisons are fair.
Audit Your Website
Your website is the hub of all marketing activity. Evaluate it across four dimensions: technical performance including load speed, mobile responsiveness, and Core Web Vitals; user experience including navigation clarity, conversion paths, and form usability; search engine optimization including keyword rankings, organic traffic trends, and on-page optimization; and content quality including relevance, freshness, and alignment with buyer journey stages. Run Google PageSpeed Insights, check mobile rendering on actual devices, and crawl the site for broken links and missing meta data.
Record yourself navigating the site as if you were a first-time visitor trying to find pricing information. Note every point of friction or confusion.
Review Your Content
Audit every piece of content for relevance, quality, and performance. Pull traffic data, engagement metrics, and conversion data for each blog post, landing page, and resource. Identify top performers and analyze why they work. Identify underperformers and decide whether to update, consolidate, or remove them. Check for content gaps by mapping existing content to your buyer journey stages and persona needs. Look for outdated information, broken links, and inconsistent messaging. A content audit often reveals that 20 percent of your content drives 80 percent of results.
Sort content by traffic. Your top 20 pages by traffic deserve the most attention. Refreshing a page that already gets traffic delivers faster results than creating new content from scratch.
Analyze Social Media
Evaluate each social platform for audience growth, engagement rate, traffic generation, and lead contribution. Compare your posting frequency and content types against results. Are you investing time on platforms that do not deliver business outcomes? Review your follower demographics to ensure they match your target audience. Check content performance by format: which types of posts generate the most engagement and clicks? Audit your profiles for brand consistency, completeness, and current information. Often, businesses maintain social profiles on platforms their audience has already left.
Calculate cost per engaged follower for each platform by dividing the time and resources invested by meaningful engagement. Some platforms are not worth the team hours they consume.
Evaluate Email Marketing
Review email performance metrics: list size and growth rate, open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and unsubscribe rates. Compare against your industry benchmarks and your own historical trends. Audit your automated sequences: welcome series, nurture flows, and re-engagement campaigns. Are they still relevant? Check email deliverability by examining your sender reputation, bounce rates, and spam complaint rates. Review your segmentation strategy. Are you personalizing content based on subscriber behavior and interests, or sending the same message to everyone?
Check your inactive subscriber percentage. If more than 30 percent of your list has not opened an email in six months, your deliverability is likely suffering. Run a re-engagement campaign or clean the list.
Assess Paid Campaigns
For each paid channel, evaluate cost per click, cost per lead, cost per acquisition, and return on ad spend. Review campaign structure for proper organization: are keywords grouped tightly, are ads relevant to their ad groups, and do landing pages match ad promises? Check audience targeting for overlap and waste. Review the search terms report for irrelevant traffic. Analyze performance trends over time to identify whether campaigns are improving or deteriorating. Compare paid versus organic performance for the same keywords to identify where paid spend is redundant.
Look for "cannibalizing" keywords where you pay for clicks on terms where you already rank organically. Pausing those campaigns saves budget without losing traffic.
Benchmark Against Competitors
Compare your marketing presence to three to five key competitors across all channels. Use tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs for SEO and paid search analysis. Review competitor content strategies, social media presence, and messaging. Identify where competitors outperform you and where you have advantages. Look for tactics competitors use that you have not tried. This competitive intelligence provides context for your performance numbers and reveals opportunities your internal data alone cannot surface.
Focus on competitors who are growing fastest, not just the largest. Growth signals effective strategies you can learn from regardless of company size.
Create an Action Plan
Compile your findings into a prioritized action plan. Categorize recommendations by impact and effort: high-impact and low-effort fixes should happen immediately, high-impact and high-effort initiatives become strategic projects, low-impact fixes can be batched into maintenance sprints, and low-impact high-effort items should be deprioritized or eliminated. For each recommendation, include the specific finding, the proposed action, expected impact, timeline, and owner. Present the action plan to stakeholders with a clear narrative: here is where we are, here is where we need to be, and here is how we get there.
Limit your immediate action items to five or fewer. A focused team executing five priorities beats a scattered team attempting twenty. Phase additional improvements into subsequent quarters.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
Auditing without clear objectives
Define the specific questions the audit should answer before starting. Without objectives, you will drown in data without extracting actionable insights.
Relying on vanity metrics instead of business outcomes
Evaluate every channel and tactic against revenue contribution, not just impressions, likes, or traffic. Beautiful metrics that do not drive business results indicate misaligned efforts.
Conducting the audit but never implementing findings
End the audit with a prioritized action plan that has owners, deadlines, and measurable success criteria. Schedule follow-up reviews to ensure implementation happens.
Auditing channels in isolation without seeing connections
Examine how channels work together. Email may drive social engagement, SEO may reduce paid ad costs, and content may fuel every other channel. Siloed auditing misses these synergies.
Letting the audit take months to complete
Set a hard two-week deadline. An imperfect audit completed quickly is more useful than a comprehensive one delivered after the next planning cycle has already started.
Not involving the sales team in the audit process
Sales has direct feedback on lead quality, competitive dynamics, and customer objections. Their input grounds the audit in revenue reality rather than marketing echo chamber metrics.
Frequently Asked Questions
How often should I conduct a marketing audit?
Can I conduct a marketing audit myself or do I need an agency?
What tools do I need for a marketing audit?
How do I present audit findings to leadership?
What is the most common finding in marketing audits?
Should a marketing audit include brand analysis?
How do I measure marketing technology effectiveness?
What if the audit reveals that everything needs fixing?
How do I audit marketing efforts when attribution is unclear?
Should I audit competitor marketing strategies?
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