Most marketing reviews look at one channel at a time.
The SEO report lands in one inbox, the social numbers in another, the paid media recap in a third.
Each one looks fine on its own. Each one is probably accurate, too. Together, they can still miss the biggest problem.
Buyers don’t experience your marketing that way. They see a LinkedIn post, search your name a week later, land on your website, and maybe click an ad on the way back. If one of those moments is off, the whole experience is off, no matter how good the individual reports look.
That’s what a marketing audit is for: looking at the whole journey at once. This marketing audit checklist covers 12 questions across five areas: strategy, website, SEO, social, and paid media. It runs in about 90 minutes with the analytics you already have. No new software, no consultants required (yet).
How to Run This Audit in 90 Minutes
Before you start, open your website analytics (GA4 or similar), Google Search Console, and the native analytics for your social and ad accounts. Then mark each question:
- Green: yes, and you can show it.
- Yellow: sort of, or you’re not sure.
- Red: no.
Give each section about 15 minutes and save the last 15 for sorting your results. Be strict. “Probably” is a yellow, not a green.
Strategy & Goals
One clear goal, and a budget that actually matches it.
- Can you state your #1 marketing goal for this year in one sentence?
If three people on your team would give three different answers, mark it red. Every other question in this audit gets measured against that goal, so it has to exist first.
- Does your budget follow that goal?
Put your spend next to your goal. If the goal is qualified leads but most of the money went to awareness campaigns and events with no lead capture, your plan and your budget are pulling in different directions.
Website
Your website has one job: turn visitors into conversations.
- Can a first-time visitor tell what you do, and who it’s for, in five seconds?
Show your homepage to someone outside the company for five seconds, then ask them. If they can’t answer, neither can your buyers.
- Is there one obvious next step on every key page?
Check how many visitors reach your contact or demo form, and how many complete it. Pages with no clear call to action, or five competing ones, quietly leak leads. Your highest-traffic pages should each point to one clear action, whether that’s booking a call, requesting a quote, or downloading a guide.
- Does the site work well on a phone, and does it load fast?
Check what share of your traffic is mobile, then run your homepage through Google’s free PageSpeed Insights. If most visitors are on mobile and the mobile score is in the red, you’ve found where buyers are dropping off.
Search (SEO)
Showing up for your own name isn’t the same as showing up.
- Do you rank for the terms your buyers actually type into Google?
In Search Console, look at the queries driving clicks. If nearly all of them include your company name, you’re only being found by people who already know you. Non-branded searches are where new buyers come from.
- Do your top pages match what searchers want?
Look for pages with lots of impressions but a low click-through rate. That usually means the page title and description don’t match what people are searching for. It’s one of the easiest fixes in this whole audit, and one of the most overlooked.
Social & Content
Consistency, engagement, and a voice that sounds like one company.
- Have you posted consistently for the last 90 days?
Gaps of two weeks or more tell the algorithm, and your followers, that nobody’s home. A steady rhythm beats bursts of activity followed by silence.
- Is engagement coming from the right people?
Look past the likes. Are comments and shares coming from buyers, partners, and people in your industry, or mostly from your own colleagues? Your LinkedIn follower and visitor demographics will tell you quickly.
- Do your channels sound like one company?
Read your last five LinkedIn posts, your homepage, and your latest email side by side. If they sound like three different brands, buyers notice, even if they can’t say why.
Paid Media & Measurement
Every dollar should trace back to a lead or a sale.
- Can every paid dollar be traced to a lead or a sale?
Confirm conversion tracking is set up on each ad platform, and that it’s actually firing. If your best metric is clicks, you’re measuring activity, not results. If leads come in but nobody can say which campaign produced them, mark it yellow at best.
- Do you know your cost per lead by channel?
Not blended. By channel. Without it, you can’t tell which campaign to scale and which to stop, and every budget meeting turns into a debate about opinions.
What You Walk Away With
Count your marks, then sort every red flag into one of three buckets:
- Fix now: quick wins under a day of work, like a broken form or a missing tracking tag.
- Plan for Q1: bigger issues that need time or budget, like a homepage rewrite or a content plan.
- Watch: yellows that need more data before you decide.
Then pick the three red flags that would move your #1 goal the most. Those are your 2027 priorities. Not a 40-item wish list. Three moves, each with a clear reason behind it.
That’s the difference between an audit that produces a report and one that produces a plan.
Who Should Be in the Room
Keep the group small: whoever owns marketing, someone who can pull the analytics, and someone close to sales who knows which leads actually went somewhere. That last seat matters most. Your dashboards show what people clicked; sales knows what turned into revenue. If you’re a team of one, run it anyway, then walk your red flags past a sales colleague before you lock in priorities.
Why One Audit Beats Five Reports
Channel reports show how each channel is performing. They don’t tell you how the buyer is doing. A great LinkedIn month means very little if the people it sends land on a homepage that doesn’t explain what you do. Strong rankings won’t help if the ads running alongside them can’t be tracked.
The gaps between channels are where most leads get lost, and they’re exactly what a channel-by-channel review misses. If you’ve already run our 2027 budget diagnostic, this checklist is its natural partner: the diagnostic shows where the money went, and the audit shows why it did or didn’t work.
Block 90 minutes this week. Your red flags are next year’s plan, already written.
Ready for a second opinion before 2027?
The checklist gets you started. A CVAC Marketing Audit goes deeper: we review every channel with fresh eyes and hand you a clear report — what’s working, what isn’t, and the three moves that matter most next year.