A marketing audit template is only as good as the data behind it. Before you start, get read access to Search Console, Google Analytics, the ad accounts, the email platform and the CRM, and pull the last twelve months.
This checklist is part of our strategy guides. The budget question that usually follows an audit is covered in how much should a company spend on marketing.
Why audit before you change anything?
Most marketing changes are made in response to the most visible symptom: traffic is down, so buy ads; leads are poor, so change the agency; the site looks dated, so redesign it. The audit exists to find the weakest link. A company that redesigns a website which converts fine but is never found has spent six months fixing the wrong thing.
An audit also sets the baseline. Every change you make afterwards can be judged against a number you recorded before, which is the only way to know whether it worked.
How to use this marketing audit checklist
Work through the eight sections in order; each builds on the one before. For every item, record three things in a sheet: what exists (yes, no, partly), what the number is (from your own data, with the date range), and what is missing. Keep opinions in a fourth column, separate from facts. The table below is the summary sheet; the sections that follow fill it.
1. Goals, budget and ownership
Start with what marketing is for:
- Is there a written revenue or lead goal for the year, with a number and a date?
- Is there a marketing budget, and does it trace to that goal? Record the budget as a share of revenue so you can check it against published ranges.
- How does it compare? The CMO Survey's 35th edition (31 March 2026, 308 US marketing leaders) put marketing at 9.0% of company revenues on average. A market estimate.
- Who owns marketing, who owns each channel, and who signs off on spend? Write the names.
- What does the sales team say about lead quality? Ask them before you read any dashboard.
2. Audience and offer
Check that the company knows who it sells to and what it says to them:
- Who buys, in writing: role, company type, the problem they have when they search, and who else decides.
- What the offer is, in one plain sentence a buyer would recognize, and how it differs from the two nearest alternatives.
- Where buyers research: search, LinkedIn, referrals, marketplaces, trade shows, AI assistants. Ask ten recent customers how they found you.
- Whether the website and the sales deck describe the same offer to the same buyer.
3. Brand and messaging
Check consistency and honesty:
- Is the name, logo, color and tone the same on the website, social profiles, proposals and ads?
- Can a stranger say what the company does within ten seconds on the home page?
- Are claims supported? Any "best" or "leading" claim without evidence is a liability.
- Are the company's basic facts (legal name, address, who leads it, how long it has operated) consistent everywhere, including directories and AI assistants' answers about you?
4. The website
The website is where every channel lands:
- Speed on a phone, measured. Fix the slowest templates first.
- One page per service with what it is, who it suits, how it works, proof and a way to inquire. Note every service with no page.
- Titles and descriptions: Google's starter guide says a good title is unique, clear and concise, and describes the page. Count the pages with duplicate or missing titles.
- Lead paths: does the form post, does the phone number tap, does the thank-you page show, is the lead received? Test one path end to end.
- Trust: named people, real photos, credentials, a facts page, recent reviews.
5. Search visibility
Search Console is the truth here, not a rank tracker:
- Open Search Console's Performance report, which shows clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position by query and page. Record the twelve-month totals and the top twenty queries.
- Which pages earn impressions but few clicks (a title problem), and which queries you show for on page two (a content problem).
- Whether two pages compete for the same query, and which service pages have no query showing them at all.
- Local: if you serve an area, the Google Business Profile is complete and the details match the website. Google's local ranking help says results rest on relevance, distance and prominence.
- AI answers: for ten prompts a buyer would ask an assistant, record whether you are named and which page is cited.
6. Content
Content is audited on value, not volume:
- Inventory every guide, post and resource with its date, author, impressions and clicks from Search Console. Mark what earns, what is outdated and what duplicates another page.
- Authorship: Google's guidance on helpful content strongly encourages accurate bylines and treats fabricated author profiles as deception. Count the pieces with no named author.
- Facts: how many figures carry a named source and a date? Unsourced statistics are the first thing to remove.
- Gaps: which buyer questions, by stage, have no page answering them?
7. Paid media and social
Paid channels are audited on cost per outcome:
- For each paid account: spend, leads, cost per qualified lead and the share of spend on branded terms, over twelve months, from the account and the CRM; the platform's summary is not enough.
- Does every campaign land on a matching page, with conversion tracking that fires? Spot-check three.
- Who owns the accounts? Your business, and never the agency, should own the ad and analytics accounts.
- Social: which profiles are active, what they post, and whether anything there produced an inquiry. Trust-building is a valid purpose; record it as such.
8. Email, CRM and measurement
Measurement decides whether the rest of the audit can be trusted:
- Email: list size, how consent was gathered, what is sent and how often, and clicks and replies (opens are unreliable). Check compliance with your market's email law (CAN-SPAM in the USA, CASL in Canada).
- CRM: does every lead have a source, a date and an outcome? Can you follow one lead from first visit to closed deal?
- Attribution: which model do the reports use? Google Analytics offers three attribution models and gives direct visits no credit unless the whole path was direct, so a last-click report and a data-driven report will disagree. Write down which one each report uses.
- Reporting: who gets which report, how often, and does any decision follow from it? A report nobody acts on is a cost.
- Lead definition: leads are people in your own record; analytics events are not leads. Count them that way.
Turning the audit into a plan
Score each finding on two things: how much it affects leads or revenue, and how much effort it takes to fix. The findings that score high on effect and low on effort go first. Then write one page: the five findings that matter most, each with an owner, a date and the number you will watch to see whether the fix worked.
Resist the urge to fix everything. A prioritized list of five lands; a spreadsheet of two hundred rows gets archived. Our guide to how to measure marketing performance sets up the numbers you will track afterwards, and how to measure digital marketing ROI does the sum for each channel.
How often should you audit?
Run the full audit once a year, or before any large change: a new agency, a website rebuild, a budget reset, a new market. Run the measurement section every quarter, because it is the part that drifts fastest and the part everything else depends on. Keep each audit, so next year's compares with this one.
Conclusion
A marketing audit is the stocktake before the plan: eight sections, three facts per item, one page of priorities at the end. Done with your own data, it tells you which link is weakest and gives you the baseline to prove the fix worked.
PromotEdge International is an international strategy, technology, marketing and design company, and our delivery team is in India. Our marketing strategy consulting begins with this audit, and the fixes run through our digital marketing team. For a small business running the audit itself, digital marketing strategies for small businesses shows where to begin. This guide is general information, not legal advice; the rules of your state or province and your own counsel decide what applies to you.
Facts we rely on: see our company facts for what we state about ourselves and where each fact comes from.