A digital marketing audit is one review of everything that turns your spend into customers: the tracking, your search visibility, the ad accounts, the website and what happens after someone enquires. I look at them together because money usually leaks where two of them meet, such as an ad account optimising towards a form that stopped sending months ago, or a cookie banner that prevents GA4 from recording most visits.
You get a ranked list of fixes, ordered by how much each problem is likely to be costing you, with a note of who should make each change. It is a diagnosis with an end point. Whether I, your own team or your current suppliers carry out the fixes is your decision.
What the audit finds, and what changes for you
Many businesses know what they spend on marketing each month but not what each channel returns. Every supplier reports from its own platform, every platform claims credit for the same sale, and the totals add up to more customers than the business actually won. Budget decisions then follow the most confident report rather than the most accurate one.
After the audit you know which of your numbers can be trusted, where money is going without producing enquiries or sales, and which fixes to make first. Sometimes the answer is to spend less. Sometimes it is to stop changing campaigns until the measurement underneath them has been repaired, because adjustments made on broken data tend to make things worse.
Who it suits, and who it does not
The audit is built for:
- Owners of UK small and medium-sized businesses paying for two or more channels, such as Google Ads, Facebook and Instagram ads and SEO, who suspect part of that money is wasted but cannot see which part.
- Businesses whose enquiries have fallen without an obvious cause, often after a new website, a new agency or a new cookie banner.
- In-house marketers who want an independent view before asking for more budget or replacing a supplier.
- Anyone who has taken over marketing from a colleague or agency and needs to know what they have inherited.
It is the wrong purchase in a few situations. If your concern is search alone, a full SEO audit of your website goes much further into crawling, content and links than this review does. If you would like an outside look at your site before committing to anything, start with the free SEO audit. And if you already know what is broken and need a plan for where the budget should go next, a written digital marketing strategy is the better fit.
What the audit covers
The scope is agreed in writing before work starts, and only the channels you actually use are included. These are the areas I would expect to review.
Tracking and measurement
Everything else depends on this, so it comes first. I check that GA4 records the actions that make you money as key events, that form submissions, calls and purchases are counted once and only once, and that Google Ads and Meta receive the same conversions your own records show. I then compare a sample of real enquiries with what each platform reported for the same days. If you want to try a lighter version yourself first, my guide on how to check your conversion tracking works walks through the basic tests.
Consent and data collection
Visitors from the UK are covered by UK GDPR and PECR, and the ICO expects non-essential cookies to wait until someone agrees to them. I check what your cookie banner really does: whether tags fire before anyone has clicked, whether rejecting is as easy as accepting, and whether Google consent mode passes the right signals to GA4 and Google Ads. A banner set up wrongly either breaks the rules or quietly removes a large share of your data, and sometimes it does both.
Search visibility
I review how the business appears in Google for the searches that matter to you: whether the important pages are indexed, what the result for your brand name looks like, the state of your Google Business Profile if you serve local customers, and the Search Console trend across the 16 months of data it keeps. This is a health check to set priorities, not a page-by-page technical audit.
Paid advertising
In Google Ads I start with the search terms report, because it shows what you have actually paid for rather than what you meant to target. Then I check bidding, conversion goals, location settings and whether searches for your own brand are kept apart from everything else. In Meta I look at which event each campaign is optimising towards, how audiences overlap and how often the same people see the same ads. On both platforms the question is the same: which spend cannot be connected to an enquiry or a sale?
Website and landing pages
I follow the routes that paid and search visitors take, on a phone as well as a desktop. Slow pages, forms that ask for more than they need, phone numbers that cannot be tapped and landing pages that do not match the ad that sent the visitor all show up at this stage, along with any page that receives paid traffic but is blocked from search or missing from the menu.
Enquiry handling and follow-up
This is the part many audits leave out. I ask how enquiries reach you, how quickly someone replies, where each one is recorded and how many become customers. Paying for leads that wait two days for an answer, or that never reach a CRM, can cost more than anything wrong in the ad account. If you send email to enquirers or customers, I also check that SPF and DMARC records are in place so your replies land in the inbox rather than in spam.
How I run it
- Scoping call. You tell me what worries you, which channels you pay for and roughly what a new customer is worth, and I confirm the scope and fee in writing.
- Access. You add me as a user on GA4, Tag Manager, Search Console, the ad accounts and your Business Profile. Read-only access covers nearly everything, and I never need your passwords.
- Data gathering. I export up to 12 months of platform data where it exists and ask for a simple record of enquiries and sales from your own systems, so platform figures can be checked against what really happened.
- Review and testing. I work through each area above, submitting real test enquiries and calls rather than trusting dashboards.
- Ranking. Each finding is weighed on what it is likely to be costing you and how hard it is to fix, then put in order.
- Walkthrough. I take you through the report on a call, and your developer or agency is welcome to join and ask questions.
Problems I see most often in UK marketing set-ups
- Conversions counted twice, typically because an imported GA4 goal and a native Google Ads tag both record the same form, which makes the cost per lead look roughly half of what it really is.
- Thank-you page conversions that fire every time someone reloads or bookmarks the page.
- Cookie banners added after the analytics tag, so tracking runs before consent, or configured so strictly that the ad platforms see almost no conversions.
- Revenue sent to GA4 including VAT while the ad accounts work from figures excluding it, so return on ad spend differs between reports for no real reason.
- Broad match keywords with no negative list, paying for searches about jobs, free versions or a competitor’s name.
- Phone calls, which is how many trades and service businesses win most of their work, not tracked anywhere.
- Website forms still sending to the inbox of someone who left the business.
What an audit is not
It is not a sales pitch for more of my time. If the review shows that a current supplier is doing good work, the report says so plainly. Nor is it a promise that fixing everything will lift sales by a set amount. It shows where money is being lost and what it would take to stop that; what happens next depends on your market, your offer and how quickly the fixes are made.
What you receive
The deliverables are confirmed in writing with the scope. They usually include:
- A written report explaining each finding in plain English, with the evidence behind it and the fix.
- A ranked fix list as a spreadsheet, showing the likely impact, the effort involved and who should do each item: you, your developer, your ads manager or me.
- A one-page measurement summary stating which of your current figures can be relied on and which cannot.
- Answers to your questions on the findings, in the way agreed before work starts.
What it costs
The fee depends on how many channels are in scope and how much tracking needs testing. I quote it after the scoping call, and you will have the fee in pounds in writing before any work begins. Making the fixes is priced separately, and you are under no obligation to use me for them. If your ad accounts need running afterwards, performance marketing across your paid channels or monthly Google Ads management are the usual next steps.
Next step
Send me a message through the contact page with your website, the channels you pay for and what you spend on them in a typical month. I will reply to arrange the scoping call, and if a narrower single-channel review would answer your question for less, I will say so.