Digital Marketing
Marketing Audit
The finding clients remember is rarely what is broken. It is what is working quietly and getting no budget.
A marketing audit reviews everything currently running — channels, spend, tracking, content and suppliers — and returns an ordered list of what to fix, what to stop and what to leave alone. The Nexclick writes it to be actionable by anyone, including the agency being assessed.
Is this you?
What usually prompts the call
- Spend has grown steadily and results have not.
- You have inherited an arrangement nobody currently in the building set up.
- Three suppliers each report success and the overall numbers disagree.
- A contract is up for renewal and you want an independent view before signing.
What we do
The actual deliverables
Things that appear on an invoice, not adjectives.
- Reconcile spend against outcome, channel by channel
- What each channel costs including management fees, and what it produced. Fees are missing from the client’s own view of cost per acquisition more often than not.
- Verify the tracking before believing any of it
- Every audit starts here, because one built on broken measurement repeats the existing errors with more authority and a nicer cover.
- Review each channel on its own terms
- Search, paid, email, social, content and site conversion, each assessed against what good looks like for that channel rather than squeezed onto one scorecard.
- Assess the suppliers, not only the work
- Reporting quality, account access, asset ownership and notice periods. Whether you could leave at all is itself a finding, and frequently an uncomfortable one.
- Find what is working and underfunded
- Nearly every audit turns up a channel performing well on a small budget that nobody has examined in a year. This is usually the most valuable line in the report.
- Name what to stop, with the money attached
- An explicit stop list carrying the annual spend against each item. This is the part clients act on and the part most audits leave out.
- Order by impact against effort
- A prioritised list with a suggested owner for each line. An unordered list of forty findings is a document rather than a plan, and nothing in it gets done.
Comparison
The nine areas, and what a failure looks like in each
This is the structure of the audit and the specific faults that recur most. Several are checkable yourself in an afternoon, which may save you commissioning anything.
| Area | What failure looks like | What leaving it costs |
|---|---|---|
| Measurement | Conversions counted twice, or a form not tracked at all | Every budget decision made on the wrong numbers |
| Cost reconciliation | Management fees excluded from cost per acquisition | True acquisition cost understated, often by a third |
| Paid search | Broad match running against a thin negative list | Spend on queries you would never bid on deliberately |
| Paid social | One creative running unchanged for eight months | Rising costs misread as a platform problem |
| Organic search | Several pages competing for one phrase | Neither ranks, and the fix is a merge rather than more content |
| One list, no segmentation, everything sent to everyone | Deliverability decline that is slow and hard to reverse | |
| Content | A calendar with no stated purpose per piece | Production cost with no measure to judge it against |
| Site conversion | Traffic growing while enquiries stay flat | Every channel paying more per customer than it needs to |
| Supplier arrangements | Accounts and assets held in the agency’s name | You cannot leave without starting again from nothing |
How it works
Step by step, with timeframes
Timeframes are typical rather than guaranteed, and they assume we get account access and approvals when we ask.
- 01Week 1
Access and reconciliation
Platform access, invoices, contracts and CRM data. Gathering access is usually the slowest part, which is why it is chased on day one.
- 02Week 1–2
Tracking verification
What can be trusted, what cannot, and what has to carry a caveat in every finding that follows from it.
- 03Week 2–3
Channel review
Each channel assessed in depth against its own standards, with the working shown so any finding can be checked rather than taken on trust.
- 04Week 4
Findings and working session
A written prioritised report, presented as a session where the findings get challenged. Anything that does not survive the challenge should not be in the report.
What you get
Reporting and ownership
- A reconciled view of what each channel costs including fees, and what it actually produced.
- A verdict on whether your measurement can be trusted, stated before any other finding.
- An explicit stop list with the annual spend attached to each line on it.
- Findings ordered by impact against effort, with a suggested owner for each.
- A document written to be handed to any supplier, including the ones being assessed.
Tools and platforms
- Full account access across every live channel
- Ahrefs or Semrush
- GA4, Search Console and Tag Manager
- CRM and invoice reconciliation
- Site crawler
Timeline
How long this actually takes
Four weeks, and the first depends entirely on how quickly access is granted — an incumbent agency slow to hand over account access is itself a finding worth recording. Where the work goes afterwards is not our concern and there is no obligation to bring it to us; several audits have concluded that the incumbent was doing good work and the problem sat inside the client. One thing worth saying before you commission one. If nobody has the authority or the appetite to act on the findings, an audit is an expensive way to confirm a suspicion. Where that is the honest situation, spend the money on the one change you already know needs making.
Pricing model
Day rate
Fixed price, scoped by the number of live channels. Sold independently of any delivery work, deliberately — an audit whose conclusion is a proposal from its own author is worth considerably less.
Questions
Marketing Audit questions
Will you recommend replacing our current agency?
Only where the evidence says so, and it frequently does not. Several audits have concluded the incumbent was performing well and the constraint sat inside the client — slow approvals, no budget authority, or a brief nobody had updated in two years. That finding is as useful as the other one.
What access do you need to run one?
Read access to every ad platform, analytics, Search Console, Tag Manager, the email platform and the CRM, plus invoices and any supplier contracts. Read-only throughout — nothing is changed during an audit, including the things we would change immediately afterwards.
How does this differ from an SEO audit?
An SEO audit examines one channel in depth. This examines every channel, the spend across them, the tracking underneath them and the suppliers running them, then reconciles the lot. It goes wider and, in any single channel, less deep — which is the right trade when the question is where the money should go.
What if our incumbent agency will not grant access?
That is a finding in itself, and worth more than most of the report. Access to accounts you pay for should never be discretionary. Where it is genuinely withheld, we work from exports and reporting, note the limitation explicitly, and every affected finding carries that caveat.
Is an audit worth it if we already know what is wrong?
Often not. If you know the answer and have the authority to act, spend the money on the fix. An audit is worth commissioning when you need evidence to convince somebody else, when several plausible explanations compete, or when nobody has looked across all the channels at once.
Do you audit in-house teams as well as agencies?
Yes, and the findings tend to be different in character — process and prioritisation rather than account structure. It requires a little care, since the people whose work is being reviewed are also the people who have to act on it. We write it accordingly and say so upfront.
What is the single most common finding?
Money going to a channel that stopped working some time ago, while a smaller one that is working well has had no increase in a year. It survives because nobody has compared them on the same page, which is precisely what the reconciliation stage forces.
Last reviewed 28 July 2026.
Tell us what you are trying to fix
A 20-minute call, no pitch deck. The Nexclick will tell you what we would do, roughly what it costs, and whether we are the right people for it.