An audit is not for companies that are failing. It is for companies that cannot say why they are succeeding or failing. Here are five situations where it makes sense to stop adding budget for a moment and look at where it is leaking instead.
Sign one: you cannot say where your last customer came from
Try it right now. Take your last order or enquiry and say out loud which channel that person came through and what it cost you. If the answer is 'probably Google' or 'that will have been Facebook', you have the first sign. Not because you are doing something wrong, but because without that answer every further budget decision is made blind.
In practice this is rarely about laziness — it is about measurement. A customer journey today runs through three to five touchpoints: someone sees an ad on their phone, googles you on a laptop two days later and orders a week after that from an e-mail. If your measurement is set to last click, you credit the whole success to the e-mail and switch off the ad that started the chain as unprofitable.
Signs two and three: the budget grows, the enquiries do not
The second sign is easy to spot: over the past year you raised ad spend by a third and the number of enquiries stayed the same. The classic reaction is to add even more — the competition is probably adding too. What is more likely, though, is that you have hit the channel's ceiling and the extra money goes to audiences that will never buy from you.
The third sign is related: website traffic is growing but the conversion rate is falling. That almost always means you are paying for visitors whose intent differs from your customers'. It is not a fault in the campaign itself but in who you show it to — and that only becomes visible once campaigns are broken down into individual search queries.
Sign four: you do not trust the numbers in your reports
If Google Ads reports fifty conversions, Analytics thirty-two and your accounting shows nineteen orders, you do not have a marketing problem — you have a measurement problem. And until it is fixed, every report is just a nicely formatted guess. Here are four things you can check in half an hour:
- Is your own internal traffic excluded by IP address in Google Analytics? Without it you manufacture fake conversions every day.
- Do you count a submitted form as a conversion, or just a view of a thank-you page that people can also reach straight from Google?
- Is the same conversion being measured twice — once through Google Tag Manager and once directly in the site code?
- Is the conversion window in Google Ads set correctly, and do you know whether a conversion is attributed to the click date or the purchase date?
- Does the order count in analytics match your invoice count to at least ninety percent? If not, find the difference before you start optimising campaigns.
Sign five: nobody in the company owns marketing
The last sign is organisational and usually the most expensive. The website is run by an external firm, campaigns by another agency, social media by a colleague on top of her own job, and the copy is written by the owner in the evenings. Each of them does their part well, but nobody sees the whole — so a campaign sends people to a page somebody has since rewritten, or two channels race each other on the same discount.
The answer is not necessarily to hire somebody. It is enough for one person — even the owner — to have a single overview of all channels with consistent definitions in front of them once a month. Incidentally, this is the most common deliverable clients take away from an audit and keep using for years.
If at least two of these describe you, get in touch. The initial consultation is without obligation, and we will also tell you if we think you do not need an audit yet.
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