Debrief · 11 October 2026 · 5 minutes

What a marketing audit should check, and what most of them miss

A templated marketing audit tells you what is wrong with a generic business. In the September 2026 snapshot of NR's demo room, a template would pass CobberBank's four ad platforms on 15,689 applications and stop before asking how many the bank itself recorded.

That is not a thoroughness problem. It is a context problem. Every business has its own story, and a template cannot know it. A marketing audit is useful once it understands what it is looking at and why. A digital marketing audit is the same job pointed at online channels.

A good one covers nine areas, and most cover them well. Two things go missing: your context and a plain page on what to do next.

The nine areas a good marketing audit covers

1. Goals and strategy

Start where a digital marketing strategy audit starts. Is there a written strategy? Do the marketing goals tie to a commercial target with a number and a date? Is it clear who the customer is and why they would choose you? Channel findings mean little until these are answered.

2. Budget and plan

Compare spend with plan, by channel and by month. Totals hide things. In the September 2026 snapshot, CobberBank planned A$2,019,280 across four ad platforms and spent A$2,129,504, which is 5.5% over. Two platforms landed on plan. One came in under. The whole overrun sat in one account, which ran 12.7% over.

3. Paid search

Conversion settings, brand against non-brand, search terms, bidding, budgets and tags. The eleven checks worth running are set out in Google Ads audit: the checks that find money, and the one that finds the truth.

4. Paid social and video

Check the creative first: how many ads are live, how old they are and whether one ad is carrying the account. Then check audiences for overlap between campaigns and the counting rules, because social platforms credit views as well as clicks. In the September 2026 snapshot, CobberBank's cost per application is A$148.79 on Meta and A$328.42 on TikTok. Each figure is the platform's own count under its own rules. The two cannot be compared until the rules are written beside them.

5. Organic search and content

Technical health, the pages that rank, the queries that almost rank and the questions a competitor answers that you do not. Split brand queries from non-brand. Growth in people searching your name is a different story from growth in people finding you.

6. Email and CRM

List growth, deliverability, consent records and the automated journeys. Then check the join. Does a lead captured on the website arrive in the CRM with its source attached? If the source is lost at that step, no later report can recover it.

7. Website and conversion

Speed, landing pages, forms and the steps where visitors leave. Follow the paid click through. In the September 2026 snapshot, CobberBank bought 1,595,092 paid clicks. About one in three became an engaged visit, meaning a visit that stayed. The other two are a landing page question before they are a media question.

8. Tracking and measurement

Tags firing once, consent handled, campaign links labelled and key events defined. This is where most disagreement between tools begins. The five usual causes are in Why GA4 and Google Ads never agree, and which one to believe.

9. People, agencies and tools

Who does what, what each agency is briefed and paid to do and which tools overlap. Look for work done twice and work nobody owns. Most teams are doing their best with what they were handed. The aim is a clearer handover, not a verdict.

What most of them miss

A template reviews each area on its own, with numbers from its own tool: paid search on Google Ads numbers, social on the platform's, the website on analytics, email on the email tool. Every section can pass.

Context is what joins them. Without your definitions and your finance count the sections are never added up, and the question a board asks first goes unanswered: what did marketing deliver, in one number finance accepts?

Two examples from the September 2026 snapshot.

Across channels. CobberBank's four ad platforms report 15,689 applications between them. Each platform counts every application its ads touched, so a customer who clicked two ads can be counted twice. The CRM holds one count. The demo has no CRM figure beside the platforms' total, so the snapshot cannot say how many of the 15,689 are the same people. Until it can, the total is unreconciled.

Inside one channel. CobberBank's two Google search campaigns report 7,114 conversions. GA4 reports 3,284 for paid search. One month, one bank, two answers.

Neither gap means anyone did poor work. The tools count different things by design. The cross-check is missed for ordinary reasons: channel reviews are done by channel specialists, it needs finance or CRM access an audit often lacks and it takes weeks where a channel review takes days.

Three questions to add to any marketing audit

1. Does the total the platforms report match what the CRM or finance recorded? If not, how large is the gap?
2. Is one definition of a lead and a conversion used in every channel? Is it written down?
3. Does every gap have a stated reason? A gap without one should be marked unreconciled, not averaged away.

Ask for these answers before the channel findings. A cost per lead in area 3 is only as good as the lead count beneath it.

How to brief one

• Ask for all nine areas and the three questions.
• Ask whose numbers each finding rests on.
• Ask for findings ranked by the money they move.
• Ask who will check that the numbers agree. Give them the access to do it.
• Ask for a what-next page written for your growth, not for the next sale.

Where a Number Check fits

People ask whether NR's Number Check is a marketing audit. It is not. It is narrower and does one job, the one most reviews stop short of. It reconciles the last twelve months across your platforms, your analytics and your CRM. It looks at the numbers, not the people. It is read-only, it involves no media management and you keep the pack whether or not you continue. If you are commissioning a full marketing audit, it is the part to run first.