How to run a five-point marketing audit on your own business
These are the five checks we run before we take on any engagement. None of them need a tool you don’t already have, and you can get through all five in an afternoon.
Point one, targeting
Open your ad account and look at who your campaigns are actually reaching, not who you told them to reach. Platform optimisation drifts: given a conversion goal it cannot see the value of, it will find the cheapest version of that conversion. For a service business that usually means the enquiries least likely to become customers.
The check: pull your last fifty enquiries and mark which ones became paying customers. Then look at where those specific customers came from. If your best customers cluster in one campaign, audience or suburb, and your budget is spread evenly, you have found your first fix.
Cheap clicks from people who were never going to book still look like a healthy campaign.
Point two, creative and messaging
Read your best-performing ad, then immediately read the page it points at. Do they promise the same thing? A surprising number of campaigns advertise one offer and land on a homepage describing five. Engagement stays high because the ad is good; enquiries stay low because the page answers a different question.
The check: for each live campaign, write down the single promise the ad makes. Then write down the first promise the landing page makes. Where the two sentences differ, you are paying to create a mismatch.
Point three, landing page conversion
This is where most recoverable money sits, because it costs nothing extra in media to fix. Load your own landing page on a mobile connection, from a cold browser, and time it. Then count the fields in your enquiry form and the number of decisions you are asking a stranger to make before they can act.
The check: one page per offer, one obvious action, and objections answered in the order your sales conversations actually raise them. If a field is not needed to qualify or contact someone, it belongs on the follow-up call, not the form.
Point four, tracking and reporting
Add up the conversions each platform claims for last month, then compare that total to the enquiries that genuinely reached your inbox or CRM. If the platform total is higher, you are double-counting, and every optimisation decision you have made since is built on a number that does not exist.
The check: reconcile one month of platform conversions against your CRM, line by line. Note duplicates, note events that fire on page load rather than submission, and note anything counted as a lead that was actually a bounce.
You cannot fix what you are measuring wrong, the report looks confident and points the wrong way.
Point five, budget allocation
Rank your campaigns by cost per booked customer rather than cost per click or cost per lead. For most service businesses the ranking inverts: the campaign with the cheapest leads is rarely the campaign producing the most profitable jobs. Then check payback period, because a customer worth A$3,000 over two years is a different decision from one worth A$300 today.
The check: for each campaign, divide spend by customers won, not leads generated. If you cannot do that calculation, point four is your real priority and this one has to wait.
What to do with the results
Fix in order of recoverable loss, not in order of effort. In our experience tracking and follow-up problems return money fastest because they recover demand you have already paid for, while targeting and creative changes need a full buying cycle before the data means anything.
And if all five points come back clean, the honest conclusion is that you do not have a marketing problem, you have a capacity or pricing question, and no agency should be selling you a retainer to solve it.