Marketing audit checklist: fix what matters first

Most founders can tell something in their marketing is leaking, but not where. This marketing audit checklist takes you through your website, ads, local listings, social and email in about three hours, then shows you how to rank what you find so the first fixes are the ones costing you money today. All you need is your logins, a timer and a blank document.

The email and privacy items below are general information, not legal advice.

Before you start: 15 minutes of setup

Get your access sorted first, or password resets will eat the afternoon.

• Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4
• Google Ads and Meta Business Suite, including Events Manager
• Your Google Business Profile
• Your email platform and website admin
• Your phone

Open a document with four columns: what is wrong, where, what it likely costs (sales, leads or trust) and how long the fix takes. Log every issue as you go, and don’t fix anything yet. Audits usually die half-finished because someone starts rewriting a headline in hour one.

Hour 1: your website

Do the five-second test on your phone

Open your homepage on mobile, look at it for five seconds, then look away. Could a stranger say what you sell, who it’s for and what to do next? Write it down if the main button sits below the fold, says something vague like “Learn more”, or competes with three other buttons.

Walk your own conversion path

Do whatever you want customers to do: book a table, request a quote, buy a product, join the newsletter. Then check:

• Did the form submit cleanly on mobile?
• Did the confirmation email arrive, and did it land in the inbox rather than spam?
• Did the lead reach the person who is supposed to answer it?
• Do the phone number, address and hours match what Google shows?

A broken form beats every other finding on this list.

Check speed with real-user data

PageSpeed Insights helps with diagnosis, but the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console shows what real visitors experienced on your pages over the last 28 days. It groups URLs as Good, Need improvement or Poor. As of 2026, the targets Google publishes for “good” are:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): 2.5 seconds or less, which is how fast the main content shows up
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP): 200 milliseconds or less, which is how fast the page reacts to a tap
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): 0.1 or less, which measures how much the layout jumps around while loading

These targets are measured at the 75th percentile of page visits, so three out of four visits need to hit them. Look at mobile first, and think in templates rather than single pages. If your menu or product template is slow, every page built on it is slow too.

Confirm Google can find your key pages

In Search Console, open the page indexing report and make sure your homepage, service or menu pages and best-selling products are indexed. Then search your brand name in a private window: your site should be the first result, with a title and description you’d be happy to show a customer.

Quebec: check the French

If you sell in Quebec, review the French version as carefully as the English one. Is it complete, up to date and available on terms at least as favourable as the English? Our Bill 96 field guide covers what that means in practice.

Hour 2: your ads

Confirm conversions are actually tracked

Ad platforms optimize toward whatever you’ve told them counts as a conversion. If that signal is broken or wrong, your budget is being spent blind.

• Google Ads: go to your conversion actions and check each one’s status and most recent conversion date. The actions that matter (purchases, leads, calls) should be primary, and page views or minor clicks shouldn’t be inflating the count. Google’s conversion measurement help walks through each source, including phone calls.
• Meta: in Events Manager, check that your Pixel fires the right events and see whether the Conversions API is connected. Meta says Conversions API data is less affected than the Pixel by browser loading errors, connectivity issues and ad blockers. Partner integrations, Shopify included, usually let you set it up without a developer.
• Reality check: take one recent week and compare platform-reported conversions to what actually shows up in your till, booking system or CRM. A big gap usually means double counting or missing tags.

Read the search terms report

In Google Ads, open the report of actual searches that triggered your ads over the last 30 days and sort it by cost. Flag the irrelevant ones, such as job seekers, “free” queries, the wrong city or competitor names you can’t win on, as negative keywords.

Match each ad to its landing page

Click your top three ads by spend. Does the page repeat the offer, price or promise from the ad? Paid clicks dropped on a general homepage have to hunt for what was promised, and many won’t.

Look at where the money went

Export the last 90 days by campaign and put spend next to real outcomes. Flag any campaign with meaningful spend and no tracked conversions. Don’t pause it yet: first make sure tracking isn’t the reason.

Hour 3: local, social and email

Google Business Profile

For restaurants, clinics and studios, this is often the most-viewed page you have. Check hours (holiday hours too), phone, website link, categories and photos. Google’s guidelines ask that your name match how you’re known in the real world, that you use the fewest categories needed to describe your core business, and that each business keep only one profile. Read your last 20 reviews and note which ones never got a reply.

Social profiles

For each platform you use:

• Does the bio say what you do and where, and does the link work and go somewhere useful?
• When was the last post? An account that has gone quiet can make the business look closed.
• Are comments and DMs getting answered, and how quickly?
• Does it look like the same brand as your website and packaging?

Pick the one or two platforms where your customers actually spend time. Mark the rest “maintain lightly” or “archive”.

Email

Open your last campaign. Under Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation, a commercial email needs consent, sender identification and a way to unsubscribe. According to the CRTC’s CASL FAQ, the unsubscribe link has to keep working for at least 60 days after you send, and requests must be processed no later than 10 business days after you receive them. Test your own unsubscribe link, and check that your welcome email still describes your current offer.

What to fix first

You’ll probably end up with 20 to 40 items. Sort them in this order:

1. Broken revenue paths. Forms, checkout, booking links, wrong hours or phone numbers. These lose people who had already decided to buy. Fix them this week.
2. Compliance gaps. Broken unsubscribe links, missing consent records, an incomplete French site. Usually quick, and risky to leave.
3. Measurement. Conversion actions, Pixel and Conversions API, primary goal settings. Until these are right, every budget decision is a guess.
4. Paid waste. Negative keywords, ads sent to the wrong page, and campaigns that spend without results once you’ve confirmed the tracking works.
5. Message clarity. Homepage headline, main call to action, top landing pages.
6. Speed and consistency. Core Web Vitals, visual consistency across channels, posting rhythm. These matter, but they usually take longer to fix and longer to pay off.

Within each tier, do the quick wins first. One useful rule: anything that touches money and takes less than an hour gets done before anything that needs a developer.

When an afternoon isn’t enough

This checklist finds symptoms. It won’t tell you whether your positioning is off, whether your offer is priced right, or why your website, ads and social each tell a slightly different story. That last one usually means the work is split among people with no shared plan.

If you want a second opinion, the free Marketing X-Ray is JADX’s version of this audit, done by a senior team. Its findings feed straight into the Plan step of our 3Ps loop.

FAQ

How often should I run a marketing audit?

A full pass every quarter works for most small brands, plus a quick monthly look at tracking, forms and ad spend. Also run it after a website rebuild, platform migration or big campaign launch, because that’s when tags and forms tend to break.

Do I need paid tools for this checklist?

No. Search Console, Google Analytics 4, PageSpeed Insights, Google Ads, Meta Events Manager and your email platform cover everything here at no extra cost. Paid tools add depth but aren’t needed to find the biggest issues.

What if my conversion tracking turns out to be broken?

Fix it before you change budgets or pause campaigns, since the reports you’d base those decisions on can’t be trusted. Once it’s fixed, note the date and let clean data build up before you judge performance.

Should a restaurant or clinic audit differently?

The checklist is the same, but give local items more weight. Accurate Google Business Profile details, reviews, booking links and mobile-friendly menus or service pages usually matter more than blog content or broad social reach. Brands with several locations should check each location’s profile separately.