Marketing audit checklist: what to review before you spend another dollar on ads

When a business owner tells me "ads don't work for us," the problem is almost never the ad. It's what happens before or after it: a website that doesn't convert, demand that isn't there in that market, leads nobody tracks, or a salesperson who replies the next day. That's why, before raising any budget, I always run the same review. Here it is, so you can run it yourself.

1. Your website or landing page: what does a visitor understand in 5 seconds?

Open your site on your phone, the way a customer coming from an ad would. Answer three questions without scrolling:

• Is it clear what you sell and who it's for?
• Is there one main action (message you, request a quote, book a call)?
• Is there something that builds trust: reviews, case studies, guarantees, years in business?

If any answer is "no," every click you pay for lands on a page that doesn't convince. That loses more money than any badly tuned bid.

2. Real demand: how many people search for what you sell?

Before investing in Google, measure how many monthly searches there are for your service in your city or region. Google's Keyword Planner gives you that number. Two common mistakes when reading it: adding up variants of the same search (Google repeats the figure for each one, so your market looks twice as big) and counting searches that aren't buyers, like students or job seekers.

Low demand doesn't mean there's no business. It means Google has a ceiling, and the rest has to be generated on other channels like Meta or LinkedIn.

3. Tracking: do you know how many leads each channel brings in?

This is where most businesses fall short. Check whether your site has Google Analytics 4, the Google Ads tag and the Meta pixel, and above all whether they count what matters: WhatsApp or chat clicks, form submissions and calls. Without that you can't know what each lead costs, and without that number every budget decision is a bet. Here's how to track clicks and form submissions in GA4.

4. The customer journey: where do people drop off?

Map the full path: they see the ad, visit the site, reach out, get a reply, buy, come back or refer someone. At each step, ask what actually happens today. There's almost always a broken link: a form that asks for too much, messages nobody answers on weekends, a quote that gets sent and never followed up.

5. Sales follow-up: how fast do you respond?

A lead you paid for goes cold quickly. If you reply in hours, you're competing with someone who replies in minutes. If your team has two or more people and your contacts live in spreadsheets or individual phones, nobody knows where each opportunity stands. I cover this in depth in why sales die after the ad.

6. The math: how much can you pay for a customer?

With your average ticket and margin, you can calculate what each sale leaves you and, therefore, the most you can pay to win a customer without losing money. That tells you whether your budget makes sense and how many sales you need to earn it back. The step-by-step calculation is in how much to spend on Google Ads.

7. The ads: do they speak to your customer's problem?

Only now do I look at the ads. The questions are simple: do the keywords have measured demand? Do the headlines talk about the customer's problem or about the company? Are there negative keywords so you don't pay for browsers? Does each ad group have its own copy?

The fast way: the NARVEX Diagnostic

Doing all of this by hand takes hours. That's why I built the NARVEX Diagnostic: you answer a few questions in 2 to 6 minutes and the report is generated automatically. It reads your public website and social media, measures demand with Google Keyword Planner data, checks what you're tracking, shows where you lose customers, calculates how much to invest using your ticket and margin, and gives you ready-to-run ads for Google and social media. It's free, no credit card needed.

The diagnostic is generated automatically. If you book a call, we review it together to validate the priorities and the next step.