Digital Marketing Audit
A digital marketing audit that tells you what's actually broken.
Most audit tools produce a list. A crawl report with 400 flagged issues. A spreadsheet of keyword gaps. A channel-by-channel breakdown of what performed below benchmark. These lists are not useless — but they are not a diagnosis. They tell you what is suboptimal. They do not tell you which of those things is causing the specific underperformance you are experiencing, or what to fix first.
This audit is different in one specific way: it ends with a bottleneck diagnosis, not a recommendation list. You leave knowing the one or two places where your marketing system is breaking down, why those are the constraint rather than something else, and what fixing them is worth in concrete terms.
What a real marketing audit covers.
The audit runs across three layers. Each one surfaces a different category of problem. Most underperforming marketing stacks have issues at all three — but one layer almost always contains the primary constraint.
Systems layer
The technical foundation that either enables or limits everything above it. Site performance and Core Web Vitals. Content architecture: how posts are structured, how they link to each other, whether they target coherent keyword clusters or scatter across unrelated topics. Technical SEO: crawl health, canonical tags, index coverage, structured data. Attribution infrastructure: whether the data you collect is accurate enough to inform decisions. Most teams find meaningful gaps here without realising it — not because of neglect, but because these decisions were made in the early days and never reviewed.
Operational layer
How the marketing function actually runs. How content is planned, produced, and published — and whether that process produces work that serves a strategic objective or a publication schedule. How data flows from channel to CRM: whether lead source is captured reliably, whether deal attribution is possible, whether the reporting your team uses is measuring what matters. Workflow gaps at this layer are usually invisible until you try to answer a question like "what is our CAC by channel" and discover you cannot.
Strategic layer
What the business is actually optimising for — and whether the marketing stack reflects that. Positioning: who specifically this is for, what outcome it produces, and whether that is clear in the messaging across every channel. Buyer-stage alignment: whether content is distributed across awareness, consideration, and decision, or stacked at one stage. Channel mix: whether the budget allocation matches the data on where pipeline actually comes from, or matches what felt reasonable when the budget was set.
What you get at the end.
A 12–18 page written document. Not a slide deck, not a spreadsheet. A written analysis structured around five sections, designed to be read once and acted on immediately.
Current-state map
A structured analysis of the existing marketing stack: every active channel, what it is producing, how it connects (or does not connect) to the others, and where the gaps are. This section exists so there is a shared, documented understanding of what the system currently is — not what anyone assumes it is.
Bottleneck diagnosis
A specific identification of the one or two points where the system is breaking down. Not a list of twenty things that could be improved — a prioritised finding that explains which constraint, if removed, would produce the most downstream improvement. Almost always simpler than expected.
Attribution analysis
An assessment of whether your current measurement infrastructure can answer the questions that matter: which channels are generating pipeline, what is the CAC by channel, and what is the payback period on each major investment. If it cannot, this section specifies exactly what needs to change to make that possible.
Positioning review
An analysis of whether your current messaging matches the buyer you are trying to reach, at the stage of the funnel where they encounter it. This covers homepage copy, the top three organic landing pages, paid ad creative, and lead nurture email — the places where positioning failures cost the most.
Prioritised fix list
A sequenced list of recommendations ordered by expected impact vs. implementation effort. Specific enough to act on without hiring me for anything else. Each recommendation includes the rationale, the expected outcome, and what success looks like. The document is designed to be handed to a team member or used directly.
The difference between an audit and a diagnosis.
An audit is a complete inventory of the current state. It tells you what exists, what is working, and what is not. A well-executed audit is genuinely useful — it surfaces things that were invisible before, establishes a shared factual baseline, and creates a record you can return to as a comparison point after changes are made. Most marketing teams should run one every 12–18 months.
A diagnosis goes further. It takes the findings of the audit and answers a different question: given everything that is suboptimal, what is the actual constraint? What is the thing that, if fixed, would cause the most downstream improvement? This distinction matters because a list of twenty issues creates paralysis. A team that does not know what to fix first often fixes nothing, or fixes the wrong things in the wrong order.
The Diagnostic I run produces both. The audit portion establishes the full picture. The diagnostic portion cuts through it to identify the bottleneck — the one or two specific places where the system is breaking down in a way that limits everything else. That is what separates a useful deliverable from a long document that describes problems without telling you what to do about them.
Related reading and resources.
The posts and pages below cover the specific topics the audit touches. If you want to understand what goes into each section before engaging, start here.
Two-week audit. $1,500. Written deliverable.
You submit the application, I review it within 48 hours, and if the fit is right we start within the week. The deliverable arrives at the end of week two. You leave with a specific diagnosis and a sequenced fix list — not a deck to present to your board, but a working document your team can act on.
The Diagnostic is a standalone engagement. Most clients use it to decide what to do next — whether that is a full marketing system rebuild, a targeted fix of the identified bottleneck, or simply a reallocation of existing budget based on what the data shows. It is useful whether or not you hire me for anything afterwards.
2 slots per month. Reviewed within 48 hours. Based in Kamloops, BC — works with companies across North America.