An audit is the easiest thing in marketing to sell and one of the easiest to do badly. A tool can produce two hundred findings in an afternoon, and a document listing all of them is both impressive and useless, because it does not say which three matter. The useful version ends with a small number of decisions in priority order, with the reasoning, and it is noticeably shorter than the useless version.
Ask for the deliverable shape before you commission it
The thing worth paying for is a ranked list: what to stop, what to start, what to fix, in what order, with an estimate of effort and expected effect for each. Ask to see a redacted example from a previous client before buying. If what comes back is a hundred pages of tool output with a summary bolted on, you have learned what you would receive, for the price of one email.
A free audit is a sales document and should be read as one
Free audits exist to find problems the auditor sells the fix for, and they reliably find them. That is not dishonest and it is not independent. If you want a free one, take three from different suppliers and note what they agree on, which is usually the real problem. If you want advice you can act on, pay for it and say up front that you may not buy the implementation.
The auditor should not be the person graded by the result
An audit of work your current agency did, performed by an agency that wants the account, will find that agency's work wanting. An audit performed by your current agency will find the problems are elsewhere. Neither is worthless and both have an interest. Where the stakes are real, buy the audit from somebody who is not bidding for the implementation and say so in the brief.
What a competent audit actually examines
Whether measurement is collecting the right things correctly, since every other finding depends on it. Whether the pages that should rank exist and are technically able to. Where money is going and what it is producing. What competitors do that you do not. And whether the enquiries arriving are ones the business can serve. Tool output is an input to that, not the substance of it.
Insist on the smallest possible first action
Every audit should end with something that can be done next week by somebody named, not with a transformation program. Audits that recommend only large projects tend to produce nothing, because large projects need budget cycles and the momentum is gone by then. Ask for the three cheapest high-impact items separately, and judge the auditor partly on whether they can identify any.
Questions people ask about digital marketing audit
What should a digital marketing audit cost?
It is normally a fixed project fee and varies with scope and seniority. What matters more than the price is whether the deliverable is a prioritized set of decisions or a catalog of findings, because the second costs less to produce and is worth much less. Ask for the example before you ask for the quote.
Are free audits worth taking?
As a way to hear how a supplier thinks, yes. As independent advice, no, because the auditor sells the remedy. Taking three from different suppliers and comparing what they agree on is a reasonable free approximation of an independent view.
How long should an audit take?
A focused audit of a mid-sized business is usually days rather than weeks. Longer engagements tend to produce more findings rather than better prioritisation. If a supplier proposes a month, ask what happens in the fourth week that could not happen in the first.
Who should we get an audit from?
Somebody with no interest in the implementation, if the decisions are significant. Otherwise, from a supplier you are considering hiring, understanding that it doubles as their pitch. Either way, insist on the ranked-decisions format, since that is what distinguishes an audit from a report.