Audit and analysis
What is a digital marketing audit, and what should it include?
Every online channel reviewed and scored, benchmarked against competitors, then ordered into what to fix first. Here is the checklist and what to expect at the end.
August 2026 · 7 minute read · Sarah Ward CFCIM
A digital marketing audit is a structured review of everything you do online: website, search visibility, content, email, organic and paid social, paid media and the tracking underneath it all.
Done properly it is not a list of faults. It is a ranked set of decisions, with the evidence attached, so the next six months of budget goes somewhere defensible.
What gets reviewed
A full audit covers:
- Website: structure, page speed, mobile experience, clarity of message and how easy it is to enquire
- Search: what you rank for, what you should rank for and what competitors are winning instead
- Content: what exists, what it is doing for you and where the obvious gaps are
- Email: list health, frequency, open and click behaviour, automation and compliance
- Organic social: platform choice, posting patterns, engagement and whether it is generating anything
- Paid media: spend, targeting, creative, cost per enquiry and where money is leaking
- Analytics and tracking: whether the data you are making decisions on is actually correct
Competitor benchmarking
Your numbers only mean something next to somebody else's. Comparing three or four direct competitors on visibility, messaging, content volume and paid presence usually explains more than any internal metric on its own.
Scoring, so the order is obvious
Each area gets scored on how it is performing and how much difference fixing it would make. That produces the only output that matters: a priority order. Quick wins in the first month, structural work in the first quarter, the slower compounding work after that.
How long it takes and what it costs
For a typical SME, expect one to two days of research and the written report about a week later, presented and talked through rather than emailed over. A full digital audit starts at £950 and a social media only audit at £495.
What a useful report looks like
You should end up with:
- Findings with evidence, not assertions
- A score per channel so you can repeat the exercise in a year and compare
- A prioritised action list with owners and rough effort
- A clear list of things to stop doing
- A budget recommendation that reflects the priorities, not the current habit
If the report ends with a proposal to run every channel it recommends, treat the recommendations with caution.
How often to do one
Annually for most SMEs, or ahead of any significant change: a new financial year, a new product, a new market, a change of agency or a drop in enquiries that nobody can explain.
The short version
An audit is only worth the money if it ends in an order of work. Findings without priorities are just a longer to do list.
Questions I get asked about this
Want the audit done independently?
I audit every online channel, score it against your competitors and hand back the order to fix things in. No channel sold at the end of it.