Digital Marketing Audit: The Complete 2026 Guide

A digital marketing audit is a comprehensive evaluation of an organization's digital marketing strategy, channels, customer experience, technology, and performance. It identifies what's working, where gaps exist, and which opportunities should be prioritized to improve marketing performance.

Depending on scope, an audit may evaluate areas such as SEO, AI search visibility, paid media, content marketing, social media, email marketing, website performance, conversion rate optimization, analytics, and marketing technology.

Fratzke’s latest Digital Marketing Trends Report found only 40% of marketing teams describe their strategy as very clear, leaving the majority without the highest level of strategic clarity.

For marketing leaders, a digital audit provides a clearer picture of marketing performance and helps uncover wasted spend, customer experience gaps, untapped growth opportunities, and areas where marketing investments can produce greater business impact.

In this guide, we'll explain what a digital marketing audit is, what it includes, how to conduct one, and how to turn the findings into a prioritized roadmap for improving your marketing strategy.

Want a Clearer View of Your Digital Marketing Performance? Explore Our Digital Marketing Audit Services.

What is a Digital Marketing Audit?

Unlike a channel-specific audit that focuses on one digital channel, a comprehensive digital marketing audit is a type of marketing audit focused on evaluating an organization’s digital strategy, customer experience, channels, technology, operations, and performance.

You may also hear a digital marketing audit referred to as a digital audit, online marketing audit, or internet marketing audit, although the scope can vary considerably.

“A digital marketing audit isn't merely a collection of digital channel health checks. It's a structured diagnostic of the customer, performance, competitive, technology, and organizational factors influencing marketing performance, and a way to establish the baseline for what to improve next.” - James Fratzke, Partner & Executive Strategist

Why Conduct a Digital Marketing Audit?

Digital marketing performance can be difficult to evaluate when strategies, channels, technologies, and customer behaviors are constantly evolving. What worked a year ago may no longer be producing the same results, while new opportunities can easily go unnoticed.

Regular digital marketing audits help leaders step outside day-to-day performance reporting to understand where marketing stands, what has changed, and where to focus next. Key benefits include:

• Identify strengths and performance gaps across your digital marketing strategy, channels, customer experiences, and capabilities.
• Improve marketing performance by understanding what’s driving results and where opportunities for optimization exist.
• Prioritize marketing investments by focusing budget, resources, and attention on the opportunities with the greatest potential impact.
• Benchmark against competitors to understand where your organization leads, competes, or lags within the market.
• Create greater strategic alignment by giving leadership a shared understanding of current performance and the priorities that matter most.
  

What Should a Digital Marketing Audit Include?

A comprehensive digital marketing audit should evaluate strategy, customer experience, website and conversion performance, SEO and AI search, content, paid media, social media, email, analytics, marketing technology, operations, and competitive performance.

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Evaluating these areas together provides the foundation for understanding where marketing stands today. The next step is bringing those findings together through a structured audit process.

How to Conduct a Digital Marketing Audit?

Successful digital marketing audits go beyond reviewing channel metrics and compiling a list of problems. 

A strong digital marketing audit combines customer, performance, and competitive perspectives with objective benchmarking to establish where marketing stands today and identify the opportunities that matter most to improve your marketing strategy.

A comprehensive digital marketing audit can be conducted in five steps: evaluate the customer experience from the outside in, review internal marketing performance, analyze competitors, benchmark performance, and prioritize the findings that matter most.

At Fratzke, we use the Fratzke Benchmark Method™, a five-step diagnostic methodology designed to establish an objective understanding of current performance and a trusted baseline for improvement.

A real-world digital marketing audit example comes from AAC device leader Lingraphica, which used a digital marketing audit to evaluate whether its long-standing marketing strategy and campaigns were still effective.

1. Start With an Outside-In Review

Key Question: How do customers experience your brand?

Start by looking at your digital marketing strategy from the customer's perspective. Evaluate how people discover, experience, and engage with your brand across the customer journey to identify friction, unmet expectations, and opportunities to improve the experience.

Put yourself in the customer's shoes and experience your marketing firsthand. Examples may include:

• Run searches on Google and AI platforms to see how customers discover your brand, how it appears, and how competitors are positioned.
• Follow a paid ad through to conversion to evaluate targeting, message consistency, landing page experience, and friction.
• Navigate the website as a first-time visitor to see how easily customers can understand your offer, find information, and take action.
• Complete a key conversion journey such as making a purchase, requesting a demo, getting a quote, or contacting sales.
• Sign up for your email program to experience welcome emails, nurture sequences, personalization, frequency, and calls to action.

For Kari De Leon, Senior Manager of Marketing Operations at Lingraphica, one of the greatest benefits of a digital marketing audit was gaining an outside-in perspective:

“We needed that outside perspective of somebody to come in and take a look at everything that we had in place, tell us what was working, what could be improved upon, and what were our blind spots.” - Kari De Leon, Senior Manager of Marketing Operations at Lingraphica

2. Review Marketing Performance

Key Question: How are you performing, and what's driving the results?

Next, go inside the organization and use the data, systems, processes, and results to understand what's actually driving performance. Look beyond top-line metrics to understand what's driving results, where performance is falling short, and what factors may be contributing to those outcomes.

• Compare marketing performance against business goals and KPIs to identify where results are meeting, exceeding, or falling short of expectations.
• Analyze website traffic and conversion trends to understand which channels and experiences are contributing to business outcomes.
• Review SEO and AI search performance to identify changes in visibility, traffic, citations, engagement, and conversions.
• Analyze paid media performance across campaigns, audiences, creative, spend, cost per acquisition, and return on investment.
• Evaluate content, social, and email performance to understand which channels, topics, and campaigns are driving engagement and results.

For Lingraphica, this meant examining every digital marketing channel in detail, including where SEO was performing well, where paid efforts were falling short, and where opportunities existed to improve both paid and organic performance. The analysis helped turn individual channel metrics into a clearer picture of overall digital marketing performance.

3. Evaluate the Competitive Landscape

Key Question: How do you compare to competitors and the market?

Performance data becomes more meaningful when viewed in context. Compare your digital presence, strategies, customer experiences, and performance against direct competitors, emerging challengers, and relevant industry practices.

Your comparative audit may include:

• Search priority keywords on Google to see which competitors consistently earn visibility and why.
• Run customer questions through AI platforms to see which competitors are mentioned, cited, compared, or recommended.
• Experience competitor websites as a prospective customer to compare positioning, messaging, UX, offers, and conversion paths.
• Follow competitor paid ads through the customer journey to compare creative, messaging, landing pages, and offers.
• Analyze competitor traffic and channel mix to understand where competitors appear to be investing and gaining digital visibility.

This helps distinguish an internal performance issue from a broader market trend while revealing where competitors may have an advantage and where opportunities exist to differentiate.

4. Benchmark Your Performance

Key Question: How do you compare to the best?

Individual metrics and competitor comparisons only tell part of the story. Benchmark your findings against leading organizations, relevant industry KPIs, and proven best practices to establish an objective baseline for current performance.

At Fratzke, we use the Fratzke Benchmark Index™ to score the dimensions most relevant to the audit and summarize performance using five maturity ratings:

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Benchmarking puts findings into context, establishes a measurable baseline, and identifies the greatest opportunities for improvement.

5. Turn Findings Into Priorities

Key Question: Where do you stand today, and what should you improve?

Finally, bring the analysis together to identify the findings, performance gaps, and opportunities that matter most. Rather than finishing with a long list of problems, prioritize recommendations based on business impact, strategic importance, and effort.

A digital marketing audit should produce clear outputs such as:

• Executive Summary: A concise view of overall performance, major themes, and the most important takeaways for leadership.
• Key Findings: The most significant strengths, performance gaps, root causes, and opportunities uncovered through the audit.
• Prioritized Recommendations: Clear actions prioritized based on business impact, strategic importance, and effort.
• Benchmark Scores: A measurable view of performance across the dimensions evaluated during the audit.
• Supporting Evidence: Data, research, competitive insights, and analysis that provide context for the findings and recommendations.

For Lingraphica, the audit made it clear that the organization's web presence needed to evolve. The findings helped translate the analysis into actionable priorities, including a website redesign, new paid advertising strategy, and SEO enhancements.

The goal is to leave leadership with more than a diagnosis. A strong digital audit should establish a trusted baseline, clarify what matters most, and provide the foundation for building a strategic Growth Roadmap that moves marketing from its current state toward a defined future state.

Watch: A Real-World Digital Marketing Audit Example

How Lingraphica Turned Digital Marketing Insights Into Action

When Lingraphica needed an outside perspective on its digital marketing, Fratzke conducted an audit to identify what was working, where performance could improve, and where blind spots existed. Hear how the findings helped clarify opportunities across its digital ecosystem and informed its next steps.

How to Adjust Your Digital Marketing Audit for Your Industry

Every industry has different customers, buying journeys, competitive dynamics, regulations, and digital marketing priorities. Your marketing audit should account for these differences when determining what to evaluate, which benchmarks matter, and where to focus your analysis.

For example:

• B2B marketing audits may place greater emphasis on long sales cycles, lead generation, CRM integration, thought leadership, and sales enablement.
• SaaS marketing audits may focus on customer acquisition, demo and trial conversion, marketing-to-sales alignment, onboarding, retention, and recurring revenue.
• Healthcare marketing audits may prioritize patient journeys, local search, accessibility, reputation, and regulatory considerations.
• Private equity portfolio company marketing audits may focus on growth opportunities, marketing efficiency, scalability, competitive position, measurement, and value creation priorities.
• Financial services marketing audits may require greater attention to trust, compliance, customer education, and complex conversion journeys.
• Ecommerce marketing audits may focus more heavily on product discovery, merchandising, paid media, conversion rate optimization, retention, and revenue performance.
• Multi-location marketing audits may require location-level analysis of local SEO, reviews, paid media, customer experience, and performance.

Industry context should also influence your competitive benchmarks and definition of strong performance. A tactic or KPI that matters significantly in one industry may have far less relevance in another.

How to Audit Your Digital Marketing Channels

Each digital marketing channel plays a different role in attracting, engaging, and converting customers. While the metrics and tactics vary by channel, the goal of your comprehensive online marketing audit is the same: understand what’s working, what’s limiting performance, and where opportunities exist to improve results.

The following channel-level audits can help you evaluate the core components of your digital marketing strategy.

1. Conduct a Website Audit & Digital Experience Audit
2. Perform a Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Audit
3. Audit Your SEO & Organic Performance
4. Conduct an AI Search Audit
5. Perform a Content Marketing Audit
6. Run a Social Media Audit
7. Conduct a Digital Advertising & PPC Audit
8. Perform an Email Marketing Audit
9. Run a Digital Analytics Audit

1. Conduct a Website Audit & Digital Experience Audit

A website and digital experience audit evaluates the overall health and effectiveness of your website, including design, usability, accessibility, technical performance, search readiness, and the customer experience.

Your website is the hub for many of your digital marketing efforts and one of the digital assets you have the greatest control over. Reviewing the experience from both a customer and performance perspective can uncover friction, technical issues, and conversion opportunities that affect results across multiple marketing channels.

Related: 100 of the Best Website Designs to Inspire You (A-Z)

Evaluate Your Website Design & User Experience

In the real world, your storefront helps shape a customer's first impression. Your website serves a similar role digitally, influencing how visitors perceive your brand, understand your value, and decide what to do next.

Your website design is an important part of telling your brand story and can significantly influence perceived credibility. In fact, Research has found that website design plays a significant role in how users judge a site's credibility.

As you audit your website, evaluate areas such as:

• Clear calls to action (CTAs): Make it easy for visitors to understand the next step and take action without overwhelming pages with competing CTAs.
• Modern, brand-aligned design: Ensure visual design, imagery, video, typography, and other elements consistently support your brand and the experience.
• Website accessibility: Evaluate areas such as color contrast, alternative text, visual focus indicators, accessible labels, and other website accessibility best practices.
• Clear content hierarchy: Use headings, subheadings, typography, and page structure to help visitors quickly understand and navigate your content.
• Intuitive navigation: Make it easy for customers to find important information through your navigation, footer, internal links, and site architecture.

Fratzke’s Website Design & Development Services can help transform audit findings into a stronger digital experience.

Here’s another real-life example of a digital marketing audit: Service Partners improved its website and ecommerce experience after a website audit and customer survey uncovered an unmet need in the market.

Check Your Website Speed & Performance

Page speed affects both the customer experience and search performance.

70% of consumers say page speed impacts their willingness to buy from an online retailer. Research has also found that website conversion rates can decline as load times increase.

Audit your highest-traffic and highest-value pages to identify performance issues and opportunities such as:

• Compressing large files and images
• Reducing unused JavaScript
• Implementing lazy loading
• Improving Core Web Vitals
• Identifying performance differences across devices and page templates

Google's PageSpeed Insights can help identify technical performance issues and evaluate Core Web Vitals.

Want to conduct a deeper website audit yourself? Follow Our Complete Website Audit Guide.

Evaluate the Mobile Experience

With a significant share of website traffic occurring on mobile devices, your audit should evaluate the experience customers actually receive across different screen sizes, not simply whether the website is technically responsive.

Manually test important customer journeys on mobile, including navigation, forms, calls to action, and conversion paths. Look for issues such as:

• Content extending beyond the screen
• Text that's difficult to read
• Clickable elements placed too close together
• Navigation that's difficult to use
• Forms or conversion experiences that create friction
• Slow-loading mobile pages

Don't stop at usability. Your website audit should also consider whether visitors can easily take meaningful actions such as making a purchase, requesting a demo, submitting a form, or contacting your organization. A dedicated Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Audit can take this analysis further by identifying friction and opportunities across key conversion journeys.

Sometimes a fresh set of expert eyes can uncover opportunities you’ve been missing. Explore Fratzke’s Website Audit Services.

2. Perform a Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Audit

A Conversion Rate Optimization Audit, or CRO Audit for short, evaluates how effectively your digital experiences turn visitors into customers, leads, subscribers, or other meaningful conversions. It identifies friction within the customer journey and opportunities to improve conversion performance.

Start by identifying the conversions that matter most to your business and evaluating the journeys customers take to complete them. A CRO audit can focus on a specific campaign or landing page or examine conversion performance across the broader digital experience.

Areas to evaluate include:

• Conversion funnels: Identify where users progress, abandon, or encounter friction on the path to conversion.
• Landing pages: Evaluate whether messaging, content, design, and calls to action align with visitor intent and campaign expectations.
• Forms and checkout experiences: Look for unnecessary fields, steps, technical issues, or other barriers to completion.
• Calls to action: Assess CTA messaging, placement, hierarchy, and whether the next step is clear.
• Conversion data: Compare conversion rates across pages, channels, audiences, devices, and stages of the customer journey.
• Testing opportunities: Identify high-impact hypotheses that can be validated through A/B testing and experimentation.

Want to Know What’s Limiting Conversions? Explore Our Conversion Rate Optimization Audit Services.

3. Audit Your SEO & Organic Performance

An SEO audit evaluates how effectively your website can be discovered, understood, and ranked by search engines. It examines your organic search performance, content, authority, and technical foundation to identify issues and opportunities that can improve search visibility and organic traffic.

Search algorithms, competitors, customer search behavior, and your own website are constantly changing. That's why every SEO consultant will tell you SEO shouldn't be treated as a “set it and forget it” strategy. Regular audits can help identify declining performance, emerging search opportunities, and technical issues before they have a greater impact on organic visibility.

A complete SEO audit should examine three core areas: on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO.

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Need a Clearer View of Organic Search Performance? Explore Our SEO Audit Services.

Conduct an On-Page SEO Audit

On-page SEO focuses on the content and elements within your website that help search engines understand your pages and determine when they should appear in search results.

Rather than simply checking whether keywords are present, evaluate whether your pages satisfy search intent, provide useful and original information, demonstrate topical authority, and show clear signals of experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T).

Important on-page SEO factors to audit include:

• Title tags and meta descriptions
• Headings and content structure
• Content quality, relevance, and search intent
• Keyword and topical coverage
• Internal linking
• Images and alternative text
• Broken links and outdated content

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Conduct an Off-Page SEO Audit

Off-page SEO evaluates the external signals that influence your website's authority and organic search visibility.

Backlinks remain an important part of this analysis. Links from relevant, authoritative websites can signal that others consider your brand and content useful and trustworthy. But an off-page audit should focus on link quality and relevance, not simply the number of backlinks.

Evaluate areas such as:

• Quantity, quality, and relevance of backlinks
• Referring domains
• Authority and trust of linking websites
• Potentially harmful or low-quality links
• Link profile relative to competitors
• Opportunities to earn authoritative links and mentions

Ready to Audit Your Organic Search Performance? Follow Our Complete SEO Audit Guide.

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Conduct a Technical SEO Audit

Technical SEO evaluates whether search engines can efficiently crawl, render, understand, and index your website. Technical issues can limit organic visibility even when your content and broader SEO strategy are strong.

Important technical SEO areas to review include:

• Robots.txt: Make sure important content isn't unintentionally blocked from crawling.
• Crawlability and indexation: Confirm that search engines can discover and index the pages you want appearing in search results.
• URL structure: Keep URLs logical, descriptive, and consistent.
• Site architecture and breadcrumbs: Create clear relationships between pages and make important content easy to discover.
• Structured data: Use appropriate schema markup to help search engines understand important content and entities.
• XML sitemap: Keep your sitemap current and submit it through Google Search Console.
• HTTPS and security: Ensure your site loads securely and consistently over HTTPS.
• Core Web Vitals and page performance: Identify performance issues that can negatively affect users and search visibility.
• Mobile experience: Make sure important content and functionality work effectively across mobile devices.
• Canonicalization and redirects: Look for duplicate content, redirect chains, incorrect canonical tags, and other signals that can create confusion for search engines.

Want To Take A Deeper Look at Your Website’s Technical SEO? Read Our Complete Guide: How To Conduct A Technical SEO Audit.

Conduct a Local SEO Audit

A local SEO audit evaluates how effectively your business appears in location-based search results and how accurately your brand is represented across local search platforms. This is important whether you operate a single location or hundreds or thousands of locations, where maintaining accurate and consistent information becomes significantly more complex.

Review your local presence across platforms such as Google Business Profile, Apple Business Connect, Bing Places, Yelp, Facebook, and relevant industry directories.

Key areas to audit include:

• Profile optimization: Make sure business categories, descriptions, hours, services, photos, links, and other profile information are complete and current.
• NAP data consistency: Verify that your name, address, and phone number (NAP) are accurate and consistent across locations, directories, and platforms.
• Reviews & ratings: Evaluate review volume, recency, ratings, customer sentiment, and how effectively your organization responds to feedback.
• Local search visibility: Review how prominently each location appears for priority local searches and how visibility compares with competitors.
• Local landing pages: Ensure individual locations have useful, optimized pages with accurate information and content relevant to local customers.
• Listings & citations: Identify inaccurate, duplicate, or missing listings across important directories and local search ecosystems.

For multi-location brands, look beyond overall averages. Benchmark performance at the location level to identify high-performing locations, systemic issues, and markets where inconsistent listings, weak reviews, or limited local visibility may be holding performance back.

In this digital marketing audit example, TruTeam’s local search audit uncovered opportunities that led to a more robust branch experience designed to improve local organic search visibility.

4. Conduct an AI Search Audit

An AI Search Audit evaluates how effectively your brand is discovered, understood, cited, and recommended across AI-powered search experiences. It helps establish your current AI search visibility, identify which sources and competitors are influencing AI-generated answers, and uncover opportunities to improve your presence.

As tools like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity, and other AI-powered search experiences change how customers discover and evaluate information, traditional rankings no longer provide a complete picture of search visibility.

“AI search is quickly becoming as important to brand visibility as traditional SEO. As customers increasingly turn to AI platforms to research, compare, and discover brands, organizations can’t afford to ignore how they’re being found, cited, and recommended in this growing channel.” - Ryan Fratzke, Partner & Executive Strategist

Evaluate Your AI Search Visibility

Start by testing the questions and prompts your customers are likely to use when researching topics, problems, products, services, and brands related to your business.

Look for:

• Brand visibility: How often does your brand appear in relevant AI-generated answers?
• Brand representation: Do AI platforms accurately understand and describe your brand, products, services, and expertise?
• Citations: Which pages, domains, and sources are being cited in responses?
• Recommendations: Is your brand recommended when users ask for relevant companies, products, services, or solutions?
• Competitive visibility: Which competitors appear when your brand doesn't, and where are they gaining an advantage?

Want to Measure Your Visibility Across AI Platforms? Read Our Complete Guide: How to Audit Your Brand's AI Visibility.

Evaluate Your Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of improving your brand and content's ability to be discovered, understood, cited, and surfaced within AI-generated answers.

When conducting a GEO audit, evaluate areas such as:

• Topical authority: Does your content thoroughly address the topics and questions important to your customers?
• Content structure: Are answers, definitions, headings, lists, tables, and supporting information clear and easy to extract?
• Originality and information gain: Does your content contribute original research, experience, perspectives, examples, or data rather than repeating information already available elsewhere?
• Authority and trust: Are claims supported by credible sources, subject-matter expertise, author information, and first-party evidence?
• Entity clarity: Can AI systems clearly understand who your organization is, what it does, and how it relates to important topics, products, services, people, and industries?
• Structured data and technical accessibility: Can AI crawlers access your content, and are appropriate schema and technical signals in place to help machines understand it?
• Third-party authority: Is your brand mentioned and represented across the external sources AI platforms may rely on?

Measure AI Search Performance

AI search measurement is still evolving, so avoid relying on a single metric. Instead, establish a baseline across several indicators and track how visibility changes over time.

Important AI search KPIs may include:

• Brand mentions across priority prompts
• AI citation frequency and cited URLs
• Share of voice relative to competitors
• Recommendation frequency
• Accuracy of brand representation
• Visibility across priority topics and customer questions
• Referral traffic from AI platforms
• Conversions and business outcomes from AI-referred traffic

How Visible Is Your Brand in AI Search? Explore Our AI Search Audit Services.

5. Perform a Content Marketing Audit

A content marketing audit evaluates the strategy, quality, performance, and effectiveness of your content to understand what’s working, what customers need, and where opportunities exist to improve engagement, search visibility, and business results.

Find Your Best-Performing Content

Start by reviewing your content portfolio to identify which topics, formats, and assets are producing results. The right metrics will depend on the purpose of the content and where it supports the customer journey.

Content performance metrics may include:

• Organic visibility and traffic
• Engagement
• Conversions and assisted conversions
• Traffic sources
• Returning visitors

Look for patterns across your strongest and weakest content to understand which topics, formats, and experiences are contributing to performance.

Is Your Content Creating Enough Value? Explore Our Content Marketing Audit Services.

Map Content to the Customer Journey & Identify Gaps

Map existing content against the customer journey to determine how effectively you're answering customer needs from initial discovery through loyalty.

• Awareness: Help customers understand a problem, need, or opportunity.
• Consideration: Help customers explore approaches and compare alternatives.
• Decision: Provide the information customers need to evaluate options and make a decision.
• Loyalty: Continue providing value to strengthen retention and advocacy.

As you map the journey, identify important content gaps such as unanswered customer questions, priority topics where competitors have stronger coverage, search opportunities, or stages of the journey that lack sufficient support.

Evaluate, Update & Consolidate Content

Traffic alone doesn't determine whether content is valuable. Evaluate important assets for quality, relevance, accuracy, originality, authority, and performance. The goal is to build Content Capital™ - a portfolio of valuable content assets that compound in value over time by strengthening visibility, authority, customer engagement, and business performance.

Based on your findings, determine whether content should be:

• Updated to improve accuracy, relevance, or performance
• Expanded to provide greater depth and value
• Consolidated with overlapping content
• Repurposed into other formats or channels
• Removed or redirected when it no longer provides meaningful value

When consolidating or removing pages, implement appropriate 301 redirects to preserve relevant authority and guide users and search engines to the best alternative.

Build Your Content Roadmap

Use insights from your content, SEO, AI search, customer journey, and competitive analysis to prioritize what comes next. Identify which existing assets need attention, which gaps should be filled, and which topics have the greatest potential to support customer and business needs.

These priorities can then inform your editorial calendar and ongoing content creation.

Want to go deeper? Read our complete Content Marketing Audit Guide for a step-by-step approach to auditing your content strategy and performance. If you’re a B2B brand check out What Is B2B Content Marketing? Definition, Strategy & Examples.

6. Run a Social Media Audit

A social media audit evaluates your strategy, presence, audience, content, and performance to identify what’s working, where gaps exist, and where to focus next.

Review relevant platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X, Pinterest, and Reddit. Focus on the platforms that matter to your audience and evaluate how effectively each supports your marketing strategy.

Start by evaluating:

• Brand consistency: Are profiles, messaging, creative, and company information accurate and consistent?
• Audience: Are you reaching and growing the audiences that matter to your business?
• Channel performance: Which platforms are generating meaningful reach, engagement, traffic, and conversions?
• Competitive performance: Where are competitors outperforming you or approaching social differently?

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Audit Your Organic Social Media

An organic social media audit evaluates how effectively unpaid social activity builds visibility, engages audiences, and supports your broader marketing goals.

Review:

• Content performance: Which topics, messages, and formats perform best?
• Engagement: How are audiences responding and interacting with your brand?
• Publishing strategy: Is your content mix, cadence, and timing appropriate for each platform?
• Community management: How effectively are you responding to comments, questions, and conversations?
• Business impact: Is organic social contributing to traffic, conversions, or other meaningful outcomes?

Learn how to conduct a complete social media audit with our step-by-step Social Media Audit Guide.

Audit Your Paid Social Media

A paid social media audit evaluates how effectively your advertising reaches priority audiences and contributes to campaign and business objectives.

Across platforms such as Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, and X, evaluate:

• Campaign performance: Spend, conversions, CPA, ROAS, and other relevant KPIs.
• Audience targeting: Audience fit, overlap, saturation, and wasted spend.
• Creative & messaging: Which ads, offers, messages, and formats produce results?
• Platform & placement performance: Where is investment generating the strongest returns?
• Conversion experience: Do ads, landing pages, and conversion paths work together effectively?

Look at paid and organic together to identify where audience, content, and creative insights from one can strengthen the other.

Evaluate Employee Advocacy & Executive Communications

Your social presence extends beyond corporate accounts. Evaluate how executives, subject-matter experts, and employees can strengthen visibility, thought leadership, and engagement. Consider a full Communications Audit if this is a core part of your strategy.

Consider:

• Executive presence: Are leaders effectively communicating their expertise and point of view?
• Employee advocacy: Are employees equipped to authentically engage with and amplify the brand?
• Subject-matter experts: Are internal experts visible around priority topics?
• Enablement & governance: Are the strategy, resources, guidelines, and support in place for effective participation?

“Your employees are an extension of your brand’s digital presence. Strong internal and executive communications can build trust, strengthen advocacy, and amplify your brand externally, while poor communication can quickly undermine it. Auditing how your organization communicates and engages employees can uncover opportunities to strengthen your overall digital marketing performance.” - Lisa Fratzke, Partner & Executive Strategist

Could Your Social Strategy Be Working Harder? Explore Our Social Media Audit Services.

7. Conduct a Digital Advertising & PPC Audit

A digital advertising audit evaluates your paid media strategy, investment, campaigns, audiences, creative, and performance to determine how effectively advertising supports your marketing and business goals. A PPC audit takes a deeper look at pay-per-click campaigns, including paid search platforms such as Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising.

Depending on your media mix, your audit may span paid search, paid social, display, programmatic, video, and Connected TV (CTV). The goal is to understand where advertising dollars are producing results, where spend may be inefficient, and where opportunities exist to improve performance.

Review Your Advertising Goals & Budget

Start by connecting advertising investment to the outcomes each campaign is expected to produce. Different objectives require different measures of success.

Common advertising goals include:

• Awareness: Build visibility and reach with priority audiences.
• Traffic: Drive qualified visitors to your website or landing pages.
• Engagement: Encourage audiences to interact with your content or brand.
• Lead Generation: Generate inquiries, form submissions, demos, or other qualified leads.
• App Promotion: Increase app awareness, downloads, or engagement.
• Sales: Generate purchases, revenue, or other commerce outcomes.

Then compare budget allocation and campaign performance against those objectives. Look for areas where spend is producing strong results, where investment is underperforming, and where budget could potentially be reallocated.

Analyze Paid Media Performance

Evaluate performance based on the objective of each campaign rather than relying on a single advertising metric.

Important metrics may include:

• Reach & impressions: How many people are seeing your advertising?
• Clicks & CTR: Is your advertising generating interest and traffic?
• CPC: How efficiently are you generating clicks?
• Conversions & conversion rate: Are audiences completing the intended action?
• CPA: What does it cost to generate each desired action?
• ROAS: How much revenue is being generated relative to advertising spend?

Look beyond topline metrics to understand why campaigns are performing the way they are. Break results down by platform, campaign, audience, creative, placement, device, geography, and other meaningful dimensions.

Conduct a PPC Audit

For organizations investing in paid search, a PPC audit should take a deeper look at the structure and performance of campaigns across platforms such as Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising.

Review areas such as:

• Campaign & account structure
• Keywords, match types & negative keywords
• Search terms & search intent
• Audience targeting
• Bidding & budget allocation
• Ad copy & creative assets
• Landing page experience
• Conversion tracking

Evaluate paid search based on how efficiently it turns relevant search demand into meaningful business outcomes, not CPC alone.

Review Your Ads & Conversion Experience

Evaluate the actual advertising customers encounter, using the performance data you've gathered to understand which combinations are producing results.

Review:

• Headlines and messaging
• Creative assets and formats
• Offers and value propositions
• Audience alignment
• Calls to action
• Landing page relevance
• Post-click conversion experience

Audit Your Media Mix

A media mix audit evaluates how effectively advertising investment is distributed across channels and whether the overall mix aligns with your audiences, objectives, and performance.

Depending on your strategy, review channels such as:

• Paid Search: Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising
• Paid Social: Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok, Reddit, Pinterest, X, and other relevant platforms
• Display & Programmatic: Display, native, retargeting, and programmatic advertising
• Video: YouTube, social video, and other digital video placements
• Connected TV (CTV): Advertising across streaming and connected television environments

Evaluate each channel based on its role in the customer journey, how it works with other channels, and the business objective the investment supports.

Are You Getting Enough From Your Media Investment? Explore Our Digital Advertising Audit and PPC Audit Services

8. Perform an Email Marketing Audit

An email marketing audit evaluates your email strategy, audience, campaigns, automation, and performance to identify opportunities to improve engagement, deliverability, and conversions.

Review both individual campaign performance and how effectively email supports the broader customer journey.

Review Email Performance

Start by evaluating performance against the purpose of each email or campaign. Important metrics may include:

• Delivery rate: What percentage of emails successfully reach subscribers?
• Click-through rate (CTR): How effectively are emails driving subscribers to take the next step?
• Conversion rate: How many recipients complete the intended action?
• Unsubscribe rate: Are particular campaigns, topics, or frequencies driving subscribers away?
• Revenue or leads: When applicable, how much business impact is email contributing?

You can still monitor open rates, but treat them carefully. Privacy features and automated activity can make opens less reliable than clicks, conversions, and downstream business outcomes.

Evaluate Audience Health & Deliverability

A large email list isn't necessarily a healthy one. Evaluate whether you're attracting, retaining, and successfully reaching the audiences that matter.

Review:

• List growth: Is your qualified subscriber base growing or shrinking?
• Engagement: Which audience segments consistently engage with your emails?
• Deliverability: Are emails reaching inboxes or being rejected, filtered, or sent to spam?
• Bounces & inactive subscribers: Are invalid or chronically disengaged addresses affecting list quality?
• Consent & preferences: Are subscription, preference, and unsubscribe processes working as intended?

Cleaning inactive or undeliverable addresses can improve list quality and help protect deliverability.

Audit Segmentation, Personalization & Automation

Look beyond individual campaigns to evaluate how effectively email supports customers throughout their relationship with your brand.

Take a look at:

• Segmentation: Are audiences grouped based on meaningful characteristics, behaviors, or customer needs?
• Personalization: Are messages and offers relevant to the recipient?
• Welcome & nurture journeys: What happens after someone subscribes, downloads content, or becomes a lead?
• Lifecycle communications: Are you supporting customers at important stages before and after conversion?
• Marketing automation: Are triggers, workflows, timing, and follow-up sequences working as intended?

Review Email Content & Design

Finally, review the emails customers actually receive. Consider:

• Mobile experience and accessibility
• Subject lines and preview text
• Messaging and value proposition
• Content hierarchy and readability
• Calls to action
• Brand consistency
• Landing page alignment

Follow important emails through to the destination page and conversion to make sure the message, offer, and customer experience remain consistent from inbox to action.

9. Run a Digital Analytics Audit 

A digital analytics audit evaluates whether your marketing data is accurate, complete, and aligned with business goals. It helps determine whether you can trust your reporting, understand marketing performance, and make informed decisions about where to invest.

Review your analytics platforms, conversion tracking, attribution, reporting, and data governance to identify gaps that may be limiting visibility into marketing performance.

Audit Your Analytics & Tracking Setup

Start by confirming that platforms such as Google Analytics 4 (GA4), Google Tag Manager, Google Search Console, advertising platforms, CRM systems, and other marketing technologies are collecting and sharing data as intended.

Review areas such as:

• Analytics configuration: Are platforms configured correctly and collecting reliable data?
• Tags & events: Are important customer interactions being captured consistently?
• Conversion tracking: Are forms, purchases, calls, downloads, demos, and other meaningful actions tracked correctly?
• Cross-domain & cross-device tracking: Are important customer journeys being fragmented or lost?
• Data integrations: Is data flowing appropriately between your website, advertising platforms, CRM, marketing automation, and reporting tools?

Not Sure Where to Start? Talk to a Digital Marketing Audit Expert.

Evaluate KPIs & Measurement

Tracking more data doesn't necessarily create better insight. Determine whether your measurement strategy focuses on the metrics that matter to marketing and business performance.

Evaluate:

• KPI alignment: Do marketing KPIs connect to business and customer objectives?
• Channel measurement: Can you consistently compare performance across marketing channels?
• Funnel measurement: Can you see how customers progress from discovery through conversion?
• Business outcomes: Can marketing activity be connected to leads, pipeline, revenue, purchases, retention, or other relevant outcomes?
• Measurement gaps: Are important customer interactions or stages of the journey missing from your data?

Review Attribution & the Customer Journey

Customers rarely experience marketing through a single touchpoint. Review whether your measurement approach provides enough context to understand how channels and interactions contribute throughout the journey.

Look for:

• Attribution models: How is credit assigned across marketing touchpoints?
• Channel interactions: Can you understand how paid, organic, social, email, content, and other channels work together?
• Conversion paths: Which interactions commonly occur before important conversions?
• Funnel drop-off: Where are customers abandoning key journeys?
• Online and offline activity: Where relevant, can digital marketing activity be connected with CRM, sales, retail, call center, or other offline outcomes?

Avoid relying on attribution as a single source of truth. Use it alongside customer journey, channel, and business performance data to develop a more complete view of marketing effectiveness.

Audit Reporting, Data Quality & Governance

Finally, evaluate whether marketing data is translated into reporting leadership can actually use.

Review:

• Data quality: Are there discrepancies, duplicate events, missing data, bot activity, or other issues affecting accuracy?
• Dashboards & reporting: Do reports clearly communicate performance, trends, and opportunities rather than simply presenting metrics?
• Data consistency: Are teams using consistent definitions for KPIs, conversions, channels, and other important measures?
• Ownership & governance: Is responsibility for analytics implementation, data quality, reporting, and maintenance clearly defined?
• Privacy & consent: Are tracking and data collection practices aligned with applicable privacy requirements and user consent choices?

The goal is not perfect data. It is to establish a trusted measurement foundation that gives leadership enough confidence to evaluate performance, identify opportunities, and make better marketing investment decisions.

Look Beyond Individual Marketing Channels

Digital marketing channels don't operate in isolation. Customer experience, technology, people, and processes all influence how effectively your marketing performs.

Looking beyond channel-level metrics can help uncover the root causes behind performance gaps and identify broader opportunities that may otherwise be missed. As part of your digital marketing strategy audit, evaluate how your customer experience, marketing technology, and marketing operations work together to support your strategy and business goals.

Leading marketing organizations are investing beyond individual channels. Fratzke’s latest Digital Marketing Trends Report found that 80% of high-maturity marketing teams increased investment in Marketing Analytics & Measurement, Customer Experience Strategy, and Research & Insights. This reinforces the importance of evaluating the customer, data, and organizational capabilities that influence overall marketing performance.

Want To See A Digital Marketing Audit Example? Download Our Free Digital Marketing Audit Report Preview.

Audit Your Customer Experience & CX Strategy

A customer experience (CX) audit evaluates how effectively your digital touchpoints work together to meet customer needs and deliver a consistent experience throughout the customer journey. It can also reveal gaps between your intended CX strategy and the experience customers actually receive.

Look beyond individual channels and evaluate areas such as:

• Customer personas & journey maps: Review existing customer personas and customer journey maps to ensure they reflect current customer needs, behaviors, pain points, and paths to conversion.
• Customer needs & expectations: Use research, feedback, search behavior, and other customer insights to understand what customers expect from their digital experience.
• End-to-end customer journeys: Follow priority journeys across search, advertising, websites, email, social, sales, and other touchpoints to identify gaps and friction.
• Cross-channel consistency: Evaluate whether messaging, information, offers, and experiences remain consistent as customers move between channels.
• Voice of the Customer (VoC): Review surveys, interviews, reviews, customer service feedback, and other signals to identify recurring needs, frustrations, and opportunities.
• Personalization & relevance: Determine whether experiences appropriately reflect customer needs, behaviors, preferences, and stages of the journey.

The goal is to understand the experience from the customer's perspective, not simply how individual touchpoints perform. Even strong channels can create a fragmented experience when they don't work together.

Audit Your Marketing Technology

A marketing technology audit evaluates whether your platforms, integrations, data, and capabilities effectively support your marketing strategy, customer experience, and measurement needs.

Rather than simply inventorying your technology stack, assess how well each platform is being used, how effectively systems work together, and where technology gaps or redundancies may be limiting performance.

Key areas to evaluate include:

• Marketing technology stack: Review the platforms supporting your website, CRM, email, advertising, analytics, content, social media, and other marketing activities.
• Platform utilization: Determine whether you're fully using the capabilities you're already paying for or investing in tools that provide limited value.
• Integrations & data flow: Evaluate how effectively customer and marketing data moves between platforms and identify disconnected systems or data silos.
• CRM & marketing automation: Review how effectively technology supports lead management, segmentation, personalization, lifecycle marketing, and automation.
• Analytics & measurement: Ensure your technology provides the data and integrations needed to measure performance across channels and customer journeys.
• AI capabilities: Evaluate where AI is currently being used across the marketing organization and where it could improve workflows, insights, personalization, content, or other capabilities.
• Technology gaps & redundancies: Identify missing capabilities, overlapping platforms, unnecessary complexity, and opportunities to consolidate or improve the stack.

A strong marketing technology ecosystem gives teams the capabilities, connectivity, and data needed to execute effectively. Your audit should clarify where existing technology is delivering value, where capabilities are underutilized, and where gaps or redundancies may require attention.

Audit Your Marketing Operations & Governance

A marketing operations audit evaluates the people, processes, capabilities, resources, and governance that support your marketing strategy and day-to-day execution.

Performance gaps aren't always caused by channels or campaigns. Your audit should examine the organizational factors that influence how efficiently teams work, how consistently marketing is executed, and how effectively resources are aligned with priorities.

Key areas to evaluate include:

• Roles & responsibilities: Are ownership, decision-making, and accountability clearly defined across marketing teams?
• Team capabilities: Does your organization have the skills and expertise needed to execute its marketing strategy?
• Processes & workflows: Review how work moves from planning and creation through approvals, activation, measurement, and optimization.
• Agency & partner relationships: Evaluate how internal teams and external partners work together, including responsibilities, communication, and performance.
• Planning & prioritization: Determine how marketing initiatives are selected, prioritized, resourced, and connected to business objectives.
• Governance: Review the standards, policies, approval processes, and guardrails used to maintain brand, content, data, and channel consistency.
• Budget & resources: Evaluate how people, time, and marketing investment are allocated across strategic priorities.

Strong marketing operations create the foundation for consistent execution. The audit can help leadership identify capability gaps, unclear ownership, inefficient processes, and resource constraints that may be affecting marketing performance.

Related: Fractional CMO: What is it and Why Your Brand May Need One

How to Turn Your Digital Marketing Audit Into a Strategic Growth Roadmap

Completing a digital marketing strategy audit gives you a clearer understanding of where your marketing strategy stands today. The next step is turning those insights into decisions about where you want to go, what to prioritize, and how to get there.

This is where audit findings become the foundation for a strategic growth roadmap.

To turn a digital marketing audit into a Growth Roadmap, synthesize the most important findings, prioritize opportunities, define the desired future state, sequence initiatives into a roadmap, and measure progress against the audit baseline.

1. Synthesize Your Key Findings

Bring findings from across your audit together to identify the themes that have the greatest impact on marketing performance.

Look for connections between channels and underlying root causes. For example, weak paid media performance may be connected to landing page friction, inconsistent messaging, poor conversion tracking, or broader customer experience issues.

Focus leadership attention on the findings that matter most rather than treating every issue uncovered during the audit as equally important.

2. Prioritize Your Opportunities

Evaluate recommendations based on their potential impact and what it will take to execute them.

Consider factors such as:

• Business impact
• Customer impact
• Strategic importance
• Effort and resources
• Dependencies
• Time to impact

Prioritization helps separate immediate opportunities from foundational improvements and longer-term investments.

3. Define Your Future State

With a clear understanding of current performance, define where you want your digital marketing organization to go.

At Fratzke, we call this your Guiding Light, a clear strategic vision that aligns leadership around a shared destination and defines what success looks like.

Consider how customer expectations, business objectives, competitive opportunities, and your audit findings should shape that future state.

4. Build Your Strategic Growth Roadmap

Translate your priorities into a sequenced plan for moving from your current state toward your Guiding Light.

A strong Growth Roadmap should clarify:

• Strategic priorities and initiatives
• Quick wins and foundational improvements
• Initiative sequencing and dependencies
• Ownership and resources
• Timing and milestones
• KPIs and measures of success

This creates a practical bridge between audit findings and execution, giving leadership a clearer view of what should happen, in what order, and why.

5. Measure, Optimize & Re-Audit

Use the baseline established during your digital marketing audit to measure progress as the roadmap is executed.

Track the KPIs and benchmark dimensions connected to your priorities, evaluate whether initiatives are producing the intended impact, and adjust your approach based on what you learn.

Periodic re-benchmarking provides an objective way to measure how performance has changed from the original baseline, identify new gaps and opportunities, and inform the next phase of your growth strategy.

Your digital marketing audit then becomes more than a point-in-time assessment. It provides a measurable starting point for continuous improvement and smarter marketing investment.

Identifying opportunities is only valuable if the organization can act on them. Fratzke’s latest Digital Marketing Trends Report found that just 39% of marketing teams say they execute their strategy “very well.” That execution gap is why a digital marketing audit shouldn’t end with findings. It should translate what you learn into clear priorities, measurable objectives, and a practical Growth Roadmap.

“The value of a digital marketing audit isn't finding more problems. It's creating a trusted understanding of where marketing stands today so leaders can make better decisions about where to focus next.” - James Fratzke, Partner & Executive Strategist

Digital Marketing Audit Checklist

Use the following digital marketing audit checklist as a practical digital marketing audit template for evaluating the major areas of your digital strategy. You can also download our Free Digital Marketing Audit Report Preview to see an example of what a comprehensive audit can include.

‍Digital Marketing Channels

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Look Beyond Individual Marketing Channels

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Turn Your Findings Into a Growth Roadmap