Thinking about… marketing audits and their reputation

We’ve recently launched a new marketing audit format to make it as simple as possible for any business to improve its website. But when we first started working on this project, we realised that marketing audits might have a reputation issue.

On paper, they sound sensible enough to signal responsibility and feel like progress. But ask most businesses what ROI they actually saw from their last marketing audit, and the answer is often vague at best. They got a spreadsheet and a PDF. Someone walked them through a presentation, and a few people nodded.

Then everyone went back to business as usual.

We wanted a different outcome.

We spent a lot of time considering something that rarely gets discussed openly: the actual impact of marketing audits once they’re delivered. We looked at past audits we’d run, audits we’d inherited, and audits clients had commissioned before working with us. We paid close attention to what happened after the deliverables were received: which audits drove real change and which quietly disappeared into shared drives.

Thinking about… goals and framing

Before commissioning an audit, there’s one question that almost no one asks or answers properly: What do we actually want to achieve with this?

A high-level overview. Conversion rate optimisation. SEO improvements. UX insights. Operational efficiency. Better ROI from existing spend. You can audit for anything, but should you audit for all at once?

Because the moment the brief turns into “everything marketing”, the outcome becomes fairly predictable. And bias slips in, quietly and often unintentionally.

Auditors bring their own frameworks, preferences, and past experiences. “Best practice” starts to look suspiciously like “what’s worked for my other clients.” And without a clear objective, the audit begins to answer questions you never intended to ask.

Sometimes, that’s exactly why you commissioned it. You want an outside perspective. Someone to notice the things you’ve stopped seeing. But opening Pandora’s box of everything that could be improved rarely leads to action. It just leads to overwhelm.

A good audit needs a point of view. It needs to serve a specific purpose, identifying the issues you’re ready to prioritise, understanding the root causes of a particular problem, or clarifying what genuinely moves the needle, rather than what simply looks good on a slide deck.

Thinking about… audits as an avoidance tactic

There’s another uncomfortable part when commissioning an audit - and probably one of the most common reasons audits fail to deliver.

We’ve seen plenty of businesses commission audits when, deep down, they already know what’s wrong. The audit becomes a pause button. A way to delay the harder decisions and the habit changes no one is particularly excited about making.

“I’ve watched a lot of businesses make the audit the end in itself. Very often, they know the issues and the transformation required. The audit becomes a tactic to avoid actual change. Like signing up for a gym, doing your first session with a PT, and being told, "Yes, you need to get fitter, and these are the areas to address!" And thinking, thank god that’s over, back to the next box set and the chips.” - Deborah Lewis (heads up PR & Comms here at DXD)

Audits are appealing because they feel somehow productive and, in a certain way, reassuring: no one ever gets criticised for commissioning one. It creates a comfortable distance between recognizing what needs to change and actually making the change.

This is even more evident when someone calls for an audit at the worst possible moment. If a rebrand is underway or the market is under external pressure, the audit results won’t be a priority regardless of findings.

Thinking about… insight and impact

Another common scenario we’ve encountered is teams hearing the word "audit" and bracing for criticism. And if all that follows is a list of shortcomings, that instinct is reinforced. Conversations that should translate findings into momentum often stall due to defensiveness.

“Maybe the very word 'audit' is part of what puts people off? They don't necessarily equate that with actionable insights? The learnings or the takeaways? Just an 'audit' which could have negative connotations?” - Jill Gibson (principal copywriter here at DXD)

A good audit should focus on both what needs improvement and what works. But that’s rarely what happens in real life.

Curiously, too few marketers and business owners stop to analyse why something performs well. Rarely does anyone pause to ask what conditions enabled that outcome or whether those conditions could be replicated elsewhere.

Strong audits also distinguish between low-hanging fruit and structural change. A list of quick wins and meaningful shifts in the same spreadsheet, without context or defining realistic timelines, can’t give you the impact you expect. Without a clear framework for these actionable steps, even the smartest recommendations stay theoretical, and your audit remains a checked-off item on your to-do list with no real impact on your business.

Thinking about… confusion

“An audit is that objective voice that helps you self-reflect and provides a good set of KPIs to follow up on.” - Jill Ball (Strategy & Content)

But is that really what happens when the deliverables land in your inbox?

We’ve seen genuinely valuable insights buried beneath overly technical language. Or solid recommendations lose their impact because they were framed against benchmarks that had little to do with the client’s industry, size, or stage of growth.

An audit that ignores business context, maturity, or operational constraints quickly becomes disconnected from reality. (Sometimes it seems as though something simply had to be wrong, whether or not it was the real priority.)

And then there’s the practicality problem. Some recommendations are simply too heavy for a small team to absorb. A ten-point transformation plan might look impressive on paper, but if there’s no internal capacity to execute it, momentum dies before it starts.

Too much change to execute in a short window is overwhelming. Which means no one’s working on prioritisation or defining the visible first step. Everyone’s frozen, waiting for someone else to make the difficult decisions, until the team forgets about the audit, and things return to “normal."

Thinking about… uncomfortable conversations

Audits can expose uncomfortable truths and force the team to go outside their comfort zones. You might discover that a channel everyone loves isn’t performing, for example. So, suggestions to cut efforts might not get internal support. When insights threaten ego or existing power structures, resistance shows up. The report gets acknowledged, but not embraced.

On the other hand, some audits lean heavily toward the auditor’s own services. When the recommendations imply that the only way forward is to outsource, internal teams can understandably hesitate.

Now, to be fair, this isn’t automatically wrong. Some improvements genuinely need specialist support; think structural SEO work, complex CRO testing, paid media scaling, or a complete website makeover.

The issue isn’t the presence of external support in the plan. It’s the framing.

When recommendations are presented with urgency that feels like an ultimatum - fix this immediately or risk serious decline - the audit starts to feel less like guidance and more like pressure. The tone shifts from strategic partnership to implied threat.

That’s when resistance builds, because no one wants to feel cornered into a contract.

A strong audit should empower you to build. It should clarify where investment makes sense, where internal capability is enough, and where phased support might be appropriate.

Pay attention to:

Audits that create a dependency you didn’t plan for.
Audits that manufacture questions without providing any answers.
Solutions and tactical plans that are too expensive for your current marketing budget.

HAVE I GOT YOU THINKING ABOUT the ROI of your last marketing audit? If you’re tired of commissioning reports that feel insightful in the moment but rarely translate into meaningful change, it might be time to rethink how you approach audits in the first place.

We designed our new website conversion audit to remove the friction between analysis and action. We want to help you set clear objectives for practical prioritisation and realistic next steps. No overwhelming checklists. No vague “best practice” slides. Just a structured way to turn insight into momentum.

Download our audit template and use it to guide your next review, whether that’s in-house or with an external partner.

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