Marketing department audit: a working checklist for owners

Define the decisions the audit must support

Write down the decisions ahead: increase the budget, hire a leader, change the agency, launch a category or reorganise the team. Select the products and customer groups affected. A department selling to corporate procurement teams has a different observation window from a retailer running weekly promotions. Agree the period and the business measures before requesting dashboards. Include the owner’s expectations about margin, capacity and timing. If the business objective itself is unresolved, record that as a management decision to make during the audit.

Assemble a small, reconciled evidence set

Request the current plan, spending by activity, campaign briefs, sales or order data, agency scopes and the organisation chart. Add a sample of lost opportunities, customer complaints and abandoned initiatives. Trace a small number of records from source to final status before analysing totals. Record what a lead, qualified opportunity, order and retained customer mean in this business. Check who can export the underlying data and which costs sit outside the marketing budget, including production, software and work supplied by other departments.

Check the audience, proposition and channel choices

Choose three active campaigns and ask which customer situation each addresses. Inspect the offer, the reason to believe it and the action requested. Compare the landing page with what sales or store staff actually deliver. Review the evidence used to select the channel: existing demand, a test, customer research or an assumption. A campaign can generate an acceptable cost per response while attracting buyers the business cannot serve profitably. Use a sample of actual enquiries to assess relevance, including the reasons sales rejects them.

Observe how work crosses team boundaries

Follow a campaign brief through approval, production, launch and reporting. Count waiting time, repeated revisions and decisions that require the owner. Ask who can stop an ineffective activity or change the offer. Review skills through completed work and the problems people can solve independently. Separate unclear responsibility from excessive workload and missing expertise. The same missed deadline could require a clearer approval rule, a smaller programme or a specialist. Confirm that agency tasks and internal tasks have named owners and compatible delivery dates.

Reconcile attribution with business outcomes

Compare channel reports with orders or opportunities in the operating system. Look for duplicate conversions, cancelled orders and reporting windows that attribute the same sale several times. Record the attribution model used in each source. Google Analytics documents that attribution assigns credit under a selected model; that assignment alone does not establish additional sales caused by a campaign. For a proposed increase in spending, define what comparison would help test additional value and how margin, customer quality and service capacity will be protected.

Produce a decision register and operating plan

For each finding, attach a record, calculation or observed workflow. State the business consequence, proposed change, dependency and owner. Rank issues by the scale of the affected work, confidence in the diagnosis and effort required. Discuss findings with the people responsible before finalising the plan; they may hold evidence missing from the initial request. Select a few changes that can be completed in the next cycle, define their acceptance checks and schedule a review. Retain the unresolved questions with a named person responsible for obtaining the answer.

Working files

Sources

Apply this to your business

Bring your business question and current figures. We will define the work, the data required and the decisions your team needs to make.

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