What is a marketing audit and how to conduct one?

A marketing audit is a structured, objective look at how your marketing strategy, channels, spend, and execution stack up against your business goals. It’s what saves you from flying blind—after all, you can’t improve what you don’t measure, especially when budgets are spread across dozens of channels, platforms, and partners. 

Whether you’re managing a $1 million budget or $100 million, conducting a marketing audit answers questions like:

• Are we spending in the right places?
• What’s driving our incremental growth?
• Where are the gaps, overlaps, or hidden inefficiencies?

Marketing audit definition

A marketing audit is a comprehensive, objective review of your marketing strategy, channels, activities, and performance to find if your efforts are driving incrementality or meeting other goals. 

Done right, the marketing audit report gives you a clear, data-driven analysis of your:

• Overall marketing strategy
• Marketing channel mix
• Creatives
• Marketing and media spend
• Internal processes

What are the benefits of a marketing audit? 

Between fragmented channels, AI-powered marketing tools, privacy regulations, and pressure to prove ROI, you can’t afford to rely on gut feel or old reporting processes. A marketing audit helps you:

• Spot hidden inefficiencies: A marketing audit report compares your spend to actual performance across all channels, helping you see which channels aren’t delivering incremental growth. You’ll catch areas where you’re over-investing and redirect that budget.
• Challenge assumptions with data: It forces you to look at fresh performance data rather than repeating last year’s marketing plan or blindly following marketing industry trends without understanding their real impact on your business.
• Uncover gaps in your channel mix strategy: The audit shows whether you have a healthy balance of brand and performance activity, or if you’re missing critical stages of the funnel (for example, no upper-funnel activity to feed future demand).
• Align teams on the facts: It provides a single source of truth that marketing, sales, finance, and agencies can rally around. So, your annual marketing plan isn’t based on conflicting reports or biased media attribution data.

Types of marketing audit (and when to use them)

There are different types of marketing audits depending on the area you want to review:

• Strategic marketing audit: This is a marketing strategy audit to check alignment with your business goals. You’ll review your positioning, target segments, value propositions, and how your tactics map to growth objectives.
  • When to use: You’re entering a new market, launching a major product, or updating your overall business strategy
• Channel audit: This focuses on specific platforms or media channels to find if you’re spending in the right places, if certain channels are underperforming or if there are overlaps wasting budget.
  • When to use: You suspect spend is misaligned, for example, if lower-funnel channels are getting all the budget but growth is stalling.
• Performance audit: This digs into ROI and mROI, incrementality, and attribution.
  • When to use: Before major budget decisions or annual planning, especially if you’re shifting spend between channels or introducing new media
• Process and team audit: This checks whether your people, partners, and tools are set up for success.
  • When to use:  During organizational changes like mergers, new agency relationships, or scaling up your marketing team.

Here’s a quick breakdown of what each type of audit reviews:

Types of marketing audit	Review examples
Strategy	Goals vs. spend alignment, target audience research, positioning
Channels	Media mix balance, channel ROI, overlaps, coverage gaps
Performance	Incremental ROAS, attribution accuracy, and cost per outcome
Process	Team roles, agency alignment, marketing technology and tools usage

How to conduct a marketing audit: Step-by-step process

You can conduct a five-step marketing audit process to generate a report that drives results and gets teams aligned:

Marketing audit step 1: Set your audit objectives

What to do: Before you gather a single data point, define exactly what business questions your audit needs to answer. Don’t audit for the sake of it; get a clear purpose.

Why it matters: Starting without clear objectives is the fastest way to waste time. You’ll end up buried in reports that don’t drive any decisions. The right objectives keep your audit focused on actions that improve performance.

Best practice: Put your marketing goals and objectives in writing before you pull data, keeping your audit focused.

Marketing audit step 2: Gather and validate your data

What to do: Collect all relevant data across channels, platforms, and tools. Use a cross-media measurement tool so that your data is clean, complete, and reliable.

Why it matters: Most audits fail because they rely on incomplete or unverified data. Your decisions won’t hold any value if your numbers are wrong, including duplicated spend, missing conversion rates, and platform-reported metrics with no independent validation.

Best practice: Check for data accuracy and gaps to ensure there’s no missing data (like fees or production spend). If you used a marketing mix modeling tool, you can skip this step.

Marketing audit step 3: Review strategy, spend, and execution

What to do: Analyze how well your marketing strategy, budget allocation, and tactics align with your business goals and priorities.

Why it matters: This is where you find the disconnects that waste budget or slow growth. Without linking spend and execution to strategy, you’ll support the wrong objectives, or no clear objective at all. A thorough review helps you see whether your dollars are actually driving business outcomes.

Best practice: Tie every major budget item to a specific business objective. If you can’t, that’s a red flag for wasted or misaligned spend.

Marketing audit step 4: Identify spend gaps, overlaps, and opportunities

What to do: Pinpoint where your marketing plan is overfunded, underfunded, duplicative, or missing key elements, so you can reallocate budget for greater impact.

Why it matters: Even strong strategies and clean data can mask waste or missed potential. This step connects your audit findings to action by showing where to cut, where to reinvest, and where to test new approaches.

Best practice: Quantify the dollar value of overlaps and gaps wherever possible. Data-driven marketing will help you build a clear case for reallocating budget and make your audit insights harder for stakeholders to ignore.

Marketing audit step 5: Build an action plan

What to do: Translate your audit findings into a clear, prioritized plan with owners, deadlines, and measurable outcomes. Make it clear who is responsible for each change and when it will happen. 

Why it matters: The marketing audit process without action is just a report. The value of the audit comes from what you change (and how quickly). A structured action plan ensures your insights lead to better decisions, smarter spending, and stronger results.

Best practice: Present your action plan as a simple roadmap: what’s changing, why, when, and how you’ll measure success. Prioritize actions by business impact and marketing efforts to make it easy for leadership to understand.

What does an effective marketing audit format look like?

Your marketing audit format needs to be structured enough for stakeholders to understand findings and act on them easily. A strong format includes:

• Executive summary: Key insights, opportunities, and recommended actions in plain language
• Objectives: The questions your audit aimed to answer
• Methodology: The data you reviewed and how you validated it
• Findings by area: A clear breakdown of gaps, overlaps, and opportunities
• Action plan: Prioritized recommendations, owners, deadlines, and metrics

Format your audit so it works both as a presentation (for senior stakeholders) and a detailed document (for teams executing the changes).

Sample marketing audit (what the plan looks like in practice)

Let’s look at how Keen helped a consumer brand with a data-driven audit approach.

Marketing audit objective: Identify inefficient spend areas and rebalance the media mix to improve both short-term sales and long-term brand health.

Key audit findings:

• The mix lacked a full-funnel marketing strategy and overly focused on upper-funnel tactics like linear TV, YouTube OLV, and Google Discovery, limiting immediate sales impact.
• Marketing investments weren’t efficiently reaching the core target demographic.

Action plan:

Based on the data, Keen created an objective action plan for the brand:

• Reduce investment in inefficient upper-funnel channels (linear TV, YouTube OLV, Google Discovery).
• Shift working dollars into more effective platforms for their audience, including social media platforms like TikTok.
• Rebalance media spend to create a healthier mix across the funnel, supporting both immediate sales and long-term brand growth.

Outcome: Despite spending $500K less YoY, the brand grew profit and contributed revenue by $1.2M (+8.6%), proving the power of reallocation guided by an AI-driven digital marketing audit.

Alt text: Breakdown of marketing mix channels and their contribution to the revenue.

Marketing audit checklist

Now that you have the marketing audit process steps, format, and a sample, it’s time to conduct your own. Follow this checklist to stay on track:

Marketing audit steps	Tasks	Output
Set objectives	Define 2–3 specific audit questions linked to business priorities.	Clear list of focused audit questions
Gather data	Collect data from all key cross-media data sources (platforms, CRM, MMM, sales). Check for gaps, duplicates, and inconsistencies.	Complete, validated dataset covering all relevant channels and tactics
Review spend vs goals	Compare marketing budget allocation to business priorities. Flag misaligned spend.	List of spend areas to reallocate or investigate further
Check overlaps and waste	Identify duplicated efforts across platforms (for example, overlapping retargeting). Estimate wasted budget.	List of overlaps with budget impact estimates
Build an action plan	Prioritize recommendations, assign owners, set deadlines and success metrics.	Action plan with priorities, owners, timelines, and metrics

Deliver a strategic marketing audit report with Keen

A marketing audit is only as powerful as the data and tools behind it. With Keen’s MMM platform, you can go beyond manual reviews or siloed reports and automate your marketing audit process.

Keen helps brands audit their marketing activities in real time by:

• Identifying wasted spend and under-optimized channels using marketing causality and advanced algorithms, not just platform-reported metrics
• Unifying cross-channel measurement so you see the full picture, not just pieces of it
• Pinpointing opportunities for reallocation with sales forecasts
• Turning audits into an always-on capability so you can adapt continuously, not just once a year

Request a demo to see how you can make marketing audit a dynamic part of planning, spending, and growing, not just a one-time checkup.

Frequently asked questions

What are the key elements of a marketing audit?

The key elements of a marketing audit typically include:

• SWOT report: A review of marketing strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats
• Competitive analysis: A review of how your marketing strategy and tactics compare to competitors
• Market research: Insights into changing consumer behavior, market trends, and emerging opportunities
• Marketing performance assessment: Data on how each platform, campaign, and funnel stage is performing
• Brand and messaging evaluation: Checks for unified marketing consistency, clarity, and relevance 
• Data and measurement integrity: A review of how accurately and completely performance is tracked

When is the best time to conduct a marketing audit?

The best time to conduct a marketing audit is before major planning cycles, big budget decisions, or when entering a new market. It’s also smart to audit if performance drops or your strategy changes.

How often should I audit my marketing strategy?

You should conduct a comprehensive marketing audit at least once a year, ideally during annual planning or before major budget decisions. Some agile marketing teams run smaller, focused audits quarterly, too.

What does a successful marketing audit look like?

A successful marketing audit is:

• Objective: It looks at the data honestly, without bias toward platforms or past decisions.
• Comprehensive: It covers the entire marketing strategy, channels, creative, and spend.
• Actionable: It leads directly to a plan with owners, deadlines, and success metrics.
• Repeatable: It’s not a one-off step and becomes part of ongoing marketing management.

What should I do after completing a marketing audit?

Once you complete your marketing audit, treat it as the starting point for your annual marketing plan. Here’s how to turn audit findings into action:

• Build a prioritized action plan: Focus on addressing the biggest gaps, wasted spend, or missed opportunities first. Align recommendations with your business goals for the year.
• Assign owners, deadlines, and success metrics: Ensure each action has a clear owner, timeline, and a defined way to measure progress, such as cost savings and funnel balance.
• Integrate audit findings into annual planning: Use your audit to inform budget allocations, channel strategies, creative priorities, and marketing campaign phasing.

Set a review cadence: Schedule quarterly or biannual mini-audits as part of your annual plan, so you stay agile and adjust as needed.