Ten questions you answer about your own marketing. Each one you cannot answer is a place money may be leaking. The audit does not score you and invents no numbers; it just makes the gaps visible. The research says the gaps are common, but only your data tells you yours.
Why bother auditing at all
Because the base rates are not encouraging, and because most businesses cannot tell whether they are the exception. LinkedIn's B2B Institute, with System1, rated more than 600 B2B ads and found 71% are unlikely to ever generate a sale (2022). Gartner found marketers use just 42% of their martech stack (2022), and that 64% of CMOs lack the budget to execute their strategy (2024). None of those is a measurement of your account, and that is exactly the problem: the figures describe advertising and tools in general, and the only way to know your own number is to look. This checklist is the looking. The wider evidence is on our research page.
The ten questions
Answer each honestly. A "no" or "I'm not sure" is not a failure; it is a finding.
Can you name the campaign behind your last ten customers?
Not leads. Paying customers. If you cannot trace them back to a specific ad, campaign, or page, you are funding marketing on faith.
Does your CRM lead source say "Web" or "Direct" on most records?
That is the sound of attribution failing silently. A generic source means the real origin was lost before it reached the CRM. See lead source attribution.
Do you know cost per customer by channel, or only cost per lead?
Cost per lead flatters channels that produce cheap, low-intent leads. Cost per customer is the number that decides where budget should go.
Are you paying for tools nobody opened last month?
The unused half of a martech stack is pure leakage. List every paid tool and the last time it changed a decision. The honest list is usually shorter than the invoice.
Can your agency show spend that produced revenue, not just impressions?
Activity reports (reach, impressions, engagement) are not the same as outcomes. If the monthly deck never reaches "and here is the revenue," that is a finding.
Are your campaign links tagged consistently, or guessed at?
If the same channel shows up under three spellings, your reports are fiction before you even start. Fix it with a naming convention and the UTM builder.
Do you reply to new leads within the hour?
Spend that produces a lead you then lose to a slow reply is spend wasted at the finish line. See lead response time.
Do you know which channels assist versus close?
Judging everything on last click quietly defunds the channels that create demand and overcredits the ones that catch it. Different question, different method.
Are you funding any channel out of habit?
"We've always run it" is not a reason. Every recurring line item should be able to answer "what did this produce," and the ones that cannot are the audit's whole point.
If you had to cut 20% of spend tomorrow, would you know which 20%?
This is the summary question. If the answer is yes, your attribution is working. If it is "I'd have to guess," everything above just told you why.
What to do with your answers
Every question you could not answer points to the same missing thing: a reliable link between spend and customer. You close most of them at once by capturing the real source on every lead and following it through to revenue, which is the job of lead source tracking and the goal of the attribution maturity model. You do not need to prove the 71% on your own account. You need to be able to point at the spend of yours that actually works, and put more there.