You can audit your own marketing in one afternoon with free tools: pull what Search Console says your site earns, check your pages against Core Web Vitals, list how a lead reaches you and where it is recorded, and write down what you have tried. Do it before you talk to an agency.
By Avi Vatsa, CEO, Exchange Four Agency. Avi leads the team that installs and runs AI-leveraged revenue systems for owner-led companies. His background spans law, technology, and marketing; he also co-founded Dialora, an AI voice-agent platform for automated lead capture and booking. (Marketer of the Day #1411)
Why audit your own marketing first?
Because an agency's first meeting is a story about your business, and you can only judge the story against numbers you already hold. An owner who arrives with a baseline asks sharper questions and cannot be sold a problem that does not exist. An owner who arrives without one is told what the agency has decided to find.
The audit below needs no login you do not already own and no money. It takes about four hours. The output is one page of numbers, which is also the start of a good brief for an agency.
| Step | Where to look | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| 1. What Google shows | Search Console, Performance report | Whether anyone finds you, and for what |
| 2. How the site performs | Core Web Vitals, from Google's free tools | Whether the pages are fast enough to keep a visitor |
| 3. Where leads come from | Your CRM, phone log or inbox | Which channels produce real enquiries |
| 4. What you have tried | Your own notes and invoices | What failed, so no one repeats it |
What does Search Console say your site earns?
Open the Performance report. Google defines its columns plainly: clicks are "the number of times a user clicked your site from Google Search results", impressions are "how many times your site appeared in Search results", and click-through rate is "the click count divided by the impression count." The default view covers "the past three months", which is enough for a first read.
Write down four numbers: total clicks, total impressions, the ten queries with the most clicks, and the ten pages with the most clicks. Then split the queries into two piles: those that contain your company name and those that do not. Visitors who typed your name already knew you. The second pile is the marketing. If it is nearly empty, you do not have a search problem an agency can tune. You have no search presence yet, and the conversation should be about building one.
How fast are your pages?
Google publishes the targets it asks site owners to meet. On web.dev, Core Web Vitals are given as: "LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading", "pages should have a INP of 200 milliseconds or less", and "pages should maintain a CLS of 0.1. or less." The measure is "the 75th percentile of page loads", so three out of four visits should meet each target.
Run your five most important pages through one of Google's free speed tools and record the three figures for each. You are not trying to fix anything. You are learning whether an agency that promises "faster pages" is telling you something true, and whether a redesign should come before a campaign.
Where do your leads actually come from?
This is the step most owners skip and the one that matters most. For the last ninety days, list every enquiry: how it arrived (phone, form, email, referral), when, and whether it became work. If you do not keep this record, reconstruct it from the phone log and inbox. It will be incomplete. Say so on the page.
The result is two numbers you can defend: how many enquiries you got, and how many became customers. Divide your marketing spend over the same ninety days by each. That is your cost per enquiry and cost per customer, in your own books. Any figure an agency later quotes should be compared with these, and what a marketing agency should report shows which figures deserve to be in front of you each month.
What have you already tried?
List each earlier effort: the vendor or channel, the dates, the monthly cost and what came of it. Include the ones that embarrass you. An agency that does not know a channel already failed will propose it again, and you will pay for the lesson twice.
What do you do with the page?
Show it to every agency you meet. Watch what they do with it. A good one reads it, asks about the gaps and tells you which numbers it would want next. A poor one skips it and pitches the package it brought. That reaction is the cheapest test of an agency you will run, and it sits well beside the questions to ask before you sign and the diligence checklist.
The test of your own audit is simple. Can you say, in two sentences, what your marketing earned last quarter and what it cost? If you can, you are ready to hire. If you cannot, you are about to pay someone to find out.