Quick Answer: A year-end marketing audit is not a report. It is seven questions you answer from your own records in one afternoon: where every lead came from, which of them became customers, what each channel cost per customer, what you are paying for that nobody can show you, whether people can find and trust you online, how fast a new lead gets a human response, and which numbers your agency reports that are not leads. Answer those before anyone shows you a 2026 proposal.
Why do this now instead of in January?
Because budgets get set in November and December, and most of them get set by renewal. The contracts you have roll forward, the ad spend stays where it was, and the new year starts with last year’s decisions already made.
An afternoon in November changes that. You will not have perfect data, and you do not need it. You need to know roughly where the customers came from and roughly what you paid to get them. That is enough to decide what to keep.
Question one: where did your leads come from?
Open whatever you have. A CRM if you run one, the call log on the business phone, the form submissions in your inbox, the booking system. Count the leads for the year and sort them by how they found you: search, referral, repeat customer, social, paid ads, a sign on a truck.
Most owners who do this find two things. The share of leads from referrals and repeat customers is larger than they thought, and the share from the channel they spend the most on is smaller. Write the numbers down even if they are rough. We wrote about the metrics behind this in the five numbers that tell you whether your agency is working, and lead source is the first of them.
Question two: which leads became customers?
A lead is not a customer. Take the same list and mark the ones that closed. Now you have a close rate by source, and that is where the information is.
Search leads often close at a higher rate than social leads, because the person was looking for the service. Referral leads usually close highest of all. If a channel sends you a lot of leads that rarely close, it is sending you traffic, not business, and you should be paying for it accordingly.
Question three: what did each customer cost?
Add up what you paid in each channel for the year, including the agency fees that belong to that channel, and divide by the customers it produced. Not the leads. The customers.
This number is the one that decides budgets. A channel that costs $400 per customer for a $6,000 job is a bargain at any volume. A channel that costs $900 per customer for a $700 sale is not a marketing problem, it is an arithmetic problem.
Question four: what are you paying for that nobody can show you?
Go through the invoices line by line. For each one, ask what was delivered and where you can see it. A blog post has a URL. A review response is visible on your Google profile. An ad has a report with spend and results.
If an invoice line cannot be shown to you, that is the first thing to cut or renegotiate. “Ongoing SEO” and “social media management” are the usual suspects. Both can be real work, and both are often an hourly retainer with no unit of delivery behind it.
Question five: can people find and trust you?
Search for your business by name on your phone, then search for the service you sell in your town. We laid out how to do this properly in should you search for your own business on Google. What you are checking is simple. Does your Google Business Profile appear, is it accurate, when was the last review, and has anyone answered it?
A profile with a review from eight months ago and no responses tells a buyer you are not paying attention, whatever the website says.
Question six: how fast does a lead get a human response?
Fill in your own contact form on a Saturday afternoon. Call your own number after hours. Time how long it takes to get a real reply, not an auto-responder.
The answer is often “Monday.” For a buyer who filled in three forms, Monday is too late. This is usually the cheapest thing on the list to fix and the one that pays back fastest, because it does not need a single new lead. It converts the ones you already paid for.
Question seven: which reported numbers are leads, and which are not?
Look at the last report your agency sent you. Circle every number that is a lead, a customer or revenue. Everything else, sessions, impressions, reach, engagement, followers, is an input. Inputs matter, but they are not what you are buying.
If the circled numbers are missing, ask for them. If they cannot be produced, you have your answer about that contract.
What do you do with the answers?
You now have a page of rough numbers that most businesses your size do not have. Keep what produces customers at a cost that works. Cut what cannot be shown. Fix the response time before you buy more leads. Then set the 2026 budget around those three decisions instead of around last year’s renewals.
If you would like a second pair of eyes on the page, that is what the free marketing assessment is for. We go through the same seven questions with you, and you keep the answers either way.