Digital marketing strategy audit/health check

Score and benchmark your digital marketing capabilities and prioritize improvements using our practical health check audit

How will this digital marketing strategy audit help me and my business?

Do you want to know where you most need to improve your digital marketing? With so many great opportunities for deploying digital marketing, it can be difficult to know which to prioritize. In larger businesses, you will need to justify your plans to colleagues by showing clear priorities.

Start your journey to improve your digital marketing here by reviewing your activities against best practices defined in the Smart Insights RACE Planning system.

To use the spreadsheet, simply answer the questions about your digital marketing effectiveness or score your digital capability on a scale of 1 to 5 using the drop-down selection of options and a Radar diagram will be automatically created to summarize areas needing improvement.

Dr. Dave Chaffey originally developed this spreadsheet when consulting to audit clients' websites and digital communications against best practices using analytics and also collaboratively when completing workshops and interviews with digital stakeholders.

Now it's popular with Smart Insights members for completing similar interviews with stakeholders or in a group review session, for example: between agency and client. It can also be completed quickly by a manager reviewing current weaknesses in digital marketing for a business to show the gaps and what needs to be improved.

Who is this audit for?

We’ve designed this audit spreadsheet to be as flexible as possible, so it can be applied for different types of businesses and roles:

Company directors and marketing managers – identify priorities you can direct your team and agencies to work on
Digital marketing managers – create a prioritized roadmap of digital marketing activities and review actions as a checklist
Agencies and consultants – use it to compare against and improve your own marketing audits and recommendations to clients

How is this spreadsheet audit structured?

P1: RACE Audit: Our updated ‘RACE Audit’ tab offers a detailed checklist to prioritize and action 25 key digital marketing activities in the RACE Planning System. This worksheet has been updated in 2024 to include 70 RACE activities across the key 25 techniques, opportunity, strategy and action planning for RACE Growth System 90-day planning, priority and status columns and useful links to relevant Learning Path modules and templates.The 40+ questions are grouped to assess capabilities across the Smart Insights RACE Planning Framework of online marketing activities to manage:
- Plan – shows what needs to be included in a digital plan.
- Reach – techniques to grow your audience and increase targeted traffic on your website
- Act and Convert – improve multichannel customer journeys and content marketing to increase conversion.
- Engage – approaches to increase long-term value of customers through social media, email and website improvements.
For each question and answers, recommendation links give an index of key Smart Insights resources you can follow-up on to improve your digital capabilities. These are split across two main sections:
P2: Health check: A higher level review for quickly scoring your current strategy to identify improvements. Use the Health check Radar to Benchmark your performance against competitors.

Resource Details

Author: Dr. Dave Chaffey
Format: A multi-tab Google Sheet to score and chart your digital marketing capabilities to show activities you must improve
Related templates: Multichannel retail / Ecommerce benchmark audit

About the author

Dr. Dave Chaffey

Dave is co-founder of Smart Insights and creator of the Smart Insights RACE planning framework. For his full profile, or to connect on LinkedIn or other social networks, see the About Dave Chaffey profile page on Smart Insights. Dave is author of 5 bestselling books on digital marketing including Digital Marketing Excellence and Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice. In 2004 he was recognized by the Chartered Institute of Marketing as one of 50 marketing ‘gurus’ worldwide who have helped shape the future of marketing.