Healthcare Marketing Audit: What Gets Checked

An audit of healthcare marketing is useful before a budget decision or before a change of agency. It is one of the four ways I work with companies. What follows is what I check, and what the result looks like.

When it makes sense

Before a budget decision.
Before changing an agency.
When the numbers from different tools do not match.
Before a new market starts.

Why tracking comes first

Every other check relies on the numbers. If a form is counted twice or calls are credited to the wrong source, the budget decisions made from those numbers are wrong too. So I start with tracking and only then look at lead flow and campaigns.

Tracking

One definition of a lead, used in every report.
Events and conversions that fire once, on the right action.
Consent settings that match what the cookie banner says.
Forms, calls and SMS tracked back to their source.
Real sales sent back to the ad platforms as offline conversions.

Lead flow and CRM

Where the enquiries from each channel land.
The time from enquiry to first contact.
Duplicates, and how they are matched.
Status definitions, and whether sales and marketing use them in the same way.
Consent fields, data quality and integration errors.

Campaigns

Account structure, and search terms that bring unwanted traffic.
Audiences, and whether existing customers are excluded.
Landing pages in each language.
The budget split across markets and channels, and what can be stopped.

Claims on pages and in ads, compared with approved wording.
Form texts and consent wording.
The cookie banner, and what loads before consent.

Examples of findings

These are examples of the kind of issue an audit turns up, not findings from a specific company.

A form submission counted twice because the tag manager and a plugin both send the event.
Phone calls from ads credited to direct traffic because the tracking number is not tied to the source.
Existing customers still included in an acquisition audience.
Two markets using the same status name for different stages.

What you get

A prioritised list in three groups: fix now (quick, with a clear effect), plan (needs a developer or a supplier) and leave (not worth the effort). Each item has an owner and a rough effort. A one-page summary for management comes with it. An audit does not build anything and does not replace a strategy. It tells you what to fix and in which order, and building is a separate scope in the proposal.

How items are ranked

Each finding is rated on its effect on results or risk, the effort to fix it and who has to act. A consent or claims problem ranks above a cosmetic one, because it carries legal risk. A quick fix with a clear effect goes to the top of the list.

What I ask for

Read access to the ad accounts, analytics, tag manager and CRM.
One person who knows how the call centre works.
An hour with whoever owns the budget.

How we start

A 30-minute call, then a short proposal with scope, timeline and price.