The 12-Point Digital Revenue Audit
This is the list I work through on a paid checkup. It is published here in full because most owners will read it, recognize two or three problems, and fix them without me. That is a good outcome.
How to use this. Set aside a weekend morning. Work in order, because the early checks are the ones most likely to be costing you money right now. Write down what you find rather than trying to fix things as you go, or you will get three items in and lose the afternoon to a plugin.
Nothing here needs a specialist. If a check requires a tool you do not have, that is itself a finding worth writing down.
Part one: the site itself
Buy something from your own site, or submit your own lead form, on your phone, on cellular
Not on office wifi and not on a desktop. Complete a real purchase, card and all, or a real inquiry, and count the taps from landing page to confirmation. Note every moment you hesitate or squint.
Red flag: more than five taps to checkout, or any point where you personally had to think. Most owners have never done this, and most abandoned carts begin somewhere in it.Time your homepage on mobile
Run it through Google PageSpeed Insights and read the mobile tab, not the desktop one. Your customers are on phones on imperfect connections.
Red flag: over four seconds. Every additional second costs you visitors who never see the thing you sell, and you are paying for those clicks.Confirm guest checkout exists (stores only)
Try to buy without creating an account. If the store will not let you, you are asking strangers to commit to a relationship before a first purchase.
Red flag: mandatory account creation. This is usually a settings toggle, and it is among the cheapest fixes with a real revenue effect.Calculate your actual conversion rate
Monthly orders divided by monthly visitors. Do the arithmetic yourself rather than trusting a dashboard tile you have not verified.
How to read it: under 1% points at a site or traffic problem. Between 1% and 2% is typical and improvable. Above 3% and your growth probably comes from more traffic rather than better conversion.Part two: what you are paying for traffic
Sort your campaigns by spend and look at the bottom half
Rank every campaign by money spent over the last ninety days, then put conversions next to it. Read the worst performers first.
Red flag: any campaign with meaningful spend and no conversions that has been running more than a month. In small accounts this is common and nobody has looked recently.Check whether your ads track a purchase or just a click
Open your ad platform and find where revenue is reported. If you only see clicks, impressions, and traffic, stop and fix that before optimizing anything.
Red flag: no conversion tracking. Every decision made without it was a guess, including the ones that looked like they worked.Search for yourself the way a customer would
Use the words a stranger would type, not your business name. Someone looking for you by name was already coming.
Red flag: absent from the first page and the map results. You may be paying for clicks you could have earned, permanently.Claim and finish your Google Business Profile
Hours, categories, photos, and review responses all feed local ranking. Half-finished profiles are extremely common.
Red flag: unclaimed, wrong hours, no photos, or unanswered reviews. For any business with local customers this is the highest-return free asset available.Part three: knowing and keeping
Read three months of reporting and name one decision it caused
Open the last three reports you received or generated. Write down a specific action taken because of something in them.
Red flag: you cannot name one. Reporting that changes no decisions is a cost, not an asset, however professional it looks.List every recurring subscription and when you last opened it
Apps, plugins, platform add-ons, email tools, that thing someone recommended in 2022. Pull the actual card statement rather than working from memory.
Red flag: anything you cannot remember logging into this quarter. This is usually the fastest margin an owner can recover, and it takes an afternoon.Compare your payment and shipping rates to current market rates
Both were probably set when you were smaller and neither updates itself. Both are negotiable, particularly if your volume has grown.
Red flag: rates you have not reviewed in two years. On real volume, a fraction of a percent on processing is a meaningful annual number.Ask your agency or freelancer what they changed last month
Not what they did. What they changed, and what happened as a result. The five agency tests go further.
Red flag: a summary of activity with no decision in it. A good partner answers this instantly and welcomes the question. You are entitled to know what the retainer bought.This checklist is general guidance, not a diagnosis of your business. Findings are illustrative and do not guarantee any level of revenue, traffic, rankings, or conversion.
Scoring It
0 to 2 red flags. You are in better shape than most. Your growth conversation is probably about traffic and order value rather than fixing leaks.
3 to 5 red flags. Typical, and encouraging. There is real money sitting in the ones you found, and most are fixable without hiring anybody.
6 or more. Do not panic and do not try to fix all of them. Take the two with the largest number attached and do those first. Everything else can wait a quarter.
One honest caveat: a checklist finds symptoms, not causes. Two stores can fail the same four checks for entirely different reasons, and the fix that works for one wastes a month for the other. If you run this and cannot tell which finding matters most, that is exactly the question a free consultation answers.
Want the printable version to work through offline?
Leave an email and I will send the checklist as a one-page PDF you can print and mark up. One email, no sequence, and the full text stays free on this page either way.
Used only to send this one thing. Never sold, never added to a list, and there is no follow-up sequence. Privacy.
Ran the List? Bring Me What You Found.
Forty-five minutes, free, no obligation. Tell me your red flags and I will tell you which one I would fix first and roughly what it is worth. Plenty of owners take that and do it themselves.
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