What Should a Proper Digital Growth Audit Include?

A lot of digital audits are really channel audits wearing a bigger title.

An SEO audit tells you about SEO. A PPC audit tells you about paid search. A CRO audit tells you about the site.

All useful. None of them necessarily tell you why the business is not growing the way it should.

A proper digital growth audit should start with the commercial problem, then work across the system.

1. The commercial objective

What is the business actually trying to improve?

Revenue? Contribution? New customers? Enquiries? Supporter acquisition? Retention? Efficiency?

If that is not clear, every recommendation risks optimising a proxy.

2. Demand and acquisition

Where does demand come from? How dependent is the business on a small number of channels? What is happening to acquisition cost, new-customer volume and brand versus non-brand demand?

3. Customer journey and conversion

What happens after people arrive? Where do they struggle? Which devices, pages, categories or stages underperform?

4. CRM and retention

How well does the business turn first-time buyers or contacts into a longer relationship? Are lifecycle programmes mature? Is reported CRM revenue genuinely useful?

5. Commercial trading

What is happening with product mix, pricing, promotion, stock, average order value and margin?

6. Analytics and attribution

Can the business trust its numbers? Do platforms disagree in understandable ways? Are channel reports being confused with incremental value?

7. Technology and operations

Does the stack help teams move quickly or slow them down? Are manual processes, broken integrations or poor data creating hidden cost?

8. People, partners and governance

Who owns the decisions? Are agencies aligned? Do teams know what success means? Are priorities clear?

What should the output look like?

Not 120 observations sorted by department.

I want:

• the biggest constraints
• the evidence behind them
• immediate fixes
• medium-term opportunities
• larger strategic decisions
• clear priorities
• owners and measures

A useful audit should make the next decision easier.

If the final document leaves the leadership team with more things to worry about and no clearer sense of what to do first, it has probably missed the point.

This is exactly what a Digital Growth Diagnostic is built to do — tell me what's happening and I'll help you work out where to start.