The Ecommerce Audit Nobody Runs Until It Is Too Late
Most ecommerce audits check the website and stop. For a store spending real money on ads, the expensive problems sit between the ad platforms and the till.
Where the next marketing dollar goes: what a customer can cost you, which channel earns the budget, and whether to hire in-house, an agency or a consultant. Strategy on this blog means the decisions taken before any channel work starts, because they are the ones that are expensive to get wrong and cheap to think about properly. The acquisition cost post works from your own contribution margin rather than an industry benchmark, and explains why blended and paid figures answer different questions. The channel comparison starts from which demand already exists in your category rather than from funnel-stage theory, because a channel that harvests nothing when there is nothing to harvest is not underperforming, it is empty. And the hiring comparison gives each of the three options the cases where it genuinely wins, including the ones where hiring an independent consultant is the wrong answer. These posts are written for the owner making the call, not for a marketing department, and they say plainly when the honest answer is to do nothing yet.
Most ecommerce audits check the website and stop. For a store spending real money on ads, the expensive problems sit between the ad platforms and the till.
Mailchimp, Braze and Maileon all publish an email-audit checklist, and all three skip the same things: how to attribute the revenue, how to check each flow instead of the whole list at once, and what actually changed. Here is the version that starts there.
Two of the three things people call an “Amazon PPC audit” are free, and I do not sell a standalone fourth one. Here is what each form actually checks, what all three leave out, and why the listing gets looked at before a single bid does.
Every page selling a Klaviyo audit checks the same generic list, and most of them name a deliverability fix that Klaviyo already handles automatically while skipping the one you actually have to do yourself. Here is what a Klaviyo audit should find, and what a real one costs.
Every page that ranks for “shopify ppc agency” is a single agency talking about itself. Here is the side-by-side that SERP is missing, limited to agencies that can show their Shopify work in writing.
Search for an Amazon PPC agency and the top result is three different Reddit threads asking which ones actually deliver. Here is the comparison that thread is missing.
Search for a Google Shopping agency and you get agencies telling you they are the best, one press release naming a winner, and nobody actually comparing the real options. Here is the comparison I would want if I were hiring.
Every list of the best Klaviyo agencies I could find was written by one of the agencies on it. Here is the comparison I would want if I were hiring, with the minimums, team sizes and published criticism none of them show you.
The page that ranks first for this search is written by an agency that puts itself first with unsourced numbers. Here is the comparison I would want if I were hiring.
Most roundups of SEO audit tools compare features nobody pays for. This one compares what you get without paying, whether you have to create an account, and which platform each tool was actually built around.