The audit isn’t a report card. It finds the one or two joints that are leaking most, so the next quarter goes there instead of into whatever the loudest person on the team cares about.

Open your store admin, your ad accounts, your email and SMS platform, and your finance sheet. Score each check 0 to 2: 0 if it failed or nobody can answer it, 1 if partly true, 2 if clean. “We could find out” is a 0. Don’t read the bands until all twelve are scored.

One rule makes this work: the score goes to whoever can answer from the data today, not whoever thinks they know. If the email lead says the welcome series is live and the platform says two of three emails are in draft, the platform wins. I’ve audited accounts where a team was sure its most important automation was running and it had been sitting in draft for months.

“We could find out” scores a zero.

The twelve checks

1. Contribution margin per order · 6 minLook at: Your average order, minus discounts, product cost, pick and pack, shipping, payment fees and returns.
   Good: A dollar figure someone can produce today, and it has been checked against finance this quarter.
   Cost if wrong: Every other number in the business is priced in revenue that isn’t yours.
   Read next: One Order’s P&L
2. New customers and what they cost · 5 minLook at: Last week’s count of first-time buyers, and total marketing spend divided by that count.
   Good: Both numbers are on a weekly report, next to each other.
   Cost if wrong: Revenue can rise while new customers fall, and nobody notices until the returning base runs out.
   Read next: Four Numbers Run the Business
3. Payback in months · 4 minLook at: How long a new customer takes to repay what it cost to acquire, from contribution margin, not revenue.
   Good: A number of months, and someone decided what the ceiling is.
   Cost if wrong: You spend to a lifetime value you’ll collect over years with cash you need in weeks.
   Read next: Payback Beats Lifetime Value
4. Briefs name the angle and the audience · 4 minLook at: The last five creative briefs, or the last five ads launched if there were no briefs.
   Good: Each names the offer, the angle, who it’s for and how aware they already are.
   Cost if wrong: You test formats forever and never learn which message sells.
   Read next: The Brief
5. An incrementality test on the biggest channel · 4 minLook at: Whether your largest paid channel has been measured against a holdout, a geo test or a platform lift study in the last twelve months.
   Good: Yes, and the budget changed because of what it found.
   Cost if wrong: You may be paying full price for customers who would have bought anyway.
   Read next: What the Platform Says You Caused
6. The checkout shows the total early · 5 minLook at: Buy something on your own site on your phone. Note when you first see shipping and the total, and whether you had to make an account.
   Good: Delivery cost and date on the product page or cart, guest checkout, express wallets.
   Cost if wrong: Extra costs, like shipping, tax and fees, are the most common reason shoppers give for leaving a checkout.
   Read next: The Page and the Checkout
7. The engaged list is growing · 5 minLook at: Subscribers who opened, clicked or bought in the last 90 days, today versus 90 days ago.
   Good: Up, and sign-up form conversion is tracked by form.
   Cost if wrong: Every campaign reaches fewer people than the last, and the team blames the creative.
   Read next: The List Is the Asset
8. The sending domain is authenticated and clean · 5 minLook at: SPF, DKIM and DMARC on your sending domain, and your spam complaint rate in Google Postmaster Tools.
   Good: All three records pass, DMARC exists, and complaints sit under 0.1%.
   Cost if wrong: Mail lands in spam, opens look fine because of privacy features, and revenue per send slides for months.
   Read next: Get to the Inbox
9. The core flows are live · 6 minLook at: Welcome, browse abandonment, cart and checkout abandonment, post-purchase, winback and sunset. Live, not draft.
   Good: All six live, each checked this quarter, with its revenue per recipient known.
   Cost if wrong: The highest-intent moments in the customer’s life get no message at all.
   Read next: The Six Flows
10. Campaigns are planned, not reached for · 4 minLook at: The next four weeks of email and SMS campaigns.
    Good: At least one send a week, planned a month out, with a written mix of promotional and non-promotional sends.
    Cost if wrong: Sends cluster around sales, go quiet between them, and train the list to wait for the next code.
    Read next: Campaigns and the Calendar
11. A cohort report exists · 4 minLook at: A table of customers grouped by first-order month, showing what each group spent in the months after.
    Good: It exists, it’s current, and someone read it this month.
    Cost if wrong: Calendar-month reports mix new and old customers and hide whether anything you changed worked.
    Read next: Cohorts, Not Calendars
12. Tests are written down · 3 minLook at: The last five tests, across ads, site, email and SMS.
    Good: Each has a written hypothesis, a success metric chosen before launch, a result and what changed because of it.
    Cost if wrong: The team runs tests, remembers winners, and repeats losers a year later.
    Read next: Tests That Teach

Score as you go; your band appears when all twelve are in.

Read your score

Fix zeros before ones, and fix them in check order. The first three checks price the business. Until they’re answered, every decision in parts two through four is a guess about whether you can afford it.

One pattern shows up often enough to name. A brand scores well on the paid checks, badly on the owned-channel checks, and has no cohort report. That brand is renting every customer twice: once to acquire them and again, through retargeting and discount codes, to get them back. The fix starts in part four.

Do this

• Score all twelve. Write the total, your two lowest checks and the name of whoever will own each fix on one page. Send it to the person who signs the marketing budget.