The 20-Point Audit.
The exact 20 checks we run before we touch any store. It's free — steal it. Twenty checks, four categories, all in plain English — if a check uses a marketing word, it tells you what it means. Tick the boxes as you go; the register at the bottom keeps score.
How to read your score: 17+ and you're in good shape · 12–16 and one category is holding you back · under 12 and there's real money on the floor. Scoring low isn't a verdict on you — you're running a store, not a marketing department. It's a ranked to-do list.
■ The store · 5 checks0/5
01 · Your best pages load fast on a phone. Your homepage and your best-selling product page both load in under 3 seconds on a phone, on cell data — not on your office wifi. Most of your sales happen on phones, and a slow page rarely gets a second chance.
02 · What they see before scrolling. Open a product page on your phone. Without scrolling once, can a stranger tell what it is, why it’s good, and what it costs?
03 · Checkout surprises. Do a test order. Count the steps, and note where shipping cost first appears. Late surprises are where carts die.
04 · Can people find your second-best product? Search your own site for it the way a customer would say it out loud, not the way it’s named in your catalog. If your search box and menus can’t turn it up, neither can they.
05 · Trust at the button. Reviews, returns, and shipping promise visible near Add to Cart — not buried in a footer.
■ The ads · 5 checks0/5
06 · Your ad accounts can see your sales. Buy something from your own store, then check whether that purchase shows up in your ad platforms (Meta calls this Events Manager; Google calls them conversions). If they can’t see your sales, every decision after that is a guess.
07 · One ad carrying everything. Look at last month’s ad spend. If more than half of it went to a single ad, you’re one tired ad away from a bad month — every ad stops working eventually.
08 · When did you last make a new ad? Find the newest ad currently running. If nothing new has gone live in 30 days, you’re leaning on ads your customers have already seen too many times.
09 · The click keeps its promise. Open your top ad, then the page it sends people to. Same offer, same product, same words? A mismatch is paid-for disappointment.
10 · Paying for customers you already had. In Google Ads, separate the sales that came from people searching your brand name from everything else. People already looking for you aren’t new customers — that’s a toll on traffic you’d have got free.
■ The email · 5 checks0/5
11 · The welcome email arrives fast. Sign up to your own list with an address you’ve never used. A welcome email should land within minutes — with a reason to buy, not just a hello. (Klaviyo calls these automatic sequences “flows.”)
12 · Cart recovery has follow-through. Put something in your cart and walk away. One email isn’t a sequence — three over two days is.
13 · Life after the receipt. The emails after someone buys should earn the second order — how to use it, what goes with it, a reason to come back. A tracking number on its own is a wasted email.
14 · The pop-up earns the email address. Does it offer something worth an email address, or does it just get in the way? Check the share of visitors who actually sign up — that’s its conversion rate. Much under 3% and it’s furniture.
15 · Inbox, not the promotions tab. Send your next email to your own Gmail. Where did it land? If it’s the promotions tab every time — or worse, spam — far fewer people are seeing you than your open rate suggests. (Google Postmaster Tools shows your spam complaints for free.)
■ The numbers · 5 checks0/5
16 · Your analytics match your bank. Compare one month of revenue in Google Analytics (GA4) against the same month in Shopify. More than about 5% apart and something’s being counted twice or missed entirely.
17 · One dashboard, actually read. If nobody opened it last week, you don’t have reporting — you have decoration.
18 · Your links are labeled the same way every time. Look at how last month’s campaign links are named — those ?utm_ tags on the end of a URL. If everyone names them differently, your reports can’t tell you which ad actually made the sale.
19 · Money pages, ranked. Can you name your top five pages by revenue — not traffic? Traffic flatters; revenue decides.
20 · Every part of the business has one number. Store, ads, email — each judged by a single number over a set stretch of time. If nothing’s on the line, nothing gets better.