Marketing Effectiveness Audit for DTC Brands
We don't do a “scale your Meta ads” call.
This is a real marketing effectiveness audit.
5 business days. Live call + written report.
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You can't optimize your way out of being ignored
You've hit the same wall that all ecommerce brands hit:
Your big launch worked. Now Meta brings in sales. Google captures intent. Klaviyo prints money from people who were already close to buying. Retargeting gets you 6+ ROAS. Tableu and Shopify say everything is fine.
But you sit and watch the line go down. And down. And then it goes below all the goals, KPIs, and milestones you had.
CAC gets inside a SpaceX rocket and lifts off for Mars. Your ROAS gets as nervous as people reporting it. "Creative fatigue" - that's the culprit for everything! Tell the team to ship more hooks, more formats, more offers, more landing pages, more UGC from people who clearly learned acting from hostage videos. More more more, and yet...
Your business still feels stuck.
That is usually not an efficiency problem. It is an effectiveness problem.
Your marketing might be very good at extracting existing demand and very bad at creating future demand. Your distinctive assets might be weak. Your brand might not come to mind in buying situations. Your media plan might be overfeeding warm audiences. Your creative might be measurable but not memorable.
You’re already paying for being forgettable. We can find why, how much, and how to fix it.
For DTC brands that have outgrownhacks:
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This audit is for companies already investing seriously in marketing. If you're looking for a €500/month ads operator, this is the wrong page. We're interested in effectiveness, creativity and memorability — not penny-pinching and number-crunching.
There are two ways to waste a marketing budget
The first one is loud.
Performance marketing taught ecommerce to stare at platform dashboards until reporting starts to feel like reality. Meta claims a sale. Google claims the same sale. Klaviyo claims the people who were already reaching for their card. Retargeting looks like genius because it keeps selling to people who already know you exist.
Spend climbs, the dashboard stays green, and nobody asks the only question that matters: are more people choosing you without being chased around the internet with a 10% code?
That question is about effectiveness.
The dashboard only measures efficiency.Efficiency asks how cheaply you got the click. Effectiveness asks whether the marketing made the brand easier to notice, remember, choose and buy from. You need both. But when the brand is weak, all your efficiency work is penny-pinching on a sinking ship.
The second one is quieter,
It usually shows up dressed as the cure.
An agency sells you a purpose. A brand book. A moody film. A manifesto about your "why" that no one ties to a number you could defend in a board meeting. That isn't brand building. It's brand cosplay.
Unaccountable creativity costs as much as unaccountable media — it just takes longer to notice the money's gone. We don't take a side in the brand-versus-performance fight, because it's a fake fight.
Performance tells you what's happening this month. Brand decides how much next month costs. The audit measures both, in the same place, and tells you which one is actually holding you back.
What we actually audit
Category and market standing
Output:
Category read
Main competitors
Market position
Category conventions
Differentiation gaps
Visibility opportunities
Share of voice and attention
Output:
Paid visibility read
Competitor media presence
Search demand signals
Social visibility
Retargeting vs acquisition balance
Underused channels
Mental availability & Distinctive brand assets utilization
Output:
Category entry point review
Buying triggers
Message-market fit
Brand recall risks
Demand creation gaps
Media wastage & performance drains
Output:
Channel mix review
Prospecting vs retargeting balance
Brand vs non-brand search split
Warm audience dependency
Duplicated attribution
Budget leakage points
Tracking and commercial truth
Output:
GA4 review
Platform conversion setup
CRM / HubSpot / Shopify / Klaviyo connections
Attribution inflation risks
Blended performance view
Decision-ready metric recommendations
What you get
A structured report covering market standing, competitors, share of voice, creative memorability, distinctive assets, media wastage, tracking issues and priority recommendations.
We walk you through the findings, explain what matters, what is noise and what should be fixed first.
Not a 90-page deck. Not a “test more creatives” shrug. You get a ranked list of what to fix first, what to stop doing and where the biggest opportunity sits.
You give us access --
We do the hard part
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Give us the real mess. That is usually where the answer is.
We've done this where "just run ads" was never going to be enough
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Why based.marketing?
Kris Kalman
Digital Marketing Manager
Caroline Kopsey
fCMO
Philip Ekman
Head of Marketing
Polianna Slatery
Senior Digital Marketing Specialist
What happens after the audit?
The audit is free for qualified companies.If there is a serious fit, the next step is usually one of two things:
Strategy retainer
Creative + media package
Our ongoing agency work starts from €2,000/month or 10% of media spend, whichever is higher. Long-term clients get customized, flexible offers.
If that feels insane, we are not the right agency.
If it feels reasonable because your current marketing waste is probably higher than that, the audit is a good place to start.
Got questions?
We got answers
Yes, for qualified ecommerce companies spending at least €10k/month on marketing. We use it to identify companies where our work can actually make a commercial difference. We are not trying to sell audits. We are trying to find serious brands with serious problems.
No.
This is an audit, not a full strategy project.
You will get findings, diagnosis and prioritized recommendations. You will not get a complete media plan, brand strategy, creative platform or campaign architecture for free.
That would be stupid.
Because screenshots lie.
We need to see the structure, spend allocation, attribution setup, creative patterns, conversion data and reporting logic. Read-only access is enough.
Good. Then the audit will probably be useful.Messy tracking is one of the main reasons ecommerce brands make bad decisions with great confidence.
No.
Paid ads are only one part of the system. We also look at brand assets, mental availability, physical availability, landing pages, category position, creative memorability, tracking and reporting.
No.
If you are still trying to make your first €10k/month, this is too early.
This audit is for brands already investing seriously in growth and starting to feel the limits of performance-only marketing.
No.
We're not fans of a hostage-style situations.
You can take the audit and execute the recommendations yourself. But if the problem is serious and we are the right fit, we will tell you what working together would look like.
Most agency audits look for things they can sell immediately.
Bad campaign structure. Weak hooks. Wrong bid strategy. More budget. New landing page. Another “growth roadmap.”
We look at whether your marketing is actually making the brand easier to notice, remember, choose and buy from.
Sounds preeetty different from an average ad agency.
Find out if your marketing really works
Don't trust Mark Zuckerberg to tell you it is working. Don't rely on Google taking credit. Don't even trust the dashboard looking squeaky-clean.
Consciously and honestly investigate whether your marketing is making your DTC operation more memorable, more available and more commercially effective.
If you are spending €10k+/month and returns are stagnating, get the audit.