Service · Online marketing

Marketing audit

Imagine a lakeside hotel on the Wörthersee. It has its own booking engine, spends €2,000 a month on Google Ads and receives a monthly agency report in which conversions only ever climb. Front desk staff, however, sense that most guests still arrive via booking portals, and the commission invoices from those portals keep getting bigger. Who has it right? Dig a little and three things surface: Google Ads records every press of “check availability” as a win, the booking engine sits on another domain and severs the tracking trail, and since the new cookie notice appeared GA4 only sees a fraction of visitors. No figure is false, yet none tells the owner what an additional direct booking actually costs. Our audit lines up data from ad platforms, website and booking or merchandise system, locates the breaks and separates spend that earns money from spend that just draws attractive graphs.

View-only rights
on your accounts and tools
Price per sale
worked out for each channel
Consent
notice and signals put to the test
Campaigns
left running untouched

Everything this covers

We look at what is technically recorded, how much of that may legally be recorded, and how much finally turns into revenue. Ad wording, visuals and bids are deliberately left out.

Settle the details with an engineer

Script inventory

Every tag and pixel each page pulls in: Google Tag Manager, Meta, LinkedIn, heatmap tools, chat widgets and remnants of long-finished experiments that still weigh the site down and ship data elsewhere.

Consent notice under the TKG

Austria's Telecommunications Act 2021 makes non-essential cookies subject to consent. We verify that nothing fires before the visitor decides, that saying no takes no more effort than saying yes, and that consent records can be produced as evidence.

Consent Mode in practice

Using a clean browser we decline, accept, then change our mind, while watching every network request. That reveals whether Google and Meta genuinely honour the choice or only appear to.

Tracking across domains

Booking engines, third-party shops and appointment tools frequently live on someone else's domain. We establish whether the path from ad click to completed purchase is recorded throughout or dropped halfway.

Conversions worth money

Only outcomes that pay, or very probably will, become primary goals: a settled booking, a confirmed appointment, a complete enquiry. Taps on the phone number or the directions map are demoted to secondary signals.

Channel cost including commission

Google Ads, Meta and Microsoft Ads placed next to booking portals or marketplaces, with commission, cancellations and returns factored in and one consistent formula applied throughout.

Priority list

Findings ranked by leverage and effort, each with a name attached: your staff, your agency or Apply.

Our working method

An audit normally takes one to two weeks and is carried out entirely through remote access and video meetings.

01

Kick-off

We settle which outcomes matter, what margin they bring and which systems hold the true revenue figures.

02

Tag scan and consent test

An automated crawl of all pages plus manual test visits, declining and accepting, on phones and desktops.

03

Figures versus revenue

Platform conversions are set against bookings, paid orders or won deals recorded in the same month.

04

Results meeting

A remote presentation for you and, if you wish, your agency. We either apply the fixes ourselves or hand them over as instructions.

Ad platforms learn from whatever you tell them counts. Report every “check availability” click as a conversion and the algorithm dutifully finds keen availability checkers, but few guests. Feed back real bookings with their value instead and delivery shifts towards people who actually pay. That correction usually costs less than a bigger budget and achieves more.

Frequently asked questions

With properly designed notices, acceptance swings widely by sector and audience, and figures of that order are nothing rare. A rate above 90 percent is more of a warning sign that declining has been made too awkward. We relate your figure to the notice design and show which improvements remain lawful.

The Austrian Data Protection Authority has previously been critical of data flowing to the United States. The legal landscape has since moved on with new EU-US arrangements, but visitor consent is still required. We examine the technical implementation; the legal judgement for your business sits with your data protection adviser.

We would recommend it. An audit is not a vote of no confidence; it hands the agency cleaner data. We often invite them to the results meeting so conversion and tag fixes can be agreed on the spot.

No. Read permissions in Analytics, Tag Manager, the Google and Meta ad accounts are sufficient, plus Merchant Center, booking engine, shop or CRM where relevant. You hand out those permissions yourself and revoke them at the end.

Time is charged at €110 per hour plus VAT. We estimate the likely scope after the kick-off.

Find out where your ad money ends up

Where do you advertise and roughly how much do you spend each month? We will come back with a proposed audit scope and a start date.

Availability
Monday to Friday, 8:00-17:00 Austrian time (CET/CEST), reply within one working day
Meetings
By video on Microsoft Teams or Google Meet

We only use cookies that are technically required: to run the website and to remember the location you picked. There are no advertising or tracking cookies. Details are in the privacy notice.