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Where the Marketing Budget Leaks — Free Checklist · ElevexMedia
US businesses · owners & CEOs · $2M–$50M revenue
Free checklist · no call required

Reach is up. Revenue isn't. Here is where the budget goes instead.

A 20-point checklist you run yourself, on your own dashboards, in about an evening. It doesn't tell you that marketing wastes money — you already suspect that. It shows you the specific places a budget leaks, what each number should look like, and which leak is yours.

Written by the person who signs off the budgets No call, no pitch Runs on the reports you already have
Send me the checklist See what's inside ↓

12 pages. No email sequence hiding inside it.

What's inside

A budget leaks in a fixed order — and the first leak hides the rest

Four stages, each owned by a different part of the system. Most budgets lose money at the first one, which is why "we changed agencies" usually changes nothing. Every check runs on reports you already have — no new tools, no audit, no meeting.

YOU SPEND IT IT BECOMES REVENUE A Measurement before spend · 5 checks B Channels weekly · 5 checks C The funnel per stage · 5 checks D Economics monthly · 5 checks
Stages are gates, not scores — a broken measurement layer makes every number below it unreadable
STAGE A

Can you even see it?

5 checks
  1. One agreed definition of a lead — written down, and the same one in sales and in marketing. Two definitions means every report after this is arguing with itself.
  2. Cost per lead by channel, not averaged — an average hides the channel that is three times the cost of the rest.
  3. Branded and non-branded traffic separated — people searching your name are not the channel that found them.
  4. Calls and forms land in the same system — if the phone lives outside the CRM, its channel gets credited to nobody.
  5. Every campaign is tagged the same way — one naming convention, applied by whoever launches. Untagged spend is invisible spend.
STAGE B

Is the channel earning its place?

5 checks
  1. Every active channel has a reason it is still on — a stated job, not history. "It has always run" is not a reason.
  2. Spend is concentrated, not sprinkled — a channel too small to learn from is too small to keep paying for.
  3. Creative is refreshed before performance falls — rising cost per lead on flat targeting is fatigue, not a market shift.
  4. Organic and paid are measured apart — paid ads on terms you already rank for buy traffic you had.
  5. Someone owns each channel by name — a channel owned by "the agency" is a channel nobody reads the numbers for.
STAGE C

Does the funnel hold what it catches?

5 checks
  1. Conversion measured stage to stage, not end to end — one number for the whole funnel tells you nothing about where it breaks.
  2. Speed to first response is measured in minutes — the drop between a lead arriving and a human answering is usually the largest single leak on the page.
  3. Leads that go nowhere are counted too — disqualified, unreachable and duplicate leads are a cost, and they belong in cost per sale.
  4. The landing page matches the promise of the ad — a mismatch is paid for twice: once in clicks, once in trust.
  5. Nothing is lost between the site and the CRM — test it yourself, end to end, this week. Broken forms are found by owners, not by dashboards.
STAGE D

Does the math survive a full cycle?

5 checks
  1. Cost per sale, not cost per lead, is the headline number — cheap leads that never close are the most expensive kind.
  2. LTV is calculated from your own data — from repeat behaviour you can show, not from a benchmark someone quoted.
  3. Payback period is stated in months — a ratio without a timeframe is a story, not a plan.
  4. Discounts and returns are subtracted before ROI — revenue that came back through the door was never revenue.
  5. The report the owner reads is the report the team uses — two versions of the truth means the good news travels up and the leak stays down.
And what the checklist won't do
It won't tell you which channel to add next — that needs someone who reads your funnel and knows your market. It tells you whether the money you already spend can be accounted for. The first question is what the free Express Audit is for, and it's the next section.

Four stages · 20 checks · about an evening with your own dashboards.

The same month, read twice
One business, one real month of spend. Nothing was added between these two readings — the second only separated what the first had averaged together.
As reported $40,000 spent · 320 leads · $125 per lead Cost per lead is down from last quarter. All four channels are "performing". The recommendation is to increase budget, because the number moved the right way. Where it hides: one blended average across four channels, counting every form fill as a lead, before disqualification and before anything closed.
Same month, separated Two channels at $61 per sale · one at $890 · one unattributed Branded search was buying traffic that already arrived. A quarter of leads were duplicates or unreachable. The channel that actually closed was the smallest line in the budget. What changed: the average was split by channel, calls were matched to the CRM, and unqualified leads were counted as cost rather than as results.

Illustrative example, not a client. It exists to show the shape of the reading — your numbers will be your own.

Checklist vs Express Audit

The checklist finds. The Express Audit decides.

They answer different questions, and one is not a trial version of the other.

The checklist · free, instant

A document. You run it yourself, on your own dashboards, at your own pace.

What it is
20 checks in the order a marketing system fails, with the standard behind each one.
Who does the work
You. About an evening with the reports you already have open.
What you end with
A list of the checks you failed — and which one to fix first.
What it can't do
Tell you what a failed check is worth in your business, in dollars, this quarter.
Nothing to book. It arrives by email and the exchange ends there unless you write back.
The Express Audit · free, in writing

A written read of your situation, by a named person.

What it is
Igor Sharovatov reads your funnel and your numbers and writes back what he sees.
Who does the work
He does. You send access to the dashboards, or just describe the situation.
What you end with
Three leak points, three growth areas, and the first step — in writing.
What it costs
Nothing, and there is no call to schedule. There is a limit per month, because a real person writes each one.
Start with the checklist if you'd rather look first. Both routes end in the same inbox.

Most people take the checklist, run it, and never write back. That's a fair outcome — the method was the part worth giving away.

Fair questions

Before you give us your email

"Is this just a lead magnet with your sales pitch inside?"

It's a lead magnet — that's why it's free and why we ask for an email. What's inside is the checklist and nothing else: no case studies, no pricing page, no sequence that starts on day two. If it turns out to be useful and you never reply, the exchange was still fair.

"We already have an agency. Won't this just make trouble?"

A good agency passes most of these checks and will be glad you asked, because the measurement layer is usually the client's side of the work. The checks that fail are almost always things nobody owned — a lead definition, a tagging convention, a phone line outside the CRM.

"Twenty checks sounds like a lot for an evening."

Most are answered by looking, not by calculating. Half of them are a yes or no about whether something exists at all. The ones that need a number need one number, and you already have the report open.

"What happens to my email address?"

It goes into no list, no platform and no automation. A person sends the checklist and, at most, one useful email a week, written by hand. One line back and it stops. It is never sold, rented or shared.

Honest fit

This is written for one kind of reader

It's free either way. But it's built for a specific situation, and it's fair to say which.

Probably not for you if
  • You're pre-revenue and haven't spent on marketing yet — there's nothing to read the checks against
  • You want someone to click buttons in the ad account daily; that's a different service and a different person
  • You're looking for guaranteed ROI in thirty days without baseline data — nobody can promise that, and we won't
  • You already run attribution you trust, and the numbers survive a full sales cycle. You'll pass this in ten minutes
Written for you if
  • You spend real money on marketing and can't say which part of it works
  • Reach and traffic are up, and revenue is flat — and nobody can explain the gap
  • Cost per lead keeps rising and nobody can tell you why
  • You'd rather understand the mechanism than hand it to an agency and hope
  • You've been told the campaigns are "performing" and the bank account disagrees
Who wrote it

Igor Sharovatov

16+ years building marketing that delivers leads and sales, not impressions. The standards in this checklist are the ones applied to budgets before they were signed off — written from the side that has to justify the spend, not the side that sells it.

The premise
Most marketing advice is written by people who never signed off a budgetIt describes what to run. This describes what happens to the money after you approve it — which is where the decisions are actually made.
The standard
Growth is math, not guessworkReal cost per lead, per channel, per sale. Unit economics you can influence. Marketing stops being a black box the moment the numbers survive a full cycle.
The format
The system, not the hands in the ad accountStrategy, funnel, KPIs, analytics and specifications your team or contractors execute. That's also why this checklist is written to be run by you.
Now
The Marketing ArchitectsThe marketing practice at ElevexMedia — alongside operations, PR and technical practices, which is a combination we've found in few other places.
Where the standards come from
Head of marketing at federal chains and manufacturersAnderSon (family-café chain, 50+ locations), RIMI (premium kitchen manufacturer, 50-dealer showroom network), Rapid1, Greenfield, Scrocchiarella — plus an international SaaS company.
Annual budgets signed off: up to $1.5MThese checks exist because someone had to answer for that number every month, in front of an owner who could read a P&L.
10+ published case studies on internet marketingWritten up in full — what was tried, what the numbers did, what didn't work.
Yearly speaker at industry marketing conferencesAnd trains in-house teams — which is where most of these checks were first written down, because teams kept failing the same five.
Google and Yandex certified specialistAcross SaaS, premium manufacturing, B2B services and hospitality — four industries that leak budget in four different places.

This checklist isn't a summary of marketing articles. It's the order a marketing system is actually read when someone has to defend the spend — the same sequence, the same questions, the same standards.

It's published as-is because the method isn't the scarce part. Applying it to your funnel, in your market, in the quarter you're spending — that's the scarce part.

The Marketing Architects is the marketing practice at ElevexMedia. Strategy, funnels, omnichannel analytics, KPIs and unit economics — for US owners and CEOs.

What the industry numbers say, and what they don't. Published research puts around 26% of ad budgets on ineffective channels, finds fewer than one marketer in four confident they track the right KPIs, and reports 15–20% higher marketing ROI where attribution actually works. Sources: Rakuten Marketing, HubSpot State of Marketing, McKinsey marketing-analytics benchmarks.

Those are industry averages, not a forecast for your business. The checklist exists precisely because an average tells you nothing about which of the twenty checks is the one costing you money. No result is promised here, and none of the checks is a guarantee.

We work with US-based businesses. We never sell or share personal information (Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information). See the Privacy Policy for how we handle your address.

Get the checklist

Send me the 20 checks

Free, no call, and a real person on the other end of the reply.

1
20 checks across 4 stagesIn the order a marketing system fails, not in the order they're easy to explain.
2
What "normal" looks likeFor each check — the standard behind it, so a number you find means something.
3
The first move when you fail oneThe first corrective step for each finding. Several cost nothing but an afternoon.
Our rule about your inbox
  • No mailing platform, no automation, no sequence running in the background
  • Your address goes to no one — never sold, never rented, never shared
  • A person writes it and a person sends it
  • One line back and it stops — there was never a list running you

Why give the method away? It's sixteen years of practice, and handing it over costs us nothing but the pride of keeping it secret. If it helps and we never hear from you, that's a fair outcome. If one day you'd rather someone did this work with you, you'll already know how we operate.