Every week, somebody calls us asking the same question. How much do you charge? And every single time, we say the same thing back. “Please give us one day to audit your digital assets”. Before any digital marketing agency talks about money, they need to look at the business first, in order to ascertain what needs to be done and then decide how much needs to be charged.
Most business owners in Siliguri and across North Bengal have been burned once by an ad agency in Siliguri that promised the moon on day one and delivered a PDF full of graphs on day thirty. This is not how a serious digital marketing agency should operate. So before we quote a single rupee, we run through three checks on the actual account, the website, and the numbers. Here is exactly what that looks like.
1. We Audit Your Website
We open Google PageSpeed Insights first and run your site to check the score on both mobile and desktop, because Google grades these separately, and most Indian business sites score fine on desktop and fail badly on mobile. As a digital marketing agency, we look at Core Web Vitals specifically. Largest Contentful Paint should load under 2.5 seconds. Interaction to Next Paint should respond under 200 milliseconds. If either one is in the red, we find an indicator as to why visitors are leaving before the page fully loads.
Loading time is where most sites lose quality traffic. A page that is a few seconds slower on mobile than it needs to be is turning visitors away before they even read the headline, and most business owners never see that number because nobody ever measured it.
Then we check image formats, because this is the part almost no one cares to look for but as a digital marketing agency, we do! We open the developer tools, look at every image on the site, and see if it is saved as JPEG, PNG, or WebP. Most older or template based websites are still running heavy JPEG and PNG files that were never compressed. WebP images are 25% to 34% smaller than a comparable JPEG at the same visual quality, according to Google’s own developer documentation.
On a site with forty product photos, switching formats can shave a big chunk off the load time, and that shows up directly in both rankings and Core Web Vitals scores.
2. We Audit Your Social Media
Once the website audit is complete, we proceed to the social pages. We open the Page Insights dashboard on Instagram and Facebook and pull the numbers: reach, saves, shares, and profile visits, because likes tell you almost nothing about whether the page is actively building an audience that buys. As a digital marketing agency, we trust numbers to every decimal.
We read through the last thirty posts and note the pattern. Is the messaging consistent, or does the tone change from post to post like five different people are running the account? Is there a clear voice a customer working with an ad agency in Siliguri would recognise as genuinely local, or is it generic stock captions copied from a template? We also check the comments and DMs.
A page that gets forty comments a week but never replies within a day is losing warm leads that a competitor’s page would have converted. HubSpot’s research on customer expectations has revealed that 39% of social media users expect a reply within 60 minutes, yet the average business takes about five hours to respond. We track average response time and flag it if it crosses twenty four hours, because that delay is often the reason a follower never became a customer.
3. We Audit Your Previous Ads
If the business has run Google Ads or Meta Ads before, this is where we spend the most time, because past ad accounts hold the most honest data about a business anyone can look at. We open the account and pull cost per click, cost per conversion, total budget spent, and total leads accumulated, then we line them up side by side. A business might have spent eighty thousand rupees over six months and generated twelve leads. That comes out to well over six thousand rupees per lead, and no owner should be spending that without knowing it.
We also check the keyword list, because this is usually where the biggest leak sits. Broad match keywords with no negative keyword list attached routinely pull in clicks from people searching for completely unrelated things, jobs, free templates, or a competitor’s brand name.
WordStream’s own PPC benchmark research, built from over 13,000 live campaigns across industries, consistently points to exactly this pattern, broad match without negative keywords, as one of the most common reasons accounts overspend regardless of what currency or market they run in. This is the kind of leak a proper digital marketing agency should catch within the first hour of opening the account.
Then we look at conversion rate optimisation, meaning what happened after the click landed. Did it go to a proper landing page built for that specific offer, or did it dump the visitor on a generic homepage with five different calls to action fighting for attention? A digital marketing agency that skips this step is quoting you a price based on vagueness, not your actual account history.
After Checking Everything, We Find The Gaps And We Fix Them
Once we have gone through the website, the social pages, and the ad account, we usually know more about a business’ problem than the owner does walking in. Sometimes the answer has nothing to do with a bigger ad budget at all. It might be three unoptimised images sitting on the homepage, a WhatsApp reply time of two days, or a keyword list that was never cleaned since the account was first set up umpteen months ago.
That is uncomfortable to admit as a digital marketing agency, because it means we are sometimes talking a business out of spending more money before we have even discussed our own fee. But it is the only honest way to work, and it is the only way the numbers we eventually promise will hold up once real money is on the line.
If you run a business in Siliguri or anywhere in North Bengal and you are tired of vague promises before anyone has even opened your account, this is the standard to hold any digital marketing agency too. This is exactly what separates a real ad agency in Siliguri from one that is just running your budget through Google’s default settings.
Ask exactly what they check before they hand you a price. If the answer is nothing beyond a sales call, that tells you everything about how the relationship will go once you have paid. A digital marketing agency earns the right to talk money only after it has proven the problem with numbers from your own website, your own social pages, and your own ad account, that it understands where your business is really losing ground. That is not a slower way to work. It is simply the only way that is honest, whether you are hiring an ad agency in Siliguri or a team anywhere else in India.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does a full business audit take?
For most small businesses, going through the website, the social pages, and the ad account properly takes one working day. It can stretch longer if the ad account has years of history to sort through, or shorter if the business is brand new and has almost nothing to audit yet.
Do I have to pay for this audit before you tell me anything?
No. The audit is how we decide how we can genuinely help, and it is how you decide if we or a digital marketing agency are worth hiring. Charging for it upfront would defeat the purpose. Any digital marketing agency that asks for money before showing you a single finding is asking you to trust blindly, which is exactly what this whole process is meant to avoid.
What if my business has never run any ads before?
That is fine, and honestly quite common. In that case we skip the ad account portion and spend more time on the website and social pages instead, since those two usually reveal enough gaps to build a solid starting plan without needing a single rupee spent on ads yet.
What happens if the audit shows I do not need your services right now?
We tell you exactly that. Sometimes a business only needs a faster website or a cleaned up keyword list, and nothing more. We would rather say so upfront than sell a package the business does not need yet.
How is this different from just running my website through a free online checker?
Free tools like PageSpeed Insights give you a score, but they do not tell you which fix matters most for your specific business, or how that score connects to what is happening on your social pages and in your ad account. An audit from an actual digital marketing agency connects all three, because a fast website means very little if nobody replies to the leads it brings in.