How can a fertility clinic audit its own marketing?

Before auditing, gather admin access to every marketing account, the last three months of reports, your intake numbers by service line, and a list of every vendor touching patient data. Block two half-days. Ideally one person from marketing and one from the front desk or patient coordinators do it together.

The front-desk view matters in fertility. Marketing may report a strong month while coordinators see inquiries that never booked, or callers asking about services you do not offer. The audit should reconcile both views.

Access checklist

• Google Business Profile for every site and satellite office.
• Google Ads, Meta and Microsoft ad accounts.
• Analytics, tag manager and any server-side tracking setup.
• Call tracking, CRM, email and texting tools.
• Website hosting, domain registrar and content management system.
• Any Business Associate Agreements you have signed with marketing vendors.

If any login belongs to an agency or a former employee, write it down. That is the first finding of the audit, and often the most urgent.

Numbers to pull before you begin

Pull one recent month of intake data, split by service line where your systems allow. You want inquiries received, consults booked, consults attended and where each inquiry came from. Keep this inside clinic systems covered by a BAA, and use counts, not patient names, in any document shared with an agency. If you cannot split by service line yet, note that as a finding. Clinics that market IVF, egg freezing and donor programs from one blended report usually cannot tell which campaign is working. Write down your current agency's last reported figures beside your own, so the reconciliation later in the audit has a starting point.

Search your main services plus your city on a phone, signed out, from near each site. Note where you appear in map and organic results, and what AI assistants say about your clinic. Then open each ad account and check what you pay for, where ads send people, and what counts as a conversion.

Fertility-specific items people miss

• Donor recruitment. If you recruit egg or sperm donors, check those campaigns run separately from patient campaigns, with their own pages, budgets and reporting.
• Audience targeting. Google and Meta restrict health-based targeting. Check that no audience is built from patient lists without legal review.
• Referral sources. Check whether OB-GYN and urology referrals are tracked at all.

Our guide to running Meta ads safely for fertility clinics covers the social side in depth.

Open each consult-request, intake, financing and portal page and list every script that loads. Ad pixels, session recording and chat tools on those pages are the biggest privacy risk. Then compare the agency's reported leads with what your coordinators actually received and booked last month.

OCR issued guidance on online tracking technologies in December 2022 and revised it in March 2024. A federal court vacated part of it in June 2024 for certain unauthenticated public pages, but tracking on authenticated pages such as portals is still covered. Confirm your setup with counsel.

How to run the tracking check

1. Open each sensitive page in a private browser window with developer tools on, and note every third-party request that fires.
2. Compare that list with your tag manager, and remove anything nobody can explain.
3. Confirm how conversions reach Google and Meta, and that no form fields or appointment details are passed with them.
4. Check chat widgets and scheduling tools, which often add their own scripts.
5. Record the setup in one document, so the next agency or audit starts from facts.

Then reconcile reporting. Pick one recent month and match agency-reported leads against coordinator records, line by line if needed. A large gap usually means duplicate counting, spam forms or calls tracked as leads when they were existing patients.

See which KPIs a fertility clinic should track for definitions.