What Marketing Directors at PE-Backed Companies Should Audit First

The moment you step into a marketing director role at a PE-backed company, the clock starts.

You didn’t build this. But you own it now.

The instinct is to start building.

New campaigns, new strategy, new positioning.

But before you touch any of that, there’s a faster path to proving value and protecting the business from the risks that are already running quietly in the background.

Here’s where to start.

You cannot make good decisions with bad data. And at most PE-backed companies, the data is not up to par.

It’s not because no one cared. It’s because the business moved fast, tools got layered on top of each other, and no one had time to go back and make sure everything was firing correctly.

It could look like:

Before you start scaling anything, you need to know what you’re actually measuring.

Run through these four checkpoints:

Conversion tracking: Are your Google Ads conversion tags firing on actual conversions, not page visits? Is the thank-you page or form confirmation the trigger, not the form itself?

GA4 configuration: Are your goals and key events set up correctly? Are you filtering out internal traffic?

UTM hygiene: Do all paid campaigns, emails, and social posts use a consistent UTM structure? If not, your source/medium data is meaningless.

CRM attribution: Does your CRM capture lead source at the point of entry? If not, you have no way to connect marketing spend to closed revenue.

Fix the tracking first.

Everything else you audit will tell you more once the data is clean.

If the company has been running Google Ads or paid social, there may be wasteful spending.

Paid media requires ongoing management and most growing companies don’t have someone who’s actively in the accounts every week.

What to look for:

Google Ads: Are you running broad match keywords without strong negative keyword lists? Are you paying for traffic from irrelevant searches? Are your ads sending users to a generic homepage instead of a landing page built for the specific offer?

Meta/LinkedIn: Are your audiences overlapping? Are you running the same creative to the same people for six months? Are your campaigns optimized for the right objective, or just clicks?

A quick account audit usually surfaces thousands of dollars in monthly waste.

This is also one of the fastest ways to demonstrate value in your first 90 days as the new marketing lead.

You don’t need to rebuild everything. You need to stop the bleeding, tighten the targeting, and show that the existing budget can perform better.