RTO Marketing Audit: A Free 60-Minute Self-Assessment Tool

You do not need a tool to find out where your enrolment engine is broken. You need sixty minutes, two browser tabs and the checklist below. It is the same review I run on a first call, written out.

What the Audit Covers, and What It Does Not

This audit checks whether your enrolment engine is actually working end to end. Can a prospective student find you? Does your site convert them into an enquiry? Does your team respond and follow up correctly? Can you produce the numbers that prove any of it? It does not check whether your training and assessment strategies or your assessment tools meet the Standards for Registered Training Organisations 2025. That is a different, more technical review. Our RTO marketing checklist goes deeper on the compliance side of your marketing materials specifically. It covers the same Information and Transparency Practice Guide requirements ASQA checks during a performance assessment.

Twenty questions, four parts, fifteen minutes each. Every question can be answered yes or no by whoever runs the RTO, no marketing or technical background required.

Part 1: Search (15 Minutes)

1. Does your RTO appear on page one of Google for your main qualification code plus your capital city?
2. Does it also appear on page one for that same qualification code plus your primary service suburb?
3. Is your Google Business Profile claimed, with recent reviews visible?
4. Does your website outrank at least one competitor’s paid ad for your main course search term?
5. If you run Google Ads, is at least one ad currently live and eligible, not paused, disapproved, or limited by budget?

These five checks catch the most common way an otherwise good RTO becomes invisible: not a bad website, but a search presence nobody has looked at recently. A disapproved ad or an unclaimed Business Profile can sit broken for months without anyone noticing, because nothing about the RTO’s day-to-day operations depends on checking it.

Part 2: Site (15 Minutes)

6. Does your top course page show the price above the fold, without scrolling?
7. Does it show the next intake date above the fold too?
8. Is your RTO code visible on the page itself, not only in the footer?
9. Does the enquiry form ask for fewer than six fields?
10. Does the page load in under three seconds on a mobile phone?

Most course pages fail one or two of these checks, usually the price and the load speed. Both were true when the page launched, and neither has been checked since. A page that asks a mobile visitor to wait, then hides the price below several scrolls, loses students before the enquiry form is ever seen.

Part 3: Enquiry Handling (15 Minutes)

11. Submit a real test enquiry right now. Did you receive an automated acknowledgement within five minutes?
12. Did a real person follow up within 24 hours?
13. When they called, did they already know which course you had enquired about?
14. Were you asked about your USI or course eligibility before anyone asked you for payment?
15. Was pre-enrolment information, fees, and obligations provided before you were asked to commit to anything?

This part of the audit is the one most RTOs have never actually tested on themselves. It requires submitting a real enquiry and waiting to see what happens, rather than assuming the process works because someone once set it up correctly.

Part 4: Economics (15 Minutes)

16. Can you state your total marketing spend for last month without opening five separate tabs or reports?
17. Can you state how many students actually enrolled from that spend?
18. Can you calculate a cost per enrolment right now, from memory or a single spreadsheet?
19. Do you know your enquiry-to-enrolment rate for last month? See RTO marketing KPIs if you need the exact formula.
20. Has anyone at your RTO actually looked at these numbers in the last seven days?

These last five checks are usually where the score drops hardest. Not because the numbers are bad, but because nobody has assembled them into one place recently enough to answer confidently. An RTO can be performing well on cost per enrolment and still fail every question in this part. The reason is usually that the information lives in three different systems nobody has cross-referenced this month.

Scoring: What a 12 Out of 20 Means, and What to Fix First

Sixteen or above means your engine is largely working. Focus on refining specific handoffs rather than rebuilding anything.

Ten to fifteen is where most RTOs running this audit for the first time land. It means real handoffs are broken, but they are fixable within a month once you know where to look. A 12 specifically tends to show a pattern: strong search and site scores, weaker enquiry handling and economics scores. That pattern points to one thing. The marketing is working. Nobody is watching what happens after the enquiry lands.

Below ten means the gaps sit across multiple parts at once, and trying to fix all four simultaneously usually stalls. Start with whichever part scored lowest, since that is where a small fix will move your overall score the most.

Whatever your score, the fix is rarely more marketing spend. It is almost always a specific handoff between two of the four parts above. Our enrolment engine breakdown covers exactly where those handoffs tend to fail and why.

Run this audit again in 30 days after fixing whatever scored lowest. A rising score confirms the fix worked. A flat score after a genuine fix usually means the real problem was misdiagnosed. It is worth checking the part just before or after the one you targeted. A fix in enquiry handling, for instance, can be undone entirely by a site problem still sitting upstream of it.

When It Is the Agency (And When It Is Not)

Responsibility for marketing failure sits on both sides more often than either party wants to admit. The audit above reveals which side.

Signs it is likely the agency:

• Reports show impressive numbers but you cannot tie them to actual enrolments
• Strategy is generic small-business marketing without RTO-specific overlay
• Compliance breaches appear in the marketing they produce
• The agency cannot explain their strategy in VET-specific terms (no reference to qualification codes, ASQA, Practice Guide, Fee-Free TAFE, or the training package framework)
• Communication becomes defensive when you ask specific questions about performance
• Creative refresh cadence is slow or non-existent
• Recommendations are always “increase budget” without diagnostic reasoning

Signs it is likely not primarily the agency:

• Your follow-up team calls new leads 24 hours after submission
• Your offer is uncompetitive against Fee-Free TAFE with no distinct positioning
• Your tracking has never been properly set up
• Marketing has been started and stopped multiple times over the last 2 years
• Your compliance surface has known Practice Guide breaches
• Your qualification is genuinely low-demand or oversupplied in your local market
• You expect meaningful enrolment growth within 3 months of first campaign launch

Investigate before you switch. The cost of switching agencies mid-timeline is real: the new agency needs 2-3 months to relearn your account, and campaigns that were about to work often get restarted. If the audit reveals RTO-side issues, fix those first before changing marketing partner.

What You Should Actually Expect to Spend

Realistic marketing spend as a percentage of revenue for Australian RTOs, based on patterns observed across the market.

• Small RTO ($100k-$500k annual revenue): 4-8% of revenue on marketing. Expected channels: Google Ads plus SEO plus basic email plus lightweight social. Realistic cost per enrolment $150-400 depending on qualification family. Expected timeline to profitability: 6-9 months from proper setup.
• Mid-sized RTO ($500k-$3M annual revenue): 6-10% of revenue. Multi-channel with either dedicated in-house or specialist agency management. Cost per enrolment $200-500 depending on qualification. Timeline to compound results: 9-12 months.
• Larger RTO ($3M+ annual revenue): 8-12% of revenue. Full stack across paid search, paid social, SEO, content marketing, and email nurture. Cost per enrolment $250-600 depending on qualification. Timeline: 12-18 months to full compound.

If you are spending under 4% of revenue and expecting significant enrolment growth, the expectation is unrealistic regardless of channel choice. If you are spending over 15% of revenue without cost per enrolment metrics that justify it, over-investment is likely.

The One-Page Version

This audit is the same pre-call ritual we run before taking on a new RTO client, condensed into a version you can run yourself, print, and repeat monthly. It is ungated. No email required to use it. If you would rather have someone else run this against your accounts, our the RTO marketing audit picks up from here. It cross-references this checklist against what your own numbers are already showing.

If this was useful, the newsletter covers one number, one handoff, or one real finding like this every week, drawn from the RTOs we work with directly.