What a Keap Audit Should Check: The 10-Part Checklist We Use

Quick answer: a Keap audit is a structured review of a Keap account, read-only apart from test form submissions, that ends with a ranked list of fixes. A useful one covers ten areas: campaigns, tags and custom fields, broadcasts, email deliverability, list health, lead sources, the website lead path, integrations, orders and payments, and users and access. If an audit hands you observations without priorities, it's a tour, not an audit.

We run these as a Keap Certified Partner, usually for businesses that have been on Keap, or on Infusionsoft before that, for years and suspect it's leaking leads. Here is the checklist, in the order we work through it.

1. Campaigns: what's live, and what's quietly stuck

Open every published campaign and ask three questions. Does anything still feed it? Does it do what its name says? Are contacts piling up somewhere they shouldn't be? The usual findings are goals that never fire because the form or tag they listen for was replaced years ago, timers pointing at dates that already passed, and contacts parked in a sequence for months because the step after them was deleted. Dead campaigns aren't harmless. They make the account harder to reason about, and eventually someone edits the wrong one.

2. Tags and custom fields: is there a system?

Most older accounts have hundreds of tags with no naming convention, several tags that mean the same thing, and custom fields created for one campaign years ago. The fix is a tag taxonomy: a short set of categories, such as lead source, product, status and behavior, with one naming pattern, and a keep, merge or retire decision for every existing tag. It's dull work, and it's what makes every future automation faster to build.

3. Broadcasts: who you email, and how often

Look at the last few months of broadcasts: who they went to, how often, and what happened. Sending every broadcast to everyone Keap will still let you email, including people who haven't opened anything in months, is the most common habit we see, and it does the most damage to deliverability.

4. Deliverability: can your email get through at all?

Check that the sending domain is authenticated. Keap generates three CNAME records for DKIM, and its current guidance pairs them with a DMARC record, starting at p=quarantine with pct=5 for a new record, then sending from an address on the authenticated domain. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all expect authenticated, DMARC-aligned mail from bulk senders now. Our Keap deliverability guide walks through the full sequence.

5. List health: how much of the list can you actually email?

Keap assigns every contact an email status, and those statuses decide who can receive marketing. A contact with no open, click or form submission for four months becomes Unengaged Marketable. At six months they become Unengaged Non-Marketable, and Keap stops sending them marketing email until they engage again. Keap recalculates these every Saturday. Count how much of your list sits in each status, add hard bounces, opt-outs and duplicates, and you'll know how much of your list size is real. It's often a surprise.

6. Lead sources: do you know where customers come from?

If lead source is blank on most contacts, every marketing decision is a guess. Check whether each way into the account (web forms, landing pages, imports, Zapier, Facebook Lead Ads, manual entry) stamps a lead source, and whether the values are consistent enough to report on.

7. The website lead path: test it like a customer

Submit every form on the website with a test contact and follow the lead all the way in. This is where the expensive failures hide: a form plugin updated and stopped posting to Keap, a zap that errors on one field, a thank-you page that loads but never applies the tag. These tend to break late on a Friday and go unnoticed until Monday, and every lead in between is lost. If ad spend depends on those forms, this section can pay for the audit on its own.

8. Integrations: what talks to Keap, and how

List everything connected to the account: Zapier and Make scenarios, plugins, payment tools, scheduling apps and custom code. Note who built each one and which API it uses. Keap has been retiring its older XML-RPC API in favor of REST v2, and custom integrations written years ago often still use it; here's what that change means. Zaps count too: Keap's legacy Zapier app runs on XML-RPC, and Thryv is asking users to rebuild those zaps in its newer Keap app. An integration nobody can explain is a risk even while it works.

9. Orders, payment plans and subscriptions

If Keap takes payments, compare the order forms, payment plans, promo codes and subscriptions against what you actually sell today, and review failed charges and how they're followed up. Billing breaks quietly. We've traced a case where customers were paying and receiving nothing, and the failure had to be pinned to a nine-day window before anyone could say what went wrong.

10. Users, access and ownership

Who has admin access, including former staff and past contractors? Who owns the Keap account, the sending domain and the payment processor login? Tidy this before anything else changes.

What you should get at the end

A written report that ranks the fixes: what is costing leads or money right now, what is a risk, and what is housekeeping. Each item should say what is wrong, why it matters, and roughly what it takes to fix. You should be able to hand that report to anyone, including someone other than the person who wrote it, and have them act on it.

A 20-minute version you can run yourself

1. Submit every form on your website using a test contact and confirm each lead lands in Keap with a lead source and the right tags.
2. Count your contacts by email status and work out what share of the list is still marketable.
3. Check your email domain settings in Keap and confirm the domain shows as connected.
4. Open your five most important campaigns and check how many contacts sit in each sequence and when the last one moved.
5. List every integration and write down who would fix it if it broke tomorrow.

If any of those turns up something you can't explain, that's the part worth paying someone to look at properly. And if you're weighing a move off Keap entirely, read Keap vs HubSpot in 2026 first.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Keap audit?

A Keap audit is a structured review of a Keap account, read-only apart from test form submissions, covering campaigns, tags and custom fields, broadcasts, deliverability, list health, lead sources, the website lead path, integrations, payments and user access. It ends with a ranked list of fixes rather than a list of observations.

How long does a Keap audit take?

For a typical small-business account, about one to two weeks, most of it spent tracing campaigns and testing the lead path. Very large or very old accounts, such as Keap Max Classic accounts with a decade of history, take longer.

What access does a Keap auditor need?

A user login that can see campaigns, contacts and settings. Adding the auditor as a user on your account is simpler than sharing a password and easy to remove afterward. A careful audit doesn't change live campaigns or real contacts; the only writes are test submissions made with test contacts.

How much does a Keap audit cost?

It varies with the size of the account and the scope. We quote ours as a fixed price after a 15-minute call, so the number is agreed before any work starts.

Should I audit Keap or just switch to another CRM?

Audit first. Many problems blamed on Keap come from years of unmaintained tags, forgotten campaigns and broken integrations, and they follow you to a new platform if nobody untangles them. An audit tells you whether the platform or the setup is the problem, for far less than a migration costs.