Most businesses have a dashboard that tells them how their marketing is performing. Hallam’s new AI audit tool tells them whether they can trust the numbers in the first place.
Why we built it
Marketing dashboards are good at reporting performance. Whether the underlying tracking is actually sound is a different question entirely. Though these platforms are brilliant at showing you what’s happened: sessions, conversions, revenue, nicely visualised, there is no way to know if your entire technical setup is in place in an optimal way.
That’s the problem we set out to solve internally at Hallam and the result has quickly become one of the most useful things we’ve built this year.
Every website is given an overall score and grade almost instantaneously
What it does, and why we call it Rocky
Formally, it’s our Google & Technical Platform Audit Tool. Informally, nobody at Hallam calls it that – to us, it’s just Rocky.
The name comes from our Data & Insights team who are big film fans and, at the time of developing the tool, were on a Project Hail Mary hype. Rocky is the resourceful, endlessly problem-solving engineer who turns up exactly when things need fixing and gets on with it. We liked the parallel enough that the name stuck.
In simple terms, Rocky audits a business’s full digital stack. From its entire Google stack (Tag Manager, Analytics, Ads and Search Console), its wider marketing platforms (such as Bing and Meta), and the technical SEO health of its website – and turns what it finds into a clear, scored report with plain-English commentary on what needs fixing and why.
Rather than a wall of raw data, you get a straightforward view of what’s working, what isn’t and what to prioritise. It’s the same judgement calls a specialist would make after hours of manual digging but delivered in minutes. Our technical experts have been using Innovation time to bring the tool to life and now the output is improving clients’ digital health.
The benefits
It builds trust in your data
There’s a quiet, nagging doubt a lot of businesses live with: is the tracking actually working? Rocky answers that directly. The dashboard shines a light on the technical foundations underneath the metrics you already trust, so you know whether the numbers on your dashboard are ones you can actually act on.
It puts a specialist-level audit within anyone’s reach
Technical audits used to be locked to whoever held the specialist skillset – only a paid media expert could properly audit a paid account, only an analyst could properly audit GA4. Rocky is a simple interface that allows anyone on a team, technical or not, to run a full audit and get a report they can actually understand and act on. This means our specialists’ input is focused where it’s needed most – the strategic and creative thinking that drives strong performance for their accounts.
It gets the boring, complicated stuff out of the way quickly
Onboarding with a new agency or platform is rarely the exciting part and technical audits, done properly, can eat weeks of time before anyone gets near a lead generation strategy. Rocky flags what needs fixing from day one, so the unglamorous groundwork gets dealt with quickly and everyone can move on to the work that actually matters – whether that’s a lead generation push or a wider marketing strategy.
The outputs are explained in a way that’s easy to understand by any stakeholder
Already proving its worth
Rocky is still in beta, but it’s already earning its keep across our client accounts. It runs scheduled weekly health checks in the background and only speaks up when something needs attention. This means issues that might once have gone unnoticed for weeks, like tracking silently breaking after a site update or a domain change, now get caught and flagged within hours.
The tool is also smart enough to tell the difference between a genuine tracking failure and a false alarm. For example, recognising when a site’s own security settings are simply blocking an automated check, rather than raising it as a real problem. This added judgement layer is exactly what makes the tool so useful, rather than one that just adds noise.
Users can easily pin-point which technical areas require attention
What’s next
We’re actively expanding what Rocky can audit, and we’re exploring what a public, try-it-yourself interactive version could look like – something you could point at your own site and get an instant score back from, no strings attached. Watch this space.
In the meantime, if you’re not sure your own tracking would hold up to scrutiny, come and chat to us as that’s exactly the conversation we’d love to have.
