Do you want to keep a tab on your website’s performance? Do you want to improve your website’s performance? Well, digital marketing audit it is! It gives you a clear picture of what your website lacks and what needs to be done to improve the performance. In short, you get an overview of the current performance, diagnose the main issues, and come up with solutions.
The key purpose of the audit is not only to highlight the issues but also to generate actionable ideas that can add value and evaluate a data-driven digital marketing strategy. A digital marketing audit digs deep into your current marketing practises and assesses the effectiveness of the components.
If you are wondering how to do an effective one, you are at the right place! This guide will walk you through the process of a successful digital marketing audit.
What is a Digital Marketing Audit?
Digital marketing audits are a comprehensive assessment of your business’s digital marketing activities. These include your site and your social networks, your paid-for-play ads, etc. Digital Marketing can help you identify elements of your business’ marketing strategy and how the process can improve. How should I know if I should audit myself and how do I do it? Even though you know what your product is going for, you may not be aware of what it is you will receive.
Let us begin with the basic concepts of digital advertising. Digital marketing is an essential part of any business strategy. This is basically your attempt at maintaining your business visibility, viability, relevance and growth through online marketing. To make this process successful, the digital marketing process must include:
How Do You Create a Digital Marketing Audit Strategy?
Define the scope
As there is an array of digital marketing techniques, your digital marketing audit will depend on the practice that the organisation executes. Basically, there are three types- content, social media, and SEO. If the marketers are not into social media strategies, you may not have to check the social media channels’ performance.
However, auditing the different aspects of digital marketing will help you take a better approach to create better tactics and boost your business’s online performance.
Content audit
In a content audit, the team examines the performance of the written on-page content and tracks the performance against metrics. The best you can do is create a spreadsheet that will help you to organise the pieces of content and analyse their performance like, the number of clicks, shares, comments, and other engagements. You can assess the strengths and shortcomings of your campaigns by evaluating each component of your digital marketing efforts.
Also, make sure that you focus on a buffet of content and not just on posting articles and blogs. Make things a bit more interesting by writing infographics, how-to guides, FAQs, white pages, interviews, and more. To understand how your content is doing, you can use tools like Google Analytics, Moz, and Ahrefs.
Social media marketing audit
Social media audit is all about the pieces of content posted on social media channels and their performances based on engagement metrics. Again, there are plenty of social media monitoring tools that can help in streamlining the process. The audit can be done for all the social media accounts- Twitter, Instagram, Google My Business, Facebook, Pinterest, and more.
Besides these accounts, there can be accounts that are set up by employees of your organisation. Make sure to find those accounts that align with your business vision. You no longer have to continue using all the accounts; hence you can go ahead and deactivate them. Once you choose an account for your business, align that with your business by updating the profile picture, about us section, bio text, contact and email, reviews, and more.
To analyze your social media performance, go through the top-performing post, understand the hashtag strategy, research the trends, and study the behaviour of your audiences so that you can build a social media strategy effectively and increase your visibility over time.
Do you want to conduct an effective digital marketing audit?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) audit
Do you want to improve both on-page SEO and off-page SEO? Then a search engine optimization audit is the thing you need! During this audit, the site’s performance, website loading speed, site structure, backlink, and more are checked thoroughly. A content audit can be a supporting exercise for SEO audit because during the former old and duplicated write-ups are located and replaced with new pieces of information.
It benefits on-page SEO along with keyword research and analysis. You can also use Ahrefs to get deeper insights into keywords and understand what new keywords you can use. In addition to this, technical aspects of SEO should also be taken care of while conducting the audit.
It often includes checking the website’s loading speed, aligning pages with Google algorithm updates, making the website responsive, addressing issues with 404 errors, and more. If you prioritize your on-page and off-page SEO, it will significantly benefit your overall marketing.
Choose metrics to track
The metrics you select to track depend on the type of auditing you are going to perform. If you feel overwhelmed with the technicalities, do not be! As long as you understand your business’ marketing goals, choosing metrics will be a piece of the cake.
When you are thinking about your digital marketing techniques, think about your business goals, mission, and vision. Are you getting enough conversions? Are you engaging the right customers? Are you penetrating the right market? Do you still have existing users? Have you introduced new products to the market? This will vary from one company to another.
Despite having different goals, companies often use general metrics to their digital marketing performance and how near they are towards their goals. These include conversion rate, cost-per-click, website traffic, bounce rate, cost-per-lead, click-through rate, the ratio of new and existing customers, and more.
Each of the metrics has its own functions, but it will help you to assess whether the metric is helping you in achieving your marketing goals or not.
PPC (Pay per click ads / Paid advertising)
In PPC auditing, there are different aspects that you need to keep in your mind. While launching a new campaign, you need to think about visibility, profitability, and ad quality. When carrying out an audit of an ad account, you can find out the areas where your spending is going to waste so that you can cut off these areas and spend on high-performing areas.
Areas of waste spending may include paying higher CPCs, bidding on irrelevant keywords, tightening your markets or target audience, and more. Once you identify the spots where you are spending irrelevantly, you can prune these areas and redirect the money to the areas of high performance. By doing this, you can drive the leads and revenue that you need. Apart from this, do not forget to analyze the quality of ads.
To determine the overall ad rank, you can combine the ad’s quality score and the maximum bids. You can not only work on the quality of the ads but also improve their visibility while maintaining CPCs.
Represent your brand
Why do you do digital marketing? To get brand recognition, to increase visibility, and to garner attention! People should know what you do for business and must connect with you as prospective customers. It means you need to maintain consistency across all the social media platforms.
How to do that? During a digital marketing audit, check whether your brand represents the right logo, name, colours, and symbols on the website and all the social media channels. When you maintain consistency, you connect with more audiences and convey the right messages to them. Also, make sure that your brand’s assets are up-to-date and reflect the brand’s identity.
It’s time to execute an effective digital marketing audit.
Why Would You Do a Digital Marketing Audit?
Without an online marketing audit your entire business is completely unresolved. How do you define measurable performance metrics without knowing how to measure the performance across digital channels and the channels that they serve? These facts apply to all owned or paid business activities. If you establish these performance statistics you could use them historically and competitively to find trends. Knowing this can help decide how to proceed with your business strategy. Typically, a digital market analysis will help you get things done before you even start executing them.
Identify bottlenecks
No matter how well-researched your marketing strategies are, there is always room for improvement. An SEO, content marketing, sales funnel or web analytics audit will tell you which are the areas that need improvement and impede your growth.
Recognize untapped areas of growth
There is a bundle of growth opportunities that are waiting for you to explore and make the most use of. A good audit will make you spot the untapped areas so that you can exploit them.
Align with the company’s goals
When you focus on so many aspects of digital marketing, it’s quite obvious that you will lose sight of the primary goals. An audit will remind you of the company’s goals and help you stay put. If your company wishes to get the right audience, then you need to look for ways to penetrate the right market. You need to check how the product/service aligns with the customer demographics, income, interest, and more.
Build your strength
As a business owner, you need to always think about growth and expansion. Maybe your strategies are surpassing your competitors’ strategies, or maybe you have a set of trustworthy people who make no stone unturned to help you reach your goals, or maybe your products are fresh and exciting. An audit will tell you what your strengths are and how to reinforce them.
Increase your ROI (Return on Investment)
An audit ditches the techniques that are not working and embraces those where you can show immense growth. By getting rid of the outdated techniques, you can invest your resources and money in the areas that will work in favour of you.
Recall your old spirit
An audit remembers your product’s brilliance that you may have forgotten over years of use. You recall all your goals and what made you launch the product in the market.
Sign You Might Need a Digital Marketing Audit
A typical digital marketing audit is recommended for almost all companies and industries. Even the best businesses need improvements. However, it’s possible for a company’s marketing strategy to have some serious problems.
Closing Thoughts About Creating an Effective Digital Marketing Audit
Every digital marketing channel including online presence and performances, assets, competitor’s performances, and optimization opportunities should be included in the audit. A digital marketing audit may sound like a lot of work, but in the end, it is worth it! In a nutshell, the audit is about three things- identify the gaps in your digital marketing strategy, let go of the methods that do not work anymore and focus on the areas that have chances of improvement, and brainstorm new, exciting areas to improve your strength.
A digital marketing audit gives you a better understanding of your business and how effectively the strategies are working. No matter what kind of audit you are performing, the data you obtain will help you do better in the long run.
Growth Hackers is a full-service digital marketing agency helping businesses from all over the world grow. There is no fluff with Growth Hackers. We help entrepreneurs and business owners to be in control of their digital marketing audit, driving targeted traffic, generating qualified leads, optimizing their conversion rate gathering and analyzing data analytics, acquiring and retaining users and increasing sales. We go further than brand awareness and exposure. We make sure that the strategies we implement move the needle so your business grow, strive and succeed. If you too want your business to reach new heights, contact Growth Hackers today so we can discuss about your brand and create a custom growth plan for you. You’re just one click away to skyrocket your business.
