What is a Digital Marketing Audit?
As a business owner, you’re constantly looking for new ways to improve your company. In an increasingly digital world, having an online presence is essential for any business. However, it can be challenging to create strategic plans for your online footprint and ways to appeal to your target audience. So how can you go about tracking your progress and making significant changes? You will need to perform a digital marketing audit.
This type of audit will encourage the right questions to be asked and solutions to be found for any problem. Or, it will be a way for you to find out more in-depth information on how your digital marketing efforts are performing. This blog will provide you with the must-know details on a digital marketing audit and how to implement any changes.
What is a digital marketing audit?
A digital marketing audit is a thorough inspection of all your digital marketing efforts. This can include your social media accounts, website, online advertisements and so forth. An audit will provide you with an evaluation of your digital platforms to then help you understand which elements of your marketing strategy are either successful or not. Having a better understanding of the effectiveness of your current marketing strategies will allow you to make changes as needed and improve your overall business practices.
How to know if you need a digital marketing audit
You may be thinking: why do I need to do a digital marketing audit? I already have a great marketing strategy; what will a digital marketing audit help me achieve? Although you may have digital marketing strategies already in place, you might not be aware of the full extent of what you’re getting in return. It is one thing to implement a plan for your business, but it is a whole other practice to evaluate its success effectively. A digital marketing audit will determine the strengths and weaknesses of your business and its campaigns. With this information, you can create or modify goals and strategies to get more out of your marketing efforts.
There’s always room for improvement for any business, no matter the size or level of success. However, if you’re unsure if a digital marketing audit is necessary, here are a few questions to ask yourself:
Has our website traffic decreased?
Are social media followers unengaged with our content?
Have our sales plateaued?
Is our bounce rate too high or too low?
Have we lost sight of our sales goals?
If the answer to any of these questions were yes, a digital marketing audit would be very beneficial to your business and an excellent way to identify any problem areas. To accomplish your goals, you must be aware of obstacles within your business and create solutions to fix them.
What to analyze in a digital marketing audit
To maximize your marketing efforts, there are a few areas in your marketing campaign worth auditing. Depending on the nature of your business and your goals, some elements may be more beneficial than others to audit.
Website Audit
A website audit will provide your company with an overview of how the website performs by gathering information and data on several metrics. Your company’s primary goal and mission must be kept in mind with every audit performed. That way, you can make changes that will help your website achieve its goals.
One of the main metrics to look into is website traffic. Ask yourself these questions: what are the most viewed pages? How are they changing over time? What are the highest sources of traffic? Are users spending more or less time on the site? Is the daily, weekly, or monthly traffic trending up or down? These are the kind of questions to ask yourself to decide your main goals and what information you want out of a website audit. Any professional service specializing in digital marketing audits will have the ability to analyze trends for your website and make recommendations as needed.
Content Audit
A content audit will evaluate the content on your website concerning your intended marketing goals. It includes ebooks, blogs, page copy, and any other written work on your site. A content audit aims to determine the success of each form of content and if it is creating the desired effects. It also involves the technical aspects of your site, such as searchability and rankability.
Content creation for your website is a time-consuming process that involves organization, creativity, and careful planning. For this reason, you want to make sure you have the right tools and details to create a better strategy. A content audit will provide you with the information you need to adjust your content to resonate with your target audience and achieve its mission. Here are a few elements to measure in a content audit:
Topics: does it serve the audience’s needs?
Word count: are posts on your website too short?
Bounce rate: are visitors leaving your site after viewing one page?
Outdated content: do some pages need to be updated or reworked?
Articles: which ones perform best and worst?
Once the analysis of your website is complete, you can use the data to understand what is working best in your site and what needs adjusting. This will help to develop a comprehensive strategic plan for your website moving forward.
SEO Audit
A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) audit is a practice used to drive traffic towards your site and determine how search-engine-friendly it is. As an online business, you want your webpage to rank highly in search engines, such as Google, to boost traffic and hopefully increase sales. SEO can be tricky since there are many reasons why a website may or may not be ranking well. If you find that your website isn’t doing as well as it once did or that it’s not receiving enough traffic, an SEO audit will be beneficial in determining the problem.
While there are many elements to an SEO audit, and some will depend on your business, this type of audit will generally analyze the following:
Technical SEO
Gaps in content
Opportunities for improvements
User experience
Website structure
On-page SEO (keywords, internal links, HTML improvements…)
Off-site SEO (backlinks, external relations…)
Social Media Audit
Your online presence is directly tied to your social media platforms. A social media audit will identify which elements in your current strategy are working and what could be improved. What can be complicated about a social media audit is the various types of apps available. For this reason, your business should have a clearly defined marketing strategy for each social media platform.
Each platform has unique algorithms, guidelines, and best practices that can impact your visibility and rank. Something that could work effectively on one app may not be as beneficial on another. Here are a few helpful metrics in a social media audit to get the best understanding of each platform and how to navigate your strategy to account for the differences:
Channel performance
Best and worst posts
Return on investment (ROI)
Followers
Cost per click
PPC Audit
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is an online model in which advertisers pay a fee only when a consumer clicks on the online ad. It is often used to drive traffic towards websites and is more and more commonly managed and hosted by Google. A PPC audit will find out how your companies’ current campaigns perform and discover how to improve. Typically, a PPC audit will consist of a thorough analysis of the campaign settings and structure, followed by gathering data on metrics such as click-through rate, average position, and conversion rate.
With this information, your company can maximize the pay-per-click advertisements and understand the potential client better. That way, you’ll be able to enhance current campaigns and apply them to future ones as well.
Setting goals and implementation
After conducting a digital marketing audit for your company, you may consider adjusting your business objectives and goals. With the new information you’ll receive, it’s important to create SMART goals to help your business grow. SMART is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. To be successful, your goals should align with each of these elements.
With your SMART goals in mind, create a digital marketing strategy that builds on the findings and information from the digital audit. It’s helpful to develop a roadmap for each campaign and a designated deadline to keep you on track. Revisit your plans as you learn new information and make changes as needed. If the planning process is done effectively, then the implementation phase will run smoothly, and you’ll be able to see results for your business in no time.
Takeaways
Whether you own a small business with a minor online presence or an established website that needs revamping, a digital marketing audit is essential. You will have more information on how your content, social media platforms, and campaigns are performing. Gathering data and analyzing trends to make the necessary changes will guarantee long-term success and improved strategic plans for your overall business practices.
FAQs
Can I perform a digital marketing audit?
It can be very time-consuming and challenging to perform a digital marketing audit by yourself. You may lack the expertise and knowledge of reading copious amounts of data and interpreting them to make changes. It can be beneficial to hire a professional service to conduct an audit for your business and provide you with the best possible data and recommendations. Think of it as a long-term investment, where you’ll spend the resources upfront to have better returns in every aspect of your business.
How much does a digital marketing audit cost?
There is a wide range of pricing when hiring a service to conduct a digital marketing audit. It is dependent on the size of your business and the complexity of your website and/or social media platforms. Some services will charge by the hour, while others offer an upfront package. It depends on the service and exactly how in-depth you want the audit to be.
How often should I do a digital marketing audit?
Depending on the type of audit, the timeframe ranges. If you’re looking to improve and grow your online presence, then there’s no better time to perform a digital marketing audit than right now! However, if you want to stay on top of trends and maximize your search engine ranking, digital marketing audits should be done every three to six months.
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