How do you know if your digital marketing strategy is working? Why are you not seeing results for this particular campaign? How can a digital marketing audit help bolster your business’s performance and presence online?
Conducting a digital marketing audit allows you to determine whether your digital campaigns are succeeding or if you need to follow a different approach. This lets you monitor your business’ performance, identify the strengths and weaknesses of each campaign, and discover what you need to do to streamline your strategies and campaigns to get better results.
What Is a Digital Marketing Audit?
Simply put, a digital marketing audit is a thorough review of your digital marketing performance and practices, which can include your website, PPC campaigns, and SEO. Each component is scrutinized to see if it’s getting you the results you want or if it needs to be optimized for success. Given its thorough nature, a digital marketing audit is an extensive process.
When conducting a digital marketing audit, you get a custom set of reports that give you a glimpse of your current performance and how you’re utilizing digital resources. In addition to these benefits, these custom reports can offer recommendations on how you can optimize the use of digital resources, as well as help you come up with a solid action plan that will allow you to get the results you want while strengthening your marketing campaigns.
Digital marketing audits often entail components such as quantitative analysis, qualitative analysis, competitive analysis, and website audit.
Other important components that comprehensive audits should have include accessibility audits, internal governance audits, an outline of a strategic timeline for a set period, and tactics for multiple channels.
Common Types of Marketing Audits
Several common digital marketing strategies are subject to audits:
Search Engine Optimization
An SEO audit allows you to see the state of your website’s traffic. Are you applying SEO best practices to ensure that your site can be easily found online (higher rankings on SERPs) and that it offers excellent user experiences? Optimizing your website for SEO, with the help of digital marketing audits, allows your website to be more visible, allowing potential customers to easily find your business online.
PPC
A PPC audit helps ensure that your PPC ads give you the results you want. This means that your PPC ads are optimized to encourage your audience to click on your ads and complete the desired action like buying your product or signing up for a trial.
Social Media
A social media audit lets you know whether or not your audience finds or engages with your page. Factors like conversion rates and impressions are measured to assess the performance of your paid, organic, and earned media.
Web Design
A website/user experience audit thoroughly examines your website to identify opportunities for improvement that may be affecting your website’s performance. For instance, one component of a website audit is a traffic audit, which gives you a glimpse of your website’s traffic, most viewed pages, highest or best traffic sources, bounce rates, and time spent on site.
How Digital Marketing Audits Can Help Your Business
Conducting a digital marketing audit lets you optimize your digital marketing campaigns and strategies, as well as monitor your current performance so you can identify the strengths and weaknesses of each campaign. It also shows you potential loopholes or bottlenecks that may be hampering your progress, thus giving you the opportunity to address these issues and refine your strategy.
When Should You Conduct Digital Marketing Audits?
You should conduct a digital marketing audit if you’re planning to create a new marketing channel or if you want to measure the current performance of your website or content. If you haven’t done an audit yet or if it’s been a while since your last audit, components such as your website and its ranking may be adversely affected and you may see results like a drop in rankings. Moreover, without a regular or routine digital marketing audit, it can be difficult for you to determine whether your digital marketing efforts are paying off and giving you the results you’re looking for.
5 Steps to Conduct a Digital Marketing Audit
Conducting a digital marketing audit can be an intensive endeavor that will potentially take up a lot of time, depending on factors like your auditor and your organization’s size. Basic audits can take anywhere between 30 to 45 days, while more comprehensive ones can take up to six months to complete.
Here are the steps you can follow when conducting a digital marketing audit:
Identify the scope and goals of your audit
Because digital marketing audits can be exhaustive, it helps if you know the scope of the audit that you’re planning to undertake. You can prioritize audits that are relevant to your goals or operations, such as SEO and social media audits, for example.
Moreover, you need to determine what the goals and key metrics are for a particular audit.
Gather all your relevant data
Once you’ve identified the scope and goals of your audit, you can start collecting data from all the channels that you’re currently using. These can include data on website, email, and social media performance.
Make sure you have the right tools
You can use an array of free tools to conduct a digital marketing audit. These tools give you a glimpse of your website performance, as well as help you understand its performance in the context of your KPIs. Some of the free tools you can use include Google Analytics, Google Keyword Planner, Google Search Console, and Screaming Frog.
Conduct an SEO audit
From there, you can proceed with an SEO audit, which should be done regularly or at least twice a year. This lets you see how your website fares when it comes to SERPs. Your SEO audit should include key areas, such as technical, on-page, and off-page SEO.
Follow up with other audits
After conducting an SEO audit, you can follow up with other audits, such as social media marketing, brand reputation, website marketing, paid advertising, content, and email marketing audits.
Comprehensive Digital Marketing Audits for Your Business
At EWR Digital, we offer four different types of digital marketing audits:
Optimize your performance today and address any loopholes that may be preventing your progress. Find out more about the digital marketing audits we’re offering and discover how each one can benefit your business. Schedule your free consultation today.