Every marketing professional has experienced the struggle to justify marketing expenses. A boardroom meeting shouldn’t feel like you’re begging for donations to a worthy cause.
Thankfully, there’s a secret tool - that we wish wasn’t so secret - to help you develop a data-driven strategy that drives growth and identifies impactful opportunities to increase your return on investment (ROI).
In this article, I will walk you through the key elements every digital marketing audit should include.
A digital marketing audit involves looking at every aspect of your brand’s digital footprint. After completing one, you’ll have a 360-degree view of your brand packed with data-driven insights that you can leverage in your marketing strategy.
Having the results of a routine digital audit is like being dealt a Royal Flush in poker. It’s a game changer. And you don’t have to wait for a good hand to come your way – you can do this right now.
The audit, if done correctly, will help you measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, fine tune campaigns, and surface gaps or opportunities for your team to execute on.
Let’s take a look at the essential steps of a comprehensive digital marketing audit.
Follow these steps to perform a digital marketing audit for your business.
A digital marketing audit will dive into each of these digital channels. Auditing each of these channels helps you understand how your customers prefer to be engaged and provide a holistic picture of your brand’s digital reach. Each channel has unique characteristics. But without performing a digital audit, you’re just throwing darts at the board – blindfolded.
The first step of your digital marketing audit is to review your website.
Simply put, your website is the hub for all your digital marketing efforts. It is one of the only online assets that you have full control over. Here are the steps you will want to follow for your website audit.
In the real world, your brick-and-mortar store window is designed to catch the eye of window shoppers passing by. In the digital world, your website should do the same thing.
Your website design is an important part of telling your brand story and significantly impacts your brand's perceived credibility.
In fact, 75% of your website's credibility comes from its design.
Here are some website design best practices you should audit on your site:
Page load speeds are important for both the user experience and search engine rankings.
70% of consumers say that page speed impacts their willingness to buy from an online retailer. When it comes to load time, seconds count. According to research, website conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42% with each additional second of load time.
Audit your top performing pages to find ways to shave off every millisecond possible. Look for site-wide optimizations like:
A great tool for finding page speed optimizations and checking your site’s Core Web Vitals is Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
Next, you should make sure that your mobile site experience is excellent. 58% of global website traffic comes from mobile devices (that doesn't include tablets).
Today's modern customer expects an easy-to-use mobile website. Mobile-friendliness is also a ranking factor for search engines.
Be sure to use tools like Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test and manually test your site using your smartphone. Here are some errors you want to avoid in order to ensure your site is mobile-friendly:
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Next you will need to conduct an SEO Audit. In simple terms, SEO helps your website rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs) driving organic traffic to your website.
We all Google things everyday, and auditing your site for SEO helps boost your website's ability to rank in the top three positions of the first page, where most of the clicks go.
The search algorithms are constantly changing, for this reason we recommend running an SEO audit on a regular basis, at least twice a year. When it comes to SEO, you can’t “set it and forget it” if you want to outperform your competitors.
Your SEO audit should be split into three sections: on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO. Let’s review all three.
On-page SEO is the process of optimizing your website's content and user experience in order to improve your page rank in SERPs. There are many on-page SEO ranking factors that send signals to search engines to help them understand what your content is about.
This helps search engines determine what keywords and search terms your content should appear for in SERPs and where they should be ranked.
If your site is optimized well for on-page SEO, you have a better chance of ranking higher in SERPs. Here are some of the most important on-page SEO factors to consider when auditing your website:
Off-page SEO refers to optimization tactics that can be used outside the boundaries of your own website, hence the name “off-page.”
Here’s how you can remember the difference between on-site and off-site SEO. On-site SEO is within your full control, since you own your website. Off-site is more difficult to control because you have to rely on other website’s for help.
One of the biggest off-page SEO tactics is to acquire backlinks, or link-building, from other authoritative websites. Since the beginning of search engines, backlinks have been a major ranking factor. When other sites link to your site it implies that they trust your brand and think your content is valuable. When auditing your website’s off-page SEO you want to consider:
Technical SEO is the process of optimizing your site for search engine crawling and indexing. The main goal of technical SEO is to optimize the structure of your website and make it easy for Google and other search engines to find your content.
Here’s what you want look for in your technical SEO audit:
Related Resources:
After assessing your site's design and SEO performance, it’s time to audit your content.
Content marketing is the practice of creating useful content for your website that attracts and engages potential customers and helps build brand loyalty.
When conducting your content marketing audit, you want to start by pulling data for all your webpages and determine the best performing content. Here are the metrics you can use to test your content performance and engagement.
Content Performance Metrics
Look for common trends between top performing pages. Once you identify what’s working, and what's not, you can better optimize your content marketing strategy moving forward.
When thinking about your content marketing strategy, it’s also helpful to sort content by which stage of the customer journey it helps support.
Customer Journey Stages:
Once you’ve identified your top performing pages, it’s time to clean up and optimize your site. Consider removing poor performing content from your site. You can also combine similar content to help boost potential SEO value. In general, users and search engines would rather see one well developed page, than two with light content. When consolidating or removing pages, make sure to set up the proper 301 Redirects.
Use the insights you gained from your content marketing and SEO audit to create a content calendar for future content creation. Identify keyword gaps and create content based on your learnings from your top performing pages.
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Now it’s time to run your social media audit. As part of this, you will want to review all of your social media profiles. Here are the areas you will want to focus on during your social media audit:
Based on your social media audit findings, you can create an action plan for next steps. For example, if you find that one social media platform is performing better than another you may consider investing more time on the higher performing channels.
During your social media audit it’s important to explore new and emerging platforms. Conduct a competitive benchmark audit to determine if any of your competitors are on lesser known or trending platforms. Consider testing content on these platforms.
If you're looking to target a specific audience, make sure to do your research to understand what platforms might work best.
Now it’s time to review your paid advertising campaigns. You may be spreading your budget across a variety of platforms like Google Search or Instagram, regardless of the platform here are the areas you should review in your audit.
You want to review your advertising budget at least quarterly to ensure that it’s being spent efficiently. Look for campaigns that have higher budget spends, but fewer conversions.
Conversions are when your ad campaigns meet their goals. Advertising campaign goal examples include:
In order to check your advertising campaigns’ performance, audit the following metrics. Identify trends, and update accordingly.
The last step of your advertising audit is to review your actual ads. There are several areas you want to focus on. Remember to use the insights you gained from your budget, goal, and performance analysis. Here are the key elements to review for your advertisements.
An Online Reputation Audit helps you better understand what customers are saying about your brand online.
According to research from BrightLocal, 79% of consumers say they trust the reviews they read online as much as a personal recommendation. As a result, understanding your brand's online reputation is very important.
When conducting your reputation audit, make sure to complete a full review of any platforms that may have reviews about your business, including:
Even when your company receives a negative review, it’s important to respond authentically and try to resolve the issue. This sends a signal to both consumers and search algorithms that your brand is engaged and puts customers first.
We made it to the last step of your digital marketing audit! It’s time to perform your email marketing audit.
Email is one of the oldest and time-tested digital marketing channels - and it is still relevant today. Here are the most important metrics you want to audit as part of your email marketing review.
Another important area to inspect is your subscriber list or audience health.
Keep in mind that losing subscribers or cleaning your list is not always a bad thing. You want to make sure your audience contains high-quality subscribers.
Consider removing subscribers who are inactive and emails that don’t get delivered. This can help increase your overall engagement.
The last part of your email marketing audit is to review your actual email designs.
Whether you’re a seasoned marketing executive, or a growing company that is just starting to think about their digital footprint, these questions will help you decide if a digital audit is right for you:
This isn’t a comprehensive list, but if you’ve answered “no” to just two or three of these questions, it’s time to perform a digital audit.
Once you can answer the questions above, you’ll be able to focus on the things that will deliver the biggest impact to your company’s bottom-line. Instead of chasing your competitors in the marketing equivalent of “monkey see, monkey do,” you can identify the metrics and opportunities that matter most for growing your digital footprint.
Numbers tell a story. When you come to the table with competitive insights, emerging trends and engagement statistics, you’re ready to handle virtually any obstacle that comes your way.
This data really is a win-win for marketers trying to justify their marketing budget. You can convince stakeholders to approve radical strategic changes based on your performance and business owners can better identify their next steps. In the areas where you are weakest, you can more effectively communicate a sense of urgency and identify opportunities for growth.
And, of course, the areas where you are strongest will serve as justification that what you are doing is making a difference. Once enough of these numbers are in the right place, you will be able to point to a growth in revenue, user engagement and brand recognition.
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If you have further questions about how to perform a digital marketing audit, or need help diving into what your stats mean, the Fratzke team is standing by to help. Our goal is to deliver the insights you need in order to be the smartest person in the room.
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