Today, digital marketing is a fundamental building block within the marketing mix of any business. Whether it’s assigning resources and budgets, ensuring the current strategy works or checking out what adjustments need to be made, a digital audit is a great way to evaluate and understand the digital presence of your business and your brand. You may want to check the performance of your internal marketing department or confirm that of external service providers. Either way, a digital audit performed by a third-party will help you to assess your current online initiatives from an independent, confidential and transparent perspective.
The foundation of a digital audit generally focuses on these key areas:
- Reach: this is an assessment of the impact and scale of your paid and organic efforts online. For example, keyword rankings in the SERPs for your key products and services, the reach and effect of your posts and publications in social media, or the open rate of the emails that you send to subscribers or external databases.
If you’ve activated display, programmatic, or pay per click campaigns in Google and Bing, ask “are these campaigns having the desired impact (impressions) and are they relevant to my audience (clicks, leads, etc.)? Is your website easy to navigate? A digital audit can help determine if you are impacting enough users and if there are ways to expand or improve your impact. - Conversion: after studying reach, it’s important to determine if the people you are reaching are taking the business actions you want them to. If you have significant impressions and clicks in your SEM / PPC campaigns, but no one is buying or filling out your lead form, a digital audit will most likely reveal aspects of your web, call-to-actions, creatives, emails, organic listings and posts that can be improved in order to boost conversion rate. It goes without saying that a fundamental part of evaluating conversion is that you are also measuring it correctly.
- Metrics and Measurement: in order to determine the success of your current digital actions, it’s key to have a clear idea of the objectives you are measuring such as conversion, awareness, social engagement or other factors indicative of performance. If you are already clear on your metrics and KPIs, great, the next step is simply to ensure that they’re being measured and represented correctly in your analytics. It’s also important to have a solid and recurrent reporting structure in place– if there is a drastic change in your metrics results, do you have a process in place to evaluate what has caused the change and how to react?
- Digital Architecture:: another key piece in any digital marketing audit is to check that your website is checking off the boxes on UX (usability), ease of retrieval of general information, products and services and of course, it should also be mobile-friendly for those users who prefer their smartphone to a computer.
It’s also a good idea to review all your social channels and additional channels you may have activated (chat, blog, etc.). How do your channels stack up against your competitors? Are you maintaining these channels consistently? Do they include additional business information like an address, phone number, hours of operation, links, etc.? Also is your business active on the social networks where your target consumer is active ? Do you have profiles setup in the right languages? - Content: businesses who are doing good work in the digital sphere generally have a content plan in place– this plan should be consistent in terms of the types of content and the frequency of publication. Content types (video, articles, gifs, user generated content, photos, apps, podcasts, how-to, etc.) should match up with the type of business you run and what your users enjoy consuming. Of course, content should also be of good quality, or consistent with what the user most enjoys– you are better off publishing less frequently and publishing content that really reflects the image you want to transmit to people. A content calendar is a good way to plan and a digital audit can help confirm that the frequency and type of content you produce is on target. Of course, the metrics and measurements you already have in place will also help to determine what’s working and what isn’t.
If you’d like to evaluate your business’ digital strategy and get more out of online marketing activities, contact us.
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Managing Director
Andreas is Managing Director at All Around. He worked for years in leading roles and international projects at WPP and Publicis Group agencies. He now leads a multi-disciplinary team of marketing consultants from different disciplines, backgrounds and countries who have joined forces to deliver international digital strategies and measurable results for our clients.
