Why You Need A Digital Marketing Audit and How To Perform One

The key to making data-driven decisions.

Why Do You Need A Digital Marketing Audit?

A Digital Marketing Audit will help make your company aware of the marketing efforts you are currently putting in and their subsequent results. By performing regular Digital Marketing audits, you will be able to set achievable and realistic KPIs and have a good understanding of your performance metrics on each digital channel. With a clear understanding of your digital marketing strategies and by identifying current trends you will be able to make a data-driven decision on what you do next.

Digital Marketing audits will examine various digital marketing channels your organization is currently using and result in; recommendations, results based on your outlined goals, and guidance for setting clear and attainable KPIs. Some channels you’ll want to look at and questions you’ll want to ask are outlined below.

Website

In our previous Blog Post "5 Ways to Optimize Your dealership's Website" we went over the importance of reviewing your website and making sure the information, images, links, etc., are up to date.

Some questions you'll want to consider during a Digital Marketing Website Audit are:

• Are the internal and external links working properly?
• Are all of the images up to date and loading properly?
• Are there any spam comments in your blog posts that need to be addressed?
• Could the metadata use rewriting?

Social Media

When auditing your social media, it is important to have a clearly defined set of achievable goals outlined to help measure your progress. You want your goals to have a clear timeline, and quantifiable objectives you can track. The metrics you choose to track may vary based on your industry.

Some important things to look at when conducting a social media audit are:

• Has the traffic from your social media pages to your website risen? If yes, by how much? And, if no, you may need to rethink your strategy.
• What is your monthly growth rate?
• Are you generating more repeat visitors or new visitors? Ideally you should have a mix.
• How is your engagement on social media?
• Has your brand awareness increased?
• How many leads have you generated through social media?
• Impressions: total content views.

Conducting a social media audit will help you realign your goals based on the progress you've made so far.

Paid Search Advertising

A SEM and Paid Media audit should be done if your company advertises on Google Ads or Bing Ads. When doing a paid search audit there are 5 key aspects you will need to investigate:

• Target keywords: The SEM audit should list all target keywords, impressions, clicks and conversions. You should look to include negative keywords as well.
• Ad copy: Check that you are using active language in your ad copy.
• Cost and bid: Analyze your current bid strategy. If you are using manual bidding, check bids per keyword and any ad schedule settings you currently have.
• Search terms: Look at the recent user search terms and check what percentage may be irrelevant.
• Audiences: Check to make sure your campaigns are effectively using remarketing lists for search ads.

Social Media Advertising

When looking at paid social metrics, it can be easy to get lost in a sea of data and numbers. Try to focus primarily on the "Cost Per" metrics and how they're tracking overtime. Tracking Cost Per metrics will give you a good indication of the spend efficiency for your social ads. Some metrics you'll want to look at include:

• Cost Per Thousand (CPM)
• Cost Per Video View (CPV)
• Cost Per Click (CPC)
• Cost Per Conversion (CPA)

Display Advertising

Display ads are the banner ads you see online. Google Display Networks (GDN) is one of the most prominent platforms for display ads, with Facebook's Audience Network following behind.

Display ads are a key digital ad channel, especially when it comes to remarketing. To measure the effectiveness of display ads you can either look at the post click conversion (ie. When the user clicks on the ad what happened after they landed on the website?) or post view conversion (ie. After they saw the ad did the user visit the website and convert on their own accord?).

You've done your Digital Marketing audit, now what?

Now that you've completed your Digital Marketing audit, the next step is to use those results and recommendations to create or enhance your Digital Marketing Strategy. As you go through the phases of your newly developed strategy it will be important to continuously measure key metrics and track your performance against KPIs. This will help to ensure you are staying on track with your plan or help you learn where your plan may need adjusting.

For a limited time you can take advantage of Seen’s Spring Cleaning Special and get a free Digital Marketing Audit!