You’ve heard me mention digital marketing audits more than once and that’s because they are vital to effective digital marketing - and that’s an understatement. When considering your annual budget, factors such as ongoing tasks, time, and resources for audits should be included as part of your business strategy.

So, here’s what you need to know about digital marketing audits and how they help your business.

What is a digital marketing audit?

A digital marketing audit summarises key findings, key performance indicators (KPIs), and actionable insights across all of your social media platforms. It helps to include collaborations, paid campaigns, and email marketing efforts too. It’s essentially a collection of raw data from your most-trusted dashboards, analysed and highlighted, with a clear outline of how they relate.

By the time you’ve completed a digital audit, you’ll have a whole new understanding of how your brand sits online, how your audience is behaving, where your digital strategy stands now, and how it needs to develop. In a nutshell, digital marketing audits set the premise for steady growth and improvements for your business online.

How do digital marketing audits benefit my business?

Digital marketing audits provide objective insights and support business goals. Especially when you’re dealing with creative assets, doing an audit helps remove bias and subjective views. Content marketing costs money and time, so knowing how your content is performing is key to increasing conversion rates and ROI. Even more so when investors are involved, digital marketing audits don’t just benefit your business, they further its development.

When should you do a digital marketing audit?

Month-to-month and year-on-year. Digital content, website traffic, and audience behaviour are measured by date and time, so in most cases, you’ll be doing a digital marketing audit each month and again annually, catered to your financial year.

How do you do a digital marketing audit? To start, create your branded template and structure the outline and the contents within it. Once you’re ready to crack open the data pool, start reviewing all of your major data platforms, including any third parties and/or centralised dashboards. Google Analytics (soon to be GA4) will always be an important participant in your audits, as well as your email marketing host, and paid ad libraries.

What should you include in a digital marketing audit? Include all data and findings worth noting and then eliminate. First, you’ll have your table of contents, executive summary, and actionable insights. Then you’ll have your data analysis, content review, and benchmarks. While you’re data crunching, make notes of key findings and KPIs. Complete the final findings and proposition at the end, once your mind has fully digested a macro and micro view of the data at hand.

How much time should be spent on a digital marketing audit? The limit does not exist. How much time it takes you to complete an audit will depend on the number of platforms you’re analysing, the size of each data pool, and how much insight you really want. Don’t forget to take breaks and let the data sink in. It takes a lot of brainpower and insight to analyse data effectively; sometimes you need to step away from the data for a couple of days to see the bigger picture.

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So there you have it, everything you need to know about digital marketing audits.

Need help with your digital marketing? Get in touch or email styledbygracieclemens@gmail.com.