If you have a website or mobile app or even just a social media business page representing your brand, you know the vital role they play for lead generation and business conversion. That’s where digital marketing audit comes in.
These days most businesses have digital footprints across these channels, and their business conversion increasingly depends upon them.
What happens when your website fails to generate any traffic or your mobile app stops having new users on board? Well, these are the times you need to be alert about the things that are not going well.
These are also the times you need to conduct a digital marketing audit, check mobile app marketing metrics, know the loopholes, and underperforming areas of your digital presence. That’s what grossly known as a digital audit.
So wondering how the digital audit is carried out? What are the key things you need to measure? What are the key metrics that you need to focus on? All these questions are answered through the following post.
What’s Digital Marketing Audit?
The evaluation and measurement of your digital marketing efforts through some well-defined metrics or parameters are called a digital audit. This auditing exercise is carried out utilizing data analytics and several key metrics.
The immediate benefit of conducting a digital audit is making informed marketing decisions based on the elements that need to be optimized and the shortcomings that need to be addressed.
When you consider the various digital marketing needs and attributes of importance, there can be an array of metrics from combining various parameters to different considerations.
What Are The Things To Audit?
A digital marketing audit is carried out to come with comprehensive insights about the marketing output across several digital channels.
The things that are generally evaluated and measured by these metrics, corresponding to the specific contents of these channels.
Let us have a look at the key components of the digital marketing audit.
SEO
Among all the digital marketing endeavors, search engine optimization ranks supreme and is given top priority by the marketers. Now, to measure and evaluate your efforts in achieving higher search engine result, SEO audit is carried out.
The SEO audit can again be classified into on-page SEO audit and off-page SEO audit.
- On-Page SEO Audit: This audit is carried out only to check whether the search engine crawler is able to find your content against relevant searches. You have to run a crawler and detect all the crawling mistakes inside your content. The tools like SEO Spider and Link Sleuth can help you in this regard.
- Off-Page SEO Audit: This audit is carried out to evaluate the performance of the outside elements such as links and find out whether they are having any negative impact on your search engine visibility and ranking. With this audit mainly the quality of the backlinks are checked.
Paid Ads and SEM
This audit is mainly carried out to evaluate the performance of the paid ads and promotional campaigns for business.
How your campaigns garner traction and generate revenue and what are the areas where you have scopes to improve are mainly taken care of by this audit. Some of the key elements of this audit include the following.
- Evaluating keywords and their performance for PPC campaigns.
- Measuring the click-through-rate (CTR) of the campaigns.
- Evaluating landing page performance.
Content Marketing
Finally, content is the key ingredient of any digital marketing campaign, and it remains to be the key deliverable from the marketer to the users of digital channels.
From web to mobile apps to social media, everywhere content plays the mission-critical role. The audit explores the shortcomings in the digital content in terms of quality, uniqueness, relevance and audience preference.
Some of the critical aspects that content audit tries to find out include the following.
- The quality of the write-up.
- Plagiarism and uniqueness.
- Relevance and being up-to-date.
- Content display and readability.
- Relevant and helpful internal and external links.
- Citations and credits.
- The visual quality of the contents.
- Appropriate content format.
Social Media
Social media as of the most growth-proponent marketing channel has already overshadowed many other channels over the years.
The growth of social media platforms for marketing content is now a significant contribution to the digital marketing mix.
Let’s have a look at the fundamental things concerning social media that are measured and evaluated by digital marketing audit.
- Social media followers.
- Social traction through likes and comments.
- Social reach through shares and mentions.
- Social media dominance through conversation.
- Social media page traffic.
- Social media paid campaign traction and business conversion.
Important Metrics To Take Into Consideration?
When evaluating your digital marketing activities, you need to focus on some metrics that can help you understand the shortcomings and how to fix them. Let us explain the brief sine of the key metrics for your digital marketing audit.
- Web Traffic Metrics
Measuring web traffic and knowing the details like session duration, abandonment rate, etc. you can easily understand how and in what ways you need to utilize SEO with more gusto and precision. Google analytics is a great tool for measuring this metric.
Web traffic source is another important metric that you can easily track using the same tool. The traffic sources may vary from social media, paid ads, mobile marketing messages, organic search engine traffic and email marketing.
This will show you where you need to improve and which channels are most effective in drawing traffic for you.
The same tool will also show you the particular devices and OS platforms that you are getting traffic from. This will help you see your mobile traffic and the popular mobile platforms where you are getting maximum traction.
With the increased mobile audience, this metric can also inspire you to build a separate mobile website.
- Bounce Rate
There are many visitors who after landing on your site almost immediately leave for another website. These instances of abandonment are called bounce rate. The bounce rate means the irrelevance of your website to all those people who bounce to another website.
- Session Length and Page Views
Have you ever thought apart from getting traffic what is the most important aspect for your digital marketing endeavor? It is engagement with your website.
To ensure this, evaluating the time the users spend on your site, and the number of pages they visit is important. These two closely related metrics help you evaluate your engagement.
- Repeat Visits
For any marketer creating a loyal audience is one of the crucial objectives. In the context of the web getting repeated visits from the users is the first step towards ensuring loyalty through an enticing web user experience or contents.
How many of your first-time visitors visited again within a month or another 6months? How many of them visited frequently or a number of times within a month or 6months? These are the questions this metric will answer.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Your click-through rate (CTR) is actually the percentage of the users who click a specific button or link against all those users who don’t. It is a crucial metric to measure the success of your campaign and business conversion.
- Conversion Rate (CVR)
The conversion rate refers to the ratio of the website visitors who ultimately responded to your marketing goal positively, like actions, registering for a membership, making a purchase, subscribing to the newsletter, etc.
If you want your marketing campaign to be successful, you need to constantly track this metric and take measures to boost the conversion rate.
Bio: Atman Rathod is the Co-founder at CMARIX TechnoLabs Pvt. Ltd., a leading web and mobile app development company with 13+ years of experience. He loves to write about technology, startups, entrepreneurship, and business. His creative abilities, academic track record and leadership skills made him one of the key industry influencers as well.
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