8 Facets for a Digital Audit

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1. Quantitative Analysis

This is the core of any digital audit. You should take a holistic look at your digital strategy through metrics and evaluate what’s been working and what has not. Expect your audit to evaluate some or all of the following:

  • Analytics data
  • PPC reports
  • Social media metrics
  • SEO ranking data
  • CRM data and reports
  • Purchase funnel data

2. Qualitative Analysis

This part of the audit takes a critical look at your digital landscape and should examine the following:

  • Design and user experience
  • Calls to action
  • Brand messages
  • Lead generation
  • Conversion information and experience
  • Emails and messages
  • Automation campaigns
  • Audiences segmentation
  • Social media messages
  • Social media profiles

3. Website Crawl

There’s a ton of services online that will crawl any domain you choose and provide feedback on technical problems with that website. Agencies that offer quick turnarounds on digital audits are usually only providing this automated information – you need to go much deeper than that to establish a true picture of your digital landscape.

You should know when your website has broken links, duplicate content, missing title tags, and poor site performance.

4. Brief Competitive Analysis

It’s pretty standard for an agency to compare your external digital efforts to those of identified competitors. Without access to competitors’ metrics, agencies aren’t equipped to compare performance. 

Still, there are many observations that a competitor analysis reveals, including areas that might be digital competitive advantages for you in the future. 

5. MarTech Stack

  • What is it
  • What tools are used
  • What monitoring is used
  • What platforms are used

6. Recommendations and Strategy

Your audit should make recommendations based off of the audit findings.

The report and audit will give you understanding of next steps you can take.

For example, an audit that merely advises you to “target your Facebook ads to an audience of 25-35 year olds” is providing you tactics, which is short of actual strategy because it has no context. A strategy might be to “Match your product offerings to narrower demographics.”

Strategic recommendations (as opposed to tactical ones) take a more holistic approach to your digital strategy, so make sure they are included in your digital audit.

7. Channel-specific Tactics

The overarching digital strategy should be supported by tactical recommendations for your primary digital marketing channels: 

  • Searcher intents to target with an organic search strategy
  • Content recommendations
  • Targeting recommendations
  • Website improvement plan
  • Calls to action
  • Email communication plan
  • Channels where you need to increase focus
  • Channels where you need to decrease focus

8. 24 month timeline

A thorough audit will offer a high-level strategic timeline for the next couple of years. This timeline gives recommendations on when you should make investments (for example, a website redesign or a product campaign) in different areas of your digital marketing mix.

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