What Is a Digital Marketing Audit?

What Is a Digital Marketing Audit?

Digital marketing can be hard to get right, but fortunately, you can course-correct if you notice it isn’t landing with your audience.

A digital marketing audit is a data-informed document that draws from all of your business’s digital marketing efforts to empirically ascertain what has been a success and what has been a failure.

This could well be one of the most important documents for any growing business, as it can give you an idea if all the resources and energy you’ve invested in digital marketing has paid off. You might have had the most imaginative marketing campaign ever, yet without a digital marketing audit, you could just be fooling yourself into thinking it was successful. 

The audit doesn’t focus so much on what you did, though, as it does how you did it. It emphasizes results in key performance indicators (KPIs), which give you a solid foundation to build from going forward.

When is a digital marketing audit necessary?

A digital marketing audit isn’t something you should do only when you feel like your marketing efforts aren’t bearing results. It’s something that should be planned in advance and, ideally, performed regularly to ensure you stay on track with your goals.

One way you can plan out these audits is to break them up throughout the year. You could do an audit at the beginning of every quarter or every new year. Alternatively, you could wait until you’ve run a campaign to perform an audit.

Aside from timing, there are other factors that can determine when it’s best to perform a digital marketing audit. For example, if you’ve recently changed your goals or performance expectations, this would be a good time to conduct an audit. You could also run an audit if you’ve started work with a new client and are eager to see if your marketing is yielding the results you were both expecting.

There’s no hard and fast rule for running digital marketing audits. When you do an audit will depend on your specific business needs.

What does the process involve?

To carry out an audit, you’ll need to set aside a fair chunk of time. For many companies, it can take several weeks to complete a digital marketing audit. You’ll also need to address the scope of the audit. Will it be for the past month, quarter, or year?

Once you have this information, you can gather all the relevant information, be it screenshots or CSV data, and store it all in one place. With that information and the relevant tools, you can create a document or presentation to reveal your findings.