You’ve built your website, set up your social media accounts, and are running ads on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. You might be nodding your head, thinking “yes I do all of that.” Well, it seems simple enough but in reality, things can change quite quickly that might jeopardize your business or income.
If you are operating in a big industry then there are plenty of competitors out there. It’s important to stay on top of trends and competition so you don’t lose sales to someone else. To keep up with this trend, you need scheduled auditing of all your digital channels.
But what is Auditing?
What is it for, and why does it matter?
Let’s explore the definition of audit below.
Evaluating Your Digital FootPrint
In its most basic form, the term auditing is the process of measuring something against a standard to see if it fulfills certain criteria. With websites, social media, and advertising, this means checking every aspect of the digital footprint (links, tags, etc) to ensure they are all in place.
An audit is important for any business as it is one way of evaluating how effective your marketing strategies are concerning your target audience.
Auditing also helps you to assess which aspects of your website are working for you and which ones aren’t. Besides, auditing allows you to identify gaps in your website or areas that require more content or specific information that may not have been provided on your site previously.
For example, an SEO audit would help you identify how well your website fits into Google’s algorithms, including elements like keyword placement, URL structure, internal linking, crawlability, duplicate content issues, sitemap errors, indexation status, age factor, etc.
Importance of a Business Audit
A website, social media, and ad accounts audit can help you to understand why you are not making money. It can also help you to see what is working so you can focus on it instead of the things that are not working.
There are so many benefits to auditing your website, social media, and ad account. Here are just a few of the benefits of these audits:
- Protecting your business
When you’re sharing information about your company on social media platforms, blogs, and other websites, it’s important to remember that the Internet never forgets. Be sure that you’re not sharing any information that can harm your reputation or that of your business.
- Saving money
By conducting an audit of your social media accounts regularly, you’ll be able to stop ads before they waste any more of your money on ads that aren’t converting well.
You’ll also be able to cut back on the amount of time you spend on social media if you decide you no longer want to pay for ads there.
- Improving conversions
Research shows that visitors will convert at higher rates when the call-to-action button is close to the targeted keyword or phrase.
Conducting audits of your website content will ensure that these keywords are included in prominent areas of your site so that visitors don’t have to search for them.
- Measure your ROI
If there’s one rule of thumb for marketing, it’s this: If you’re not measuring your marketing metrics, you’re likely missing a huge opportunity.
Tracking and measuring ROI is vital for your business. You need to know if your marketing and advertising efforts are effective and if they are proving to deliver results.
What is the ROI of your business’ SEO? What is your ROI with Adwords? What about Facebook ads? You need to be able to answer these questions accurately. Having that information at hand allows you to see what’s working and what’s not working. It also allows for future planning and forecasting.
- Quantify traffic sources
An audit helps you to quantify traffic sources. You can compare the number of visitors coming from Google search, Facebook, Twitter, and display ads. This will help you to figure out which channels are less effective and which ones are your main traffic sources.
Audits are also very helpful to identify traffic sources that bring malicious users to your website. If some of your ad networks are sending you bots or if they have a lot of non-human traffic, it is important to exclude those networks from your campaigns so that they don’t affect your quality score and your CPCs skyrocket.
- Stay ahead of the competition
As a small or large business owner, you want to be sure that customers and potential customers understand your brand and remember it. With so much content available on the internet, you need to find ways to stand out from the crowd and keep your brand top-of-mind with consumers.
Auditing your website, social media account, and advertising efforts regularly is one way to ensure that your brand is staying top-of-mind with customers. Auditing helps you identify weaknesses in your marketing approach so that you can learn from your competitors and maintain a competitive edge in your niche.
- Help to optimize your ad campaigns
Optimizing your PPC ad accounts can help you save money on paid advertising by reducing wasted clicks and impressions. If you’re not tracking the performance of your PPC campaigns, then it’s hard to know what’s working and what isn’t.
Auditing also helps you to identify low-performing keywords in your search campaign so that you can remove them or replace them with more targeted keywords that will get you higher conversion rates.
Another big part of auditing is tracking conversions across multiple PPC platforms (including paid social media). If someone clicks an ad for a workout plan but doesn’t end up buying, you can launch a retargeting campaign to get them to buy your product and service.
How often do you need an Audit?
When it comes to the rate of auditing, there is no hard and fast rule. It all depends on the size of your company, the risk associated with your business, and of course your budget.
Auditing your marketing is all about consistency. You can’t just throw up one thing and then expect it to be perfect forever. That’s why you need to audit everything in your marketing mix regularly. You have to audit your digital presence and marketing strategy consistently for them to be effective.
Let’s say you have a set of negative keywords that are preventing traffic from converting. It’s important that you continuously benchmark against them so that you can decide whether or not they are still necessary after time has passed.
The same is true for social media. There are many different ways to effectively market your business using Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook ad campaigns, and more. You need to make sure that your social media strategy is continually evolving to improve results.
If you’re running PPC ads with Google AdWords, you must be constantly testing new landing pages and keywords to increase the quality of the traffic coming in through AdWords.
In general, you should be auditing your website, social media accounts, and ad campaigns regularly. If you have a large business or a high-risk industry, you might want to audit everything weekly. Small businesses or those involved in low-risk industries can probably get away with monthly audits.
Ways to audit your website, social media, and ad account
As you know now that auditing is essential to establish relevance, then it’s time to learn how to audit the right way. Yes, there are wrong ways of auditing. But here we will talk about ways to audit your website, social media, and ad account properly.
Audit your website, social media accounts, and Ad account in the following ways:
Website Auditing
Website auditing is an important part of all website management. It is the process of analyzing how well your website performs in terms of conversions, traffic, and search engine rankings.
If you’re not sure what to do, hire an expert to help you out. It’s essential that your site is performing well and not bringing any negative effects on your business. Check the following points to make sure that your site is doing its job:
Mobile compatibility – You must make sure that your site is accessible through all devices. It should be responsive and work well on whatever device people are using to access it.
Content – One of the main reasons why people leave a website immediately after visiting it once is because of its content or lack of content. Content should always be good and up-to-date. People won’t want to visit a site if there isn’t any valuable information on it.
Security – Make sure that your site has an SSL certificate and other security features to keep customer data secured at all times. You also need to come up with a plan for handling cyberattacks for this purpose as well.
Call to action button– Make sure that your call-to-action (CTA) buttons appear on most pages of your website and they’re easy to find and click. Your CTA has to be clear and visible if you want your visitors to click on it – it’s that simple.
Social Media Audit
Social media has gained such prominence that it’s not just a matter of having a presence on it today — it’s also important to know what exactly you’re doing and how you can improve.
One way to do this is through a social media audit, which takes a hard look at what you’re posting and how many followers and engagements you generate on each platform. The idea behind an audit is to make sure your social media marketing is strategic and on point.
If you want to know about your business’s social media presence, here are some key points to check:
- Fan Count
- Engagement Rate
- Loyalty Rate
- Content
- Voice
- Personal branding
Ad Account Audit
There are many advantages to doing an audit for your ad accounts – whether it’s in Google, Bing, or even in Facebook.
The purpose of this audit is to ensure that you’re getting all the benefits from your ad accounts and that they’re not costing you more than they’re giving you.
You can also get all that information into a single place.
The following is the list of points you need to audit on your ad account:
- Account Budget
- Ad Copy
- Landing Page
- Ad Schedule
- Bid Amounts
Why you may need to invest in Auditing Experts
As a business owner, you’re probably already aware that there are a plethora of online tools that will help you optimize your digital presence. While this data can be assembled and reviewed manually, it often requires an expert eye to determine what they mean and how to use them to optimize your digital presence.
There are many different metrics that you can use to measure these various parts of your marketing plan. Each metric will give you different results, so it’s important to know which ones are most important for how you run your business.
For example, if you have a brick-and-mortar store, then the number of visitors that come into your store may be more important than the number of likes that your Facebook page gets.
The process of auditing may also take time because there are multiple aspects that you need to consider when auditing these aspects of your campaign.
You’ll need to look at all the numbers from the past month or quarter so that you can see trends developing to make adjustments as needed.
If you aren’t monitoring many aspects of your online presence, then it won’t do much good to look at the numbers. Instead, you want to have enough data so that you can compare today’s stats.
Although the costs of hiring an agency may seem intimidating, think of it as an investment for your business. Most reputable agencies offer free audits so you and your team can be sure this investment will pay off in the long run.
Be one step ahead of the game
To get from good to great, you have to keep a keen eye on progress. In other words, if you keep an eye on progress, it will move faster. This is pretty much how audits work as well. The more diligently you check for mistakes, typos, and missed opportunities, the closer you are to finding these things and making the necessary adjustments. If one of your marketing efforts isn’t yielding results, it might be time to call in an expert for an audit.
