Digital Marketing Audit: What It Is, What It Includes, and How to Do It

Digital marketing is more complex and important than ever. Omnichannel customer journeys, multiple touch points, metrics from different sources... all of these make it difficult to obtain a global view of what is happening.

That’s why performing a digital marketing audit allows you to make sure you are not missing anything important. In this article, we’ll explain what a digital marketing audit consists of, the sections and channels it includes, and how to do it step-by-step.

What Is a Digital Marketing Audit?

A digital marketing audit is an analysis and review of all the actions and strategies that a company has carried out to establish and improve its online presence.

This process seeks to answer questions about its business model, how it will capture leads and customers, its most and least effective channels, how content marketing and advertising strategies should be integrated, and more.

Ideally, you should conduct digital marketing audits on a regular basis, as they bring multiple benefits to companies:

• They allow you to obtain an objective view of business results and marketing strategies to detect possible opportunities for improvement.
• They help you make better marketing decisions and set priorities correctly.
• They contribute to improving your brand's presence on the Internet.
• They improve your company's results by detecting potential problems and opportunities and aligning digital actions with an overall business model.

What Should a Digital Marketing Audit Include?

Main Sections

• Definition of objectives. It’s often said that in marketing, what isn’t measured doesn’t exist. For your digital marketing audit to be really effective, you must define what you want to achieve with it and a series of metrics that will help you understand whether you have achieved it or not.
• Analysis of the starting situation of the brand, both in terms of digital presence and business objectives, evolution and future prospects, implementation in different markets, and more.
• Analysis of the brand's digital channels. Here you must include all the online channels that the brand has some kind of presence on and analyze the actions carried out on them and the results they yielded. In the following section, we provide a list of channels that you can take into account.
• Analysis of the competition and the sector. You should establish the brand's main competitors and analyze their presence in the different online channels to identify their strengths and weaknesses. You should also include an analysis of the main trends within your sector.

Main Channels

• Website: this is one of the most important elements of a digital marketing audit. In this section, you should analyze aspects such as design, user experience, or site performance.
• SEO positioning: In this section, you should evaluate and measure the performance of your brand in search engines. You should analyze what searches your website appears for and how it’s positioned compared to the competition. You should also include an evaluation of your website (loading speed, mobile adaptation, broken links, alternative texts, meta descriptions, rich content...) and an external analysis (off-site SEO).
• Mobile applications: If your brand has one or more mobile applications, you should also include them in the digital marketing audit, analyzing aspects such as user behavior in the application, in-app purchases, or positioning in app stores (ASO).
• Email marketing: Email marketing is a fundamental part of online strategies due to its versatility and high ROI. In this section, you should analyze the quality of your database and the performance of emails based on metrics such as open and click rates.
• Social networks: For many companies, social networks are a key element of their digital presence. The digital marketing audit should include a list of all the social networks the brand is active on and an analysis of the actions taken (post frequency, type of content, tone, style, etc.) and the results (through metrics such as the traffic generated from social networks or engagement with the company's posts).
• Digital advertising: Last but not least, a digital marketing audit wouldn’t be complete without including the paid actions carried out by the company. This includes all types of online campaigns, such as pay-per-click advertising on social networks and search engines, banners, affiliate marketing, and native advertising. The analysis should differentiate between the advertising objectives of each action (awareness, lead generation, app downloads, conversions...) and include the most relevant metrics, such as web traffic, quality of ads, or ROAS (return on advertising investment).

How to Do a Digital Marketing Audit, Step by Step

1. Define Your Business Model

The ultimate goal of a digital marketing audit is to contribute to the overall results of the company. Therefore, the first thing you need to be very clear about is what the brand's business model is, what its sources of revenue are, and how digital marketing contributes to them.

In short, you need to be able to define what the key objectives of your marketing plan are and how you are going to measure them.

2. Do a SWOT Analysis

The SWOT is a tool used to understand a company’s situation in depth, so we recommend applying it to your brand to better understand the state of your digital marketing efforts.

The SWOT Analysis Consists of the Following Sections:

• Strengths and weaknesses: These two sections represent the internal state of your company’s marketing strategy. You should focus on the current situation of the company and the capabilities of the marketing team.
• Opportunities and threats: These two sections refer to external factors, i.e. the market demand and competitive situation. It’s very important to analyze what the trends are, both in the industry and with the digital marketing channels you are using.

3. Audit Your SEO

SEO is a critical factor for your company's long-term visibility and performance, so you need to have a complete picture of what's going on. The SEO audit should include the following sections:

• On-page SEO analysis: Here you should take note of your site's content, the keywords it is ranking for, internal links, rich content, image optimization, and more.
• Technical issues: Using a tool such as Google Search Console, identify technical issues that may be affecting your page ranking, such as broken links or non-indexable content.
• Guidelines for optimizing your website: Thee should be based on the issues identified and industry best practices.
• Link-building strategy: Finally, you should define a series of actions to facilitate creating links to your website from other relevant pages.

4. Audit Your Content Marketing

Content marketing is a key pillar in positioning and obtaining traffic, as well as contributing to different objectives throughout the customer journey.

In this section, you should evaluate the quality of existing content in terms of its objectives, analyze the target audience, and define a strategy for consolidating existing content and creating new content.

5. Analyze Your Digital Marketing Channels

A digital marketing audit should include a complete analysis of the company's online channels and competitors, including:

• Email marketing: You should define what role email plays within your strategy and what the results are, as well as subscribe to competitors' mailing lists to analyze their actions.
• Landing pages: Landing pages are a key element of the conversion funnel since that’s where you direct traffic to generate leads. As part of your audit, review your existing landing pages and think about how you can optimize them.
• Social networks: Analyze the different social network channels you have a presence on, the actions carried out, and the results. It’s also beneficial to analyze the user profile of each social network and how it fits with your buyer persona.
• Online advertising: Analysis of paid online advertising actions, such as Google Ads, Social Ads, display campaigns, and more.