The Ultimate Guide of Digital Marketing Audit to generate instant profits for your E-com Business

15 min read

Oct 16, 2021

A study was conducted by the combined forces of the University of Groningen, Aston Business School, and McKinsey & Co (UK) to find out the marketing challenges in the digital era. It found out that 777 marketing executives lists – Filling ''talent gaps" and implementing "actionable metrics" are two crucial issues.

So you need to understand that actionable metrics are important to nurture results. And to find out the right focus area, you need to perform regular digital marketing audits.

You already know that digital marketing is time-taking and even expensive. You even heard some horrible stories of marketing disasters - where people spend a lot of money with no returns. Overspending ads, missing opportunities, unconverted carts - are some of the darkest nightmares for you as an e-com business owner. So, what to do?

What should you do to avoid losses and make profits? It is one of those questions which I will answer in this blog.

We are living in a noisy world of marketing. And it is critical to have a competitive advantage.

Everyone is craving for sales and conversion. There are two ways to increase profit in a business

Save unnecessary losses.
Find opportunities to get more customers.

So, if you do a digital marketing audit - it could help you do both. But how?

In this ultimate guide of digital auditing, you’ll learn about :

the significance of digital marketing audit.
How to perform a quick and profitable digital marketing audit.
Tips to optimize your eCommerce websites and improve their performance
How to save time, money, and excessive efforts with the help of one AI-based app.
Ultimately you’ll be one step ahead in optimizing your websites.

Who’s this guide for?

This guide for digital marketing audit is created for e-Com business owners, digital marketing managers, and solopreneurs who:

Wanted to boost their revenue by identifying and eliminating problems in their marketing campaign.
Who wants to learn about the significance of digital marketing audit and how to conduct it smoothly.
For developing a mindset of auditing and saving bucks on ad spend, optimize their landing pages for better results, and shift their focus to the things that matter.

So, at the end of this guide, you'll develop a mindset of testing and auditing your eCommerce websites. You'll get to learn about audit prerequisites. You'll learn about an actionable plan for performing digital audits. So keep reading till the end.

What is a digital marketing audit?

But before we start digging into the importance of an online marketing audit. Let me tell you about the digital marketing audit.

It is a crucial business document that shows the details of the execution of your digital marketing strategies. It evaluates all key efforts an organization undertakes on different digital marketing channels. It depicts the key information about the website's performance.

A digital marketing audit helps in making critical marketing decisions. But why is it so important for you?

Why should you perform a digital marketing audit regularly?

The digital marketing audit is a decisive factor in developing a successful marketing strategy. But it is also important for getting a realistic view of marketing activities. It would help in getting actual performance data for management. But conducting an audit has many other significant impacts on the whole business strategy. But how?

A digital marketing audit is a quality check to keep things aligned and get things done. A digital audit will help you optimize your websites. It will tell you about underperforming products and show you the alarming budget eating factors. All backed by solid data insights, making a digital audit more significant.

Importance of digital marketing audit for digital agencies -

Digital marketing agencies conduct audits to get crucial insights into marketing campaigns.

But most importantly to answer the following questions -

How are we performing in our digital marketing efforts?
Are we achieving our marketing goals?
Are we overspending or underspending the budget?
What are the relevant changes we need to make to optimize our digital channels?
How to set new marketing goals?

For a digital agency, it is crucial to conduct regular audits to get more relevant data on their performing and non-performing strategies. It will help them to keep a check on their roadmap and keep tweaking to increase performance.

Importance of digital audit for eCommerce business owners -

For an e-com business owner, it is critical to have actual data of your invested money. That's why you need to conduct digital marketing audits regularly.

But what are the benefits of performing a time-consuming task like audits? You'll get to know five important answers -

You can finally make new budgets.
You can restructure and align teams according to your new marketing strategies to fill the gaps.
Now you know about key performance areas after an audit.
You can now make strategic decisions for your business.
Now you know if you need to appraise your digital agency or to change it.

As of now, you know the significance of performing a digital audit of your online marketing efforts. But how?

So, in the next section, we will discuss the practical strategies of conducting a digital marketing audit. So read on.

How to conduct a digital marketing audit?

Before deciding to conduct a digital audit, you need to adopt a detective mindset.

It would be best if you considered analyzing everything in which you invested your hard-earned money.

Mindset before auditing -

Firstly keep in mind that to succeed in the digital world, you need to keep everything at the test. A testing mindset is the right approach to save tons of money in wrong efforts.

Then, you have to develop a wide lens to investigate everything happening in your marketing campaigns. You can't afford to miss any critical information. So, it is crucial not to leave any rock unturned.

The audit should include every digital marketing channel. So, it will be an intense activity to conduct a digital audit. So, keep yourself calm and focused.

Prerequisite before digital marketing auditing -

It would help if you considered the following aspects before conducting a digital audit -

Have plenty of time. It will take hours to complete a considerable audit. Many agencies demand around two weeks of turnaround time. But don't worry, you will soon find your secret tool doing all your analyzing and auditing work in minutes without spending a fortune.
Define the scope of your digital audit. For example, a performance audit for the last three months' activities or an expense audit for the previous month's marketing activities.
Keep a separate data storage to separate your marketing activities from your auditing activities. It must need to be unbiased.
Be ready to provide access to your different digital channels, including websites, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Keyword Planner, social media dashboards, etc.
To perform a digital audit, you will need digital tools like google console, google analytics, etc., to get your audit data and make sense of it. So be ready with these analytical tools.

Now, it's time to perform an actionable digital marketing audit. So, what are the key areas to perform this audit?

Key Areas for Actionable Digital Marketing Audit -

There are seven critical areas to do your marketing audit. These areas will include all the aspects and efforts of your digital marketing strategy.

Website audit (Includes website pages, landing page, product pages)
SEO audit
Paid media marketing audit

Website Audit -

It is the major part of your whole digital audit program. And the most important section is the traffic audit.

Traffic audit -

It will let you know the different sources of traffic, their quality, and trends.

Start by login into your Google Analytics and select a time frame for auditing.
Have a look and find out the following questions which will help you in further decisions -
Is your daily, weekly, or monthly traffic trending up or down?
What are the most viewed pages? How are these views changing over time?
What are the best sources of traffic? Is it ad traffic that converted most or organic traffic?
What is the bounce rate? Is it going up or down?
What are the best performing times on-site? In terms of traffic and conversion.
For eCommerce: What is the returning rate of visitors?
After answering the following questions or any other important question in your list, try to dig a bit deeper in terms of demographics.
List out the trends in conversion rate, bounce rate, and other important sources of traffic.

The second important part of a website audit is the UX audit.

UX audit -

UX could have a great impact on conversion. So including a UX audit in your overall audit is essential.

For larger sites, you might also need to do usability tests like Heuristic evaluation.

After that, it could help to see the clicks and heatmaps to identify potential UX issues.

Also, these tools will enable you to see what exactly users see and where they click or didn't click.

SEO audit -

Search Engine Optimization is important to rule the digital world.

It would be best if you improve the technical foundations of your site. By improving your technical SEO, you will increase your chance of being found, indexed, and rank higher by a search engine.

Auditing on-page SEO primarily focused on the crawlability and indexability of your website.

You can keep the following parts in mind while doing an SEO audit -

Sitemaps contain only indexable pages - use the 'Valid' pages category in Google Search Console to find it.
Find out if any page falls in the 'Error' or 'Excluded' categories of Google Search Console.
Please look at the robots.txt file through yourwebsitename.com/robots.txt and make sure that it doesn't block any pages.
Audit your website page load speed by Google's PageSpeed tool.
Look out if it's mobile-friendly or not by using a Mobile-friendly test tool by Google.
Find out if any of your pages fall in the category, such as 404 errors, and point out those issues to remove immediately.
Check for any broken links as Google and users hate broken links.

Paid Marketing Audit -

There is a huge chunk of the marketing budget used for paid marketing. And every underperforming ad spend could cost you a huge fortune. So to keep the budget aligned and make the most out of PPC marketing, you need to focus your digital audit on paid marketing.

The paid marketing will include paid media on social platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn and search engine marketing (SEM).

The paid media on social platforms will be a focused approach as there is a huge ocean of social metrics.

Focus on the product performance - which product is doing great in terms of ROI.
Analysis of target keywords is expensive for the campaign and needs your focus for more investment. It will define both cautions for overspending and opportunities for new keywords.
Track all the necessary activities that lead to conversion. Everything related to direct conversion is an important part of your paid media audit.
Track the linked channels of traffic for your landing pages. Find out which traffic is performing well and which traffic is simply browsing in terms of conversions.
Focus on "Cost per" metrics - like Cost Per Conversion(CPA, Cost per Click (CPC), Cost Per Thousand (CPM), etc.
The efficiency of ad spend is also a defining factor.
Check visibility metrics like impressions, impression share, top of page IS.
Make a separate analysis section for profitability metrics - CPCs, CPA, ROAS, and ROI.
Find out Ad quality - clicks on the ad, CTRs, quality scores, etc.
Check the quality of Ad copy. See if you have enough ad variations and how they are performing in the past period.
Analyze bid strategy and overspending.
Please find out the target keywords and their CTRs, bids per keyword, and their performance changes. Stop spending money on outdated or underperforming keywords.

It is crucial to identify the areas wasting ad spend—where you are still investing in low-performing ads.

So, as of now, we have discussed the importance of a digital marketing audit. Now you know how to conduct your digital marketing audit by using different analytical tools. But there's a huge issue in running a digital audit. What's that?

The issue is - digital auditing is a time-consuming and very intensive exercise. It takes a lot of effort to make sense of vast data. You've to keep an eye on Google Analytics and Google Search Console. You've to understand the meaning of Facebook business manager and its metrics. And so on.

So, what to do? Do you have to ignore a digital marketing audit? But you can't afford to overlook an e-com audit. But there's a life-saving solution for this problem.

The secret auditing tool - heybooster

It is an AI-based solution for all of your digital marketing auditing problems. It will not only help you understand the vast data but also make sense of it.

How would heybooster help you in performing digital marketing audits?

heybooster will help cut the stress of excessive data and provide you with a meaningful solution on a single screen.

Through the heybooster digital marketing auditing feature, you will run a complete audit without stressing about time or manual mistakes.

Here's how heybooster will help you in digital marketing audit -

Analysis data from Google Analytics and other tools like Google Search Console etc.
It will analyze the data about your ad spends on different channels.
heybooster will help you in finding best performing keywords and tell you how much to spend on them. It will tell you where to stop biding more.
It will come up with a meaningful message on various investments.
heybooster will also alert you for non-performing products and tell you where to stop selling them. It will also tell you about different opportunities to increase sales by focusing on cross platforms for converting traffic.
It will tell you where you are overspending and which ad is underperforming.
heybooster will help you with campaign performance audits. It will ensure that each penny spends, helps you in making dollars.
heybooster will help you boost Google ads ROAS.
heybooster will help you in optimizing the landing page for better traffic conversion.
It will continuously alert you to all essential marketing priorities.
heybooster will tell you which product is spending the most without any modifications.
It will ensure you utilize your budget at best.
And being an AI-based tool, heybooster will keep improving with time while analyzing all set data.
It will also help you to improve your campaign performance.
heybooster will help you in setting goals and focusing on reasonable KPIs.

heybooster will do hours of leg work in analyzing vast data; it will show you all important data as per your set priorities. It will adapt your style and work as your assistant, solving all auditing problems.

heybooster will notice any unnoticed changes and alert you for them. It will ensure that no issues remain unattended. heybooster also performs audits for you to unearth any hidden problems that are eating your budget. It will also suggest you require improvements to boost campaign quality in terms of ROI.

So, if you want to perform better with your digital marketing strategies, you can try heybooster as your helping hand as an analyzing, auditing, and alarming indicator.

Get your heybooster now - let it do the hard work for you.

Tips to optimize eCommerce website after running a digital marketing audit

After performing a digital marketing audit, you'll get to know many metrics. Now is the time to optimize your eCommerce website. Here are a few tips.

Please focus on the best sources of converting traffic and continuously optimize it to increase ROI.
Increase and test your budget on best-performing ads and their placements.
Stop wasting money, time, and efforts on underperforming channels.
Stop investing in the branded keywords which lost their charm.
Increase your ad spend at the most converted timings.
Focus on the right demographics and create content according to your best-converting audiences.
Change the placement of your ads that have a high bounce rate & high CTR.
Increase your marketing budget for new opportunities on new marketing channels.
Stop marketing your upselling products and shift your focus on the new ones - marketing trends and product demand keep changing with time.

Conclusion

After analyzing every data, you are now able to perform a profitable digital marketing audit.

Now, you get an understanding of the importance of digital marketing audits.

You've got the idea of performing different audits like website audit, SEO audit, and PPC audit. Now you've got a command to make sense of all that data and utilize it in your future strategies.

Now, go on and perform your next digital marketing audit with confidence. After your next audit, you might develop different ideas to improve your marketing performance, optimize your websites, and increase sales for yourself and your clients.

Also, you now have a fair idea of heybooster, our fantastic tool to analyze all of your marketing data and come up with sensible statements and alerts.

So, if you want to perform better in the digital world and save a lot of money - try heybooster.

It will help you in understanding critical data and making sense of them. Get your first-hand experience of heybooster digital auditing, right away.