Conducting a comprehensive digital marketing audit helps businesses gain insights into current strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats across key areas of their strategy and execution. An audit provides an organized, objective overview of what’s working, what’s not, and where improvements can drive the biggest impact. It ensures alignment across teams, optimizes limited resources, and guides focused progress toward important business goals.
Before creating a digital marketing audit checklist, determine objectives and key metrics that will determine success. Then identify all channels, platforms, tools, content, campaigns, partnerships, and other initiatives currently leveraged for marketing purposes. Evaluate how effectively each element supports identified goals and the overall customer journey. Assess integration between channels as well as alignment with brand messaging and company values.
What are a Digital Marketing Audit and its importance?
A Digital Marketing Audit refers to evaluating key areas of your digital marketing strategy and execution to determine what’s working, what needs improvement, and where opportunities exist for greater optimization, impact and return on investment. Audits are important for several reasons:
- Gains Valuable Insights: An audit provides an objective, data-driven understanding of strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities across channels, content, campaigns, metrics, technologies, resources and more. You gain insights to enhance strategies, prioritize efforts and make smarter decisions.
- Drives Focus and Alignment: Audits ensure all teams and initiatives are working toward the same key goals and objectives. They surface dependencies and opportunities to leverage synergies, eliminating wasted effort from misalignment or lack of integration. Focus improves efficiency, effectiveness and results.
- Optimizes Limited Resources: Most companies operate with constraints around budget, time, tools, and staff. An audit helps determine where to allocate resources for maximum potential return and impact. It reveals underperformance and lesser priorities to divest or reduce investment.
- Improves Optimization: Audits evaluate how effectively you are reaching key audiences, engaging users, boosting key metrics like traffic, conversions, revenue and ROI. They uncover gaps in skills, strategies, tools or data preventing you from optimizing performance and staying competitive. Recommendations can then guide continuous optimization.
- Increases Accountability: A good audit provides objective criteria for evaluating performance and determining responsibility. It holds leaders, teams, agencies and other stakeholders accountable for progress against important goals and metrics. Regular audits also provide opportunities to re-evaluate strategies as needed to meet evolving business needs.
- Drives Progress and Impact: Ultimately, audits identify opportunities to improve marketing’s impact on key business objectives. By optimizing strategies, allocating resources strategically and focusing effort on high-priority initiatives, audits help marketing drive stronger growth, higher customer satisfaction, greater brand awareness and other critical metrics.
Preparing for the Audit
Preparing for an audit ensures you gain maximum value from the process and are able to implement recommendations effectively. Determine specific objectives and metrics that will determine success. What key business goals do marketing support? What are the most important channels, audiences or campaigns to optimize? Define measurable metrics, benchmarks and timeframes against which progress and impact will be evaluated.
Gather any and all information required to thoroughly evaluate your strategy and execution. This includes details on campaign objectives, target audiences, strategies, workflows, tools, partnerships, marketing funnels, key performance indicators, resources involved, budgets allocated and results achieved. Request input from cross-functional teams on their perspective and experiences. The more comprehensive the data and insights, the more comprehensive solutions can be.
The Digital Marketing Audit Checklist
A comprehensive audit checklist evaluates marketing strategies and execution objectively, determines focus areas and key metrics to optimize, inspires recommendations to strengthen competitive advantage and drive impact, providing insights for aligning efforts, innovating continuously and building excellence systematically across teams, channels and partnerships. A comprehensive digital marketing audit checklist should cover the following areas:
Website Strategy and Optimization
- Key goals and objectives of the website. Align with business goals?
- Target audiences and key messaging for each audience persona. Consistent across site?
- Integration of content strategy. Does site support key customer journeys and goals?
- Optimization of site architecture, internal linking, tags, metadata, etc. Easy to navigate?
- Optimization of load speed and mobile-friendliness. Impact on UX and key metrics?
- Regular website audits to evaluate new opportunities or issues. Process for implementation?
SEO Strategy and Implementation
- Organic search goals (traffic, traffic quality, rankings, etc.) and progress against goals.
- Keyword research, selection and optimization. Integrated with content and product strategies?
- On-page optimization of key pages. How do they rank vs. goals and competitors? Areas for improvement?
- Off-page optimization of links, partnerships, sponsorships, citations, etc. Building high-quality links?
- Monitoring of competitor analytics, rankings and strategies. Staying one step ahead? Any risks of being outdated?
- Resources and tools used. Effective for goals, fully leveraged, integrated? New opportunities?
Conducting the Audit
With objectives set, information gathered and checklists prepared, you are ready to conduct an impactful digital marketing audit. Here are some tips for leading an effective audit process:
- Define scope and timeline- Will the audit evaluate all areas of marketing or focus on select strategies/channels? How frequently will audits be conducted? Set realistic timeframes for completing evaluation, determining recommendations and implementing changes. Leave room for pivots or expanding scope.
- Share checklists and objectives- Ensure all stakeholders, including agency partners, understand what will be evaluated and why. Discuss key goals, metrics, benchmarks and timeframes for progress. Align on scope, approach and any subset audits needed.
- Gather data and examples- Have information, reports, stats, URLs, content examples, campaign details and other evidence ready to evaluate effectiveness and optimize opportunities. Share work to gain outside perspectives.
Conclusion
A digital marketing audit checklist provides the structured yet flexible framework needed for evaluating marketing strategy and execution. By determining key business goals and metrics, gathering relevant data, defining scope and timeframe, sharing objectives with stakeholders, and obtaining balanced input, you set the foundation for an effective audit.
A comprehensive checklist covers high-level business strategy as well as tactical details across marketing channels, technologies, tools, content, campaigns, partnerships, resources, budgets and key metrics. It allows for evaluating both “what” is being done as well as “why”. Gaining this holistic yet multidimensional perspective enables optimized insights, focus and alignment.
