How to do an audit for digital strategy

If you have started a digital marketing agency and you don’t know how to do a digital marketing audit, then my friend you are headed for a loss. It is very important for you to have this skill otherwise you will not be able to judge what your clients’ digital strategy lacks and how to make it better. And this goes without saying that if you can’t make your clients digital strategy better, then by default, your digital marketing agency will be doomed.

That said, no one would start the digital marketing agency before even knowing the basics. But you could be a client and you need to know the basic understanding of the audit so as to be sure that your agency is not fooling you. So to be on the same page with your agency, here is a quick guide to understand how to do the audit.

There are a lot of aspects to cover when you start doing the audit but there are some aspects that are necessary, others can be optional. The necessary ones include, quantitative analysis, qualitative analysis, website crawl, channel breakdown, and accessibility.
We will spend some time on each.

If you hated math in school, tough luck, you will never be free of it. Quantitative analysis is deeply embedded in this digital audit. In fact, the best game is the game of numbers. So put up with some of number and you will be done with major part of it. I mean isn’t it just easier, some numbers can indicate your strategy is flawed while another number can tell you that it’s correct?

So these numbers appear in front of you in the shape of Google Analytics Data, Social media metrics, PPC ads reports, Historic SEO rank tracking data, E-commerce purchase funnel data, CRM data and reports etc.

The most effective researches from my undergraduate study time were those that combined qualitative data with the quantitative ones. Therefore, once you are done with the quantitative analysis, get experts to look at all your digital assets. After looking at the digital landscape they will have a clearer idea of where your website stands in terms of website design and consequently the user experience, the social media content, brand messaging, email design, and much more.

So what happens here is that an automated service crawls your website and highlights technical problems on it. Some agencies doing the audit for you are doing this only and give you the information gained from the crawl. But it is not to say that website crawls are somehow unimportant. It is always useful to know if your website has broken links, missing title tags, duplicated content or the site has just poor performance.