The Digital Marketing Audit for Business Owners and Marketing Managers

First things first, where is my marketing budget invested.

The longer term goal of digital marketing is to be able to measure the ROI of each marketing dollar invested. However this is a not an overnight process requiring multiple layers of tracking and weeks of implementation. It is also not a simple exercise requiring a digital focused professional to implement online and offline tracking technologies.

In the mean time it is important to develop skills that enable you to audit whoever is managing your different advertising and marketing channels. Below is a quick check list and a starting point for your education in this area.

Paid Search Questions to ask your Paid Search manager

Please send me a “Search Term Report”?  This details what people actually typed in to Google that resulted in a click through to your website.  It enables you to know if you are paying for relevant traffic or not.  But you first must understand keyword psychology and what is relevant and potentially unprofitable traffic.

  • Have they asked you to set up conversion tracking for your online enquiry forms?
  • Have they asked you to set up phone tracking?
  • Have they set up Google Analytics and integrated it with your Google AdWords account?
  • Have they imported Analytics phone tracking and conversion data into your AdWords platform?
  • Have they calculated your Cost Per Conversion from both website enquiries, live chat and phone enquiries?

Is your Cost Per Conversion more than the profit margin of the life time value of a new customer?

SEO questions to ask your SEO manager

  • Which keywords are you aiming to have ranking in the top 3 positions on Google, Yahoo and Bing?
  • Please send me a rank report of these keywords each month?  (shows positive or negative movement of keywords each month)
  • Are you building high quality links focused around all my keywords.  Please show the links that have been built on high quality content sites.  ( you do not want excessive directory links or links from spammy looking sites or link farms.)
  • Are they encouraging you to write blogs and do they use quality content writers to assist. (no content spinning)
  • Have they created a keyword mapping document to improve your site navigation and meta structure.
  • Are you using a structured format for my site with schema tags, meta data, canonical tags

This gives you an upper hand in knowing if your SEO company is applying quality SEO. With the above key questions you can be confident if your SEO company is covering off the most important elements of the entire SEO process.