If you’ve been hired to take over a digital marketing project, your first order of business should be to understand and analyze what came before. This not only will help you see the big picture and learn what needs to be fixed, but will help you prioritize your efforts. Follow the steps below to make big improvements quickly and look like a hero in your new bosses’ eyes!
Create a marketing strategy
All marketing should accomplish some kind of goal, whether it’s building awareness, acquiring leads, or increasing sales. This goal and how it fits into the larger needs of your business should be very clear. If it’s not, you want to start by creating a marketing strategy. If you need help, read my primer on how to create a basic marketing strategy.
Choose your digital marketing metrics
To measure the level of success of your marketing efforts, it’s important to think about two sets of metrics: (1) immediate, short-term metrics that tell you whether you are basically going in the right direction; and (2) long-term metrics that tell you whether you are actually creating or destroying value for your company.
In B2C businesses, the short-term metrics are usually sales, but it could be less hard-edged metrics (like visits or engagements) if awareness is your primary focus, or sales leads if your customers have a length purchase cycle. Usually, your target is a certain marketing cost per sale (sometimes called CPA — cost per acquisition) or sales revenue per dollar of spend (sometimes called ROAS — return on ad spend). The B2C long-term metric, however, should be about customer lifetime value — because often the cost to acquire a new customer is much higher than the actual profit generated by that single first sale. Ask yourself, what is the total return on a customer, given repeat sales or returns? How does the cost to acquire a customer compare to the lifetime profit that the customer generates? Note that I say “profit”: revenue is often easy to measure, but it’s not enough to calculate your return on investment.
In B2B businesses, the short-term metric is often cost per lead (CPL), because B2B sales typically have an extended sales process. And that’s where a lot of marketers’ concerns end; everything after lead acquisition is the responsibility (or fault) of the sales team. But that’s a dangerously oversimplified approach: lead quality — that is, the percentage of leads that turn into sales — almost always varies greatly by channel. That’s why you need a long-term metric like marketing cost per sale, marketing cost per first-year revenue, or, to go to the ultimate metric, customer acquisition cost (CAC, including the cost of sales) vs. lifetime customer value (LTV).
The problem with all the long-term metrics is that it often takes weeks, if not months or years, to gather enough data to make a proper evaluation. In contrast, short-term metrics are usually easy to calculate and are in your face every day. As a result, it’s very common for companies to focus entirely on the short-term metrics and never even consider the long-term ones. A good marketer, however, will identify and analyze both — and if you have the data, you should do it as part of an overall marketing audit.
Select one digital marketing channel to focus on
Don’t boil the ocean: every marketing channel is different. Ideally, start by focusing on a single channel with high spend, high lead volume, and high conversion rates. Usually, this means Google Ads or Facebook Ads.
Personally, I prefer to start with Google Ads because (1) I know the channel like the back of my hand; (2) lead volume and conversion rates are usually higher than almost any other channel; (3) the insight it offers has incredible implications for SEO, landing pages, and conversion paths, and website design; and (4) it provides very quick feedback for testing new ideas. But you do you.
In any case, the audit process below will work for any digital marketing channel, although each channel has its own particulars (I’m looking at you, search, with all your crazy keyword matching challenges).
Determine if tracking is working
Now look at those short-term metrics you selected above. Do the existing campaigns give you the information you need to evaluate those metrics? It is not uncommon — even for companies that have been doing digital marketing for years — for conversion tracking to be damaged or incomplete. Never trust that the plumbing is working just because somebody tells you it is.
Find your ads in the wild and pretend to be a customer. Click on the ad and go through your lead or purchase process. How did the conversion process feel? Did the click register in the channel’s own dashboard? Did the conversion? Did it get into your CRM system too? How about your marketing automation system? If anything is wrong or lost or confusing, you can be reasonably sure that you are losing live customers, and you need to fix that right away. This likely will require technical assistance from your web designer, web developers, digital agency, or marketing operations team, so don’t be afraid to ask for help.
I don’t believe there’s any point in making campaign optimizations while tracking is broken. Focus on fixing both the tracking and reporting until you think the system works. You can keep auditing, but be warned that as long as tracking is broken, you can’t trust any of the data you have.
While you’re here, see if your tracking is also working and suitable for your long-term metrics. If lead acquisition data is not “sticking” to your most successful customers, you should fix that too. You need to know where your best customers came from or it will be hard to improve.
Measure your baseline results
Once you are sure tracking is working, measure and archive your short-term metrics and, if possible, your long-term metrics too. Are they OK? Do they meet marketing goals? Do they accomplish company goals as well? (Typically, companies are more concerned about sales revenue, sales volume, and total profit.)
If tracking was not working in the past, let the now-fixed campaigns run for a week or more and collect this data before you make changes. You’ll want this information later to show how much you’re about to improve things!
Evaluate account & campaign structure
A secondhand account is usually a confusing and spaghetti-like mess of live, dead, paused, and expired campaigns. To focus, try your best to understand all live campaigns. Also look at any defunct campaigns that have spent considerable sums in the past. Ask yourself:
- How are these campaigns organized and labeled?
- Do the campaign names actually reflect what they are doing? If not, what are they actually doing?
- How do campaigns compare in terms of short- and long-term metrics?
- Does this whole structure make any sense?
Note that you may not be able to answer these questions until you analyze the individual campaigns more thoroughly, using the following steps.
Evaluate targeting
Try to understand how each major campaign is targeted and whom each campaign actually reaches. Major targeting techniques are:
- Geographic: Where are you targeting? Using what regional division? Does the target location make sense? Are there any holes in your coverage?
- Demographics & Interests: What are the characteristics of the people you are targeting? Which types of people actually saw your ads, by age/gender/income/whatever?
- Keywords: This is the name of the game in search marketing. What keywords are people searching for? What is the intention behind those searches? What keyword matching approaches are you using? (You can read more about things to look for in my article “The Future of Search Marketing.”)
- Technology: Are there differences in results between mobile and desktop users? Mac and PC?
Note that targeting an audience doesn’t mean that you’re actually getting to them. Look at your reports and see who actually saw your ad and who reacted. It’s very common to target a large geographic area, say, and to have all your impressions go to a few cities disproportionate to their populations.
Note anything that doesn’t make sense here. Are you missing audiences or marketing to audiences that don’t care? These are often very easy issues to fix.
Evaluate ads & copy
Next, look at your ads:
- Do your ads and other copy make sense? Are they appropriate for the audience?
- Are the ads well-written? Are there spelling mistakes? (I have learned not to be surprised if there are.)
- Are the ads attractive? Do they reflect your visual brand?
- Does the messaging set up the promise of your brand? Do the ads and copy reflect your company’s value proposition for the targeted audience? (If you don’t know your brand, then it’s time to create one.)
- Do they explain why someone would click? Is it obvious what will happen next?
Do not measure ad effectiveness by click-through rates. Ultimately, an ad has to be evaluated on how well it sets up prospective customers to take the action you want them to take.
Evaluate the conversion process
Analyze your landing pages and purchase/sign-up flow. Remember that an ad makes a promise; the landing page fulfills on that promise. If a landing page is distracting or otherwise not good, you’re probably losing customers.
- Are you using your home page as your landing page? (Not good, in most cases.)
- Does the landing page follow naturally from the targeting audience and ad?
- Does the landing page make it clear what to do next?
- Does the landing page provide enough information and indicators of trust to convince people to trust you with their money and personal information?
- Is the conversion process short, simple, and easy to understand?
- Does the landing page provide quality indicators that let your channel trust it? (Quality Score and similar measures are particularly important for Google and Facebook.)
Evaluate budgets and bidding
Most digital channels have some kind of variable pricing approach. How these are set varies immensely, so you need to understand everything your channel can do, rather than just assuming that a past approach was best.
- How are bids being managed? If they are automated, what is the automation system optimizing to? Does the optimization algorithm make sense?
- How are budgets managed? Does the system spend all your budget, or does it hold back if you don’t have good opportunities?
Evaluate results
Naturally, you want to look at your results by campaign. But don’t stop there: you should also analyze individual audiences, keywords, ads, and landing pages to determine whether they were successful or not. This will tell you a huge amount — and obviously, you should quickly spend more on what is working and stop spending on what isn’t. Sometimes you can reduce the cost per conversion by 40% or more just by optimizing these factors.
Create your digital marketing action plan
Once you complete your analysis, you probably have hundreds of ideas about things to fix and test. Sort them in order of expected impact, and get to work! I typically give myself a week or two to make fixes, carry out obvious optimizations, and start a few new tests. Then I observe what’s happening before I move on to the next channel.
Note that focusing on one channel at a time does not clarify attribution issues — that is, how all your channels work together to create your total cost per acquisition. But if you don’t fix the individual channels, all your attribution modeling will be worthless anyway. So straighten out each channel first, and then you can move on to the challenges of attribution.
Conclusion: Is a digital marketing audit worth it?
Let’s be honest: audits are all about looking backwards, and that can feel boring or tedious when you have a big challenge ahead. But with a few weeks of work, a good digital marketing audit will propel you to success and save you thousands of dollars – if not millions. In short order, it will also make you the resident expert on what marketing works and what doesn’t. So give it a try! Or contact me if you need help.