A marketing audit is a comprehensive, systematic analysis of the business marketing environment of an organization, both internal and external. It covers the organization’s goals, objectives, strategies, and principles in order to identify any problems or areas of opportunity and recommend a course of action that best suits the needs of the business.

It is an incredibly useful tool that freelancers can use in order to fully understand the current marketing ecosystem at their disposal, formulate a distinct marketing strategy, and solve any underlying issues that may be revealed through the audit process. A marketing audit provides management with an in-depth look at the marking operations of the business, which enables us to evaluate the performance, budget, and resources available.

So, what are the components of a successful Marketing Audit?

• The audit needs to be comprehensive. An audit should cover all areas of marketing, not just areas where a problem is already perceived or areas that the team knows they excel in. A holistic audit is the best way to uncover opportunities and can highlight previously unknown areas of strength.

• The audit needs to be systematic. Order and efficiency are key elements of a successful marketing audit. To ensure that your audit doesn’t have any gaps, you need to account for each and every environment, principle, strategy, and operation in your organization.

• The audit needs to be regular and recurring. Some companies only conduct an audit when things are going horribly wrong, but as we all know, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Conducting periodic marketing audits enables your team to discover problems early and solve them. 

Use a Traffic Audit to Determine Campaign Effectiveness

View general traffic to your sites and socials via Google Analytics. Statistics to overview the efficacy of your campaign effectiveness would be:  

• Did the number of page views increase over last year (more traffic);

• Did the number of users increase over last year (more people);

• Was average session duration higher than last year (people stay longer); and

• Is the number of sessions per user higher (people are returning more often).   

Check Your Overall Search Position

When you first log into Google Search Console, you’ll be on the Performance tab. Click the top right of that block on “Open Report.” Change the date to the calendar year. There are a couple of things you can quickly check in this view: total clicks, total impressions and average position.

First, click “Average Position” and then uncheck any others so you only see one stat. The goal here is to see that average position number lower over time, which means you’re appearing higher in the search results. This number includes all search terms people have used and your site has been in the result list, including some you may not want. Overall you want the average position to be improving, so check the graph trend and make sure it climbs higher over time.

Next, check Total Impressions (and uncheck others). This is the number of impressions your website (and therefore your business) is getting in search results. Make sure that the graph is showing an upward trend, as well. 

The third piece to check is Total Clicks (and uncheck others). This is the number of people clicking through to your website from a search result. Again, you want to see an overall upward trend in the graph.

Insights

Insights are essentially a marketing audit for social media. YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google so don’t forget to add list to your list of social media priorities.
Keep an eye on two main things; total reach and total engaged users.
Facebook cares about engagement. View which posts overall have the most engagement, plus by each color code.
Use insights data to determine what types of content are performing best with your audience, so you know what to replicate.  

All in all, this information is super important and a great tool to better our business. Essentially, a downward trend is a red flag – especially if that downward trend does not recover. This is something you need to research further by running a full SEO audit to start researching causes and determine possible fixes.