Audits are useful tools for many kinds of work. While they may be best known as an aspect of reviewing finances such as taxes, they can actually help you review many of your business’s workflows and processes, including digital marketing. Here are six tips for auditing your digital marketing work.
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1. Automate Your Auditing Process
Depending on the size of your organization and the number of moving parts involved in your digital marketing processes, you may want to consider completely or partially automating your audit. There are data automation tools available that enable the automation of audits involving digital content. Automating your auditing process will ensure you don’t miss anything you want to include in your audit, from order entry software to search engine optimization (SEO) procedures.
2. Create an Inventory
Before you can conduct any kind of audit, you need to know what exactly you’re auditing. The first step of defining what you want to audit is by creating an inventory. You’ll need to record all the information or data, such as website content and social media tags, into a spreadsheet or database. Then, assign unique identification numbers to each section and piece of content so you can keep track of things more easily during the audit. You can also customize your inventory in other ways, such as by color-coding it or by creating labels to denote the owners of each entry and the types of content.
3. Decide Which Audits To Conduct
When you conduct a digital marketing audit, there are three main categories of digital marketing you should consider. You may choose to only audit one or two of these categories or all three of them. These three categories are content, SEO and social media. Each category will have different purposes and aspects, which means each will have different things that need to be reviewed and measured over the course of your audit. For example, if you’re auditing content, you’ll need to measure word count, while social media’s most important measurement might be top posts and SEO’s might be ranking.
4. Choose How To Conduct the Audit
You need to decide whether you want to conduct the audit yourself or work with an outside vendor with plenty of experience auditing digital marketing. There are advantages and disadvantages to both choices. The auditing process can require much time, effort and money, so outsourcing it can free up your employees’ time, as well as your budget and other resources. On the other hand, it also exposes your content and processes to greater risk than what would be posed if you kept your auditing in-house.
5. Build Your Toolbox
If you choose to conduct your audit yourself, then you should build a toolbox of various auditing tools. The tools you choose to use may vary depending on your organization, the amount of data included in your audit and the type of audit you choose to conduct. Look for tools that will enable you to keep your audit organized and to gain as much insight as you can from the audit.
6. Consider Which Models To Use
You may also be able to choose from a variety of auditing models depending on the goals you have for your audit and what you’re trying to learn from the audit. Consider the questions you have and what you want to achieve, and then do some research to determine which model or models will work best for you. One of the most common models is the attribution model. The label attribution model applies to such models as time decay models, position-based models, data-driven models, linear models and first and last click models.
An audit doesn’t necessarily need to follow a strict set of external standards. As long as your auditing process is capable of reviewing your workflows or records and providing you with useful feedback, it can be a helpful tool to have at your disposal.