6 Digital Marketing Audits to Perform Before Q4

Digital marketing audits should be at the top of your to-do list as Q4 approaches, especially for ecommerce brands. These audits, which are vital for ensuring your digital strategy is optimized for the busiest shopping period of the year, can help you proactively identify and fix potential issues within your digital strategy.

What Is A Digital Marketing Audit?

A digital marketing audit is an in-depth review of your online marketing efforts across various digital channels. It involves analyzing and evaluating the effectiveness of your digital strategy, identifying areas of improvement, and implementing changes to enhance overall performance and reach your key performance indicators (KPIs). In addition to helping align your business objectives with your marketing efforts, digital marketing audits help set up your campaigns for success.

There are many different types of digital marketing audits, each with its own purpose, from email marketing audits to content audits. However, when it comes to preparing for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Q4 as a whole, we highly recommend assessing your digital marketing efforts with the following audits.

Audit 1: Paid Search Audit

A comprehensive Paid Search Audit guarantees your Google campaigns are optimized for peak performance, especially as Q4 approaches.

This audit helps identify and address inefficiencies in your campaigns, ensures your ad copy is compelling and resonates with your target audience, uncovers new potential keywords, and much more. Here’s a detailed look at what to review:

Ad Copy and Ad Extensions

The effectiveness of your ad copy and extensions can significantly impact your campaign’s success:

• Relevance and Compelling Nature: Ad copy must be engaging, relevant to your target audience, and inclusive of strong calls-to-action (CTAs). Every word counts, especially during highly-competitive periods like Q4. Incorporate target keywords into the ad copy and maximize the use of all character counts for headlines and descriptions to enhance visibility and impact.
• Fine-Tune Your Messaging: Prioritize tailoring your copy to address the unique objectives and audience needs of each. For brand campaigns, consider a focus on reinforcing brand identity and loyalty by highlighting unique selling propositions and brand values. For non-brand campaigns, prioritize attracting new customers by emphasizing specific benefits, competitive pricing, and clear solutions to common pain points.
• Ad Extensions: Use all relevant ad assets/extensions (e.g., sitelink, callout, and structured snippet extensions) to highlight important information about your offerings and differentiate your brand from competitors. Double check to make sure all extensions are free of spelling errors, just like the rest of your ad copy, to maintain a strong first-impression.

Search Query Report / New Keyword Expansion

The search query report is a goldmine of insights:

• Identify New Keyword Opportunities: Review the search terms that triggered your ads to find new keywords that can drive additional traffic. As you discover search terms that led to conversions, be sure to add those to your keyword list, too!
• Negative Keywords: Identify and exclude irrelevant search terms that are wasting your budget. Refining your keyword list helps improve targeting and reduce wasted spend. Note: if you’re running Broad Match, this step should be done frequently. Depending on traffic volume, this could range from every 2-4 weeks, with high-volume accounts benefiting from weekly reviews.

Campaign Settings

Campaign settings build the base of your campaign:

• Campaign Structure:  Consistent and well-structured campaigns reduce stress during performance-based optimizations on live campaigns. We recommend the following structure:
  • Group campaigns based on your products or services.
  • Create distinct ad groups within each campaign for each product or service category.
  • Populate each ad group with closely related keywords.
• Budget Allocation: Review and adjust budgets to make sure your Black Friday/Cyber Monday/Q4 campaigns are set to receive sufficient budget, and underperforming ones are optimized or paused.
• Bidding Strategies: Evaluate your bidding strategies (e.g., tROAS, tCPA) to confirm the targets are aligned with your goals, whether it’s maximizing clicks, conversions, or ROAS.
• Search Network Analysis: Determine the impact Google’s Search Partner network has on your campaign by looking closely at metrics like CPA and ROAS. If Search Partners align with your account goals and drive valuable traffic, consider keeping them active. If they underperform, it may be wise to turn them off and save the budget.

Audience Targeting

Proper audience targeting guarantees your ads will reach the right people. We recommend layering the following audiences on your campaigns to gather data and review any outliers to determine if they require support through other tactics:

• Demographic Targeting: Review demographic data (age, gender, income, etc.) to confirm your ads are targeting the most relevant segments.
• Affinity Segment Targeting: Utilize audience insights to target users based on their interests, hobbies, and habits.
• In-Market Segment Targeting: Target high-intent shoppers actively researching or planning specific products or services based on their current shopping behaviors.
• Life Event Targeting: Target individuals undergoing significant life transitions, such as moving homes, getting married, or adding a new pet to the household.
• Remarketing: Target existing customers to encourage re-conversions through your website, app, or YouTube.
• Custom Segments: Create audiences based on interests, the types of websites people browse, and the types of apps people use. Note: This option is available only for Google Display, Demand Gen, and Video campaigns.

A/B Testing

Determine how every aspect of your ad campaigns impacts your results:

• Ad Copy: Test variations in headlines, ad descriptions, and ad assets (extensions).
• Ad Creative: Identify which creatives resonate with your target audience based on the campaign type and funnel stage. Note: this test can be run only on ad types with images, such as Display, Shopping, and Performance Max campaigns.
• Landing Page: Test driving your ads to various landing pages in order to determine which on-site content leads to the most engagement from your target audience.
• Audience Targeting: Learn how different audiences respond to the same ad variations. Note: this test can be run only if you’re using audience targeting for your ad campaigns.
• Product Description: Test different variations of product descriptions to identify what resonates with your audience. Read best practices for A/B tests on Shopping ads here. Note: This test can be run only on Shopping ads.
• Bid: Test different bid amounts and bidding strategies to confirm you’re maximizing your ROAS. Note: it’s important to make sure your bid is high enough to capture a good percentage of impressions and rank toward the top ad results but not so high that you waste ad spend and increase customer acquisition costs (CAC).

Why It’s Important

By conducting a thorough Paid Search Audit, you can identify and address potential issues, optimize your campaigns for better performance, and assure your marketing efforts are aligned with your business goals as you head into the critical Q4 period.

Audit 2: Paid Social Audit

A comprehensive Paid Social Audit helps you create more targeted social media campaigns, improve brand messaging, and gain a stronger competitive edge.

This audit ensures your paid social strategy aligns with your overall business goals while analyzing your campaigns, evaluating strategies, and identifying areas for improvement. Here’s a detailed look at what to review:

Performance Metrics

Analyze performance from last year’s Q4 to anticipate budgets and performance during peak moments:

• Conversion Rate (CVR): Distinguish between micro-conversions (e.g., sign-ups, form submissions) and macro-conversions (e.g., purchases).
• Cost Per Mille (CPM) and Cost Per Click (CPC): Compare CPC and CPM against industry averages to determine cost efficiency.
• Click Through Rate (CTR): Analyze CTR across different ad sets and creative variations and identify which combinations drive the highest CTR.
• Return On Ad Spend (ROAS): ROAS is not one-size-fits-all. Make sure you take into consideration the nature of your business and individual campaign objectives. 
• Creative Analysis: Review top-performing creatives from Q4 of last year and the most recent quarter of this year to understand what works now and what worked well before.

Ad Copy and Ad Creatives

The effectiveness of your ad copy and creatives can significantly impact your campaign’s success:

• Keep It Concise & Provide Value: Concise messages are key. Aim for 100-150 words that get to the point quickly. Use simple language that can be scanned easily while still delivering a powerful message.
• Routine Testing: Experimentation is vital. Create A/B testing variations of your ad copy and creatives and test them against each other. Continuous testing helps your ads remain effective.
• Creative Roadmap: Leveraging the findings from your Creative Analysis, develop a creative roadmap to support your Q4 initiatives. Cater your creatives to shorter user attention spans, ensuring they are engaging enough to stop users from scrolling and quickly communicate why they should click through.

Campaign Settings

Your campaign settings must align with your goals for optimal performance:

• Budget Allocation: Make sure your budget supports your campaign structure, adjusting as needed for peak moments. For example, during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you’ll want to allocate sufficient budget to capitalize on high consumer activity, whereas you may want to reduce spend during the 30 days leading up to the political elections as ad costs are projected to be significantly higher. Additionally, as promotional periods wind down, pace your spend accordingly. For example, for ecommerce ads, reduce your spend after your shipping cut-off dates to optimize your budget.
• Optimization: Use top-performing audiences and creatives as guides for new creatives during the promo period. Establish realistic KPIs and goals ahead of Q4 to track your performance effectively and make optimizations on the fly without being overwhelmed by the influx of data.
• Social Pixel: Confirm that your Social Pixels are set up correctly to measure campaign effectiveness, understand audience behavior, and improve ROI. Every social media channel has its own type of pixel, so be sure to audit each social pixel individually.
  
  Here are some helpful links and Chrome extensions for the top 4 social media platforms: TikTok (Instructions | Chrome Extension) Meta (Instructions | Chrome Extension) Pinterest (Instructions | Chrome Extension) and Snapchat (Instructions | Chrome Extension). 

Audience Targeting

Proper audience targeting guarantees your ads will reach the right people. 

• Interests, Behaviors, and Demographics: You don’t need to reinvent the wheel for Q4 if you’ve already identified top-performing audiences! If you haven’t identified your target audience yet, now is the time to do so.
• Lookalike Audiences: Use lookalike audiences to reach new potential customers who share similar characteristics with your existing high-value customers.
• Retargeting: Re-engage users who have previously interacted with your brand but haven’t converted yet. For ecommerce ads, consider retargeting those who created shopping carts on your website and left during checkout.
• Remarketing: Target existing customers to encourage re-conversions. For ecommerce ads, consider remarketing ads featuring new or complementary products to those who have already purchased from your brand.

Why It’s Important

By conducting a thorough Paid Social audit, you ensure your campaigns are optimized for the highest possible performance, addressing any issues and leveraging opportunities for improvement.

Audit 3: SEO Audit

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) audits are crucial for making sure your website is optimized for search engines, therefore improving its visibility and ability to attract organic traffic.

In addition to helping you identify and resolve off-page and on-page SEO issues, this audit helps you  evaluate the quality and relevance of your existing content, uncover new opportunities for high search volume and low competition keywords, and much more. Here’s a detailed look at what to review:

Organic Performance

Assessing your website’s organic online presence involves:

• Website Traffic: Analyze organic traffic using tools like Google Analytics. Look at trends over time, identify peaks and troughs, and  assess the reasons behind them.
• SEO Rankings: Use tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs to track your keyword rankings. Identify which keywords are driving traffic and which ones need improvement.
• Conversions: Measure the conversions driven by organic traffic. This can include lead generation goals like form submissions, purchases, or any other key actions that contribute to your business objectives.

Keyword Analysis

Conducting a comprehensive keyword analysis helps identify opportunities for optimization and content creation:

• High-Performing Keywords: Identify keywords that are already driving traffic and conversions and make sure you have quality content that’s fully optimized for these terms.
• New Opportunities: Look for keywords with high search volume and low competition. Consider creating new content to target these opportunities.
• Competitor Analysis: If possible, analyze your competitors’ keyword strategies. Identify gaps in your own strategy and opportunities to outperform them.

Content Review

Evaluating your existing content is critical:

• Quality and Relevance: In addition to being high-quality, your content should be informative (provide value and answer users’ questions!) and aligned with user intent. 
• Landing Pages: Review landing pages to make certain they are optimized for conversions and SEO. Check for clear CTAs and engaging, relevant content.
• Link Testing: Utilize tools such as Screaming Frog and Google Search Console to identify 404 errors (broken links) and correct them using 301 redirects.

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO elements are vital for search engine visibility:

• Meta Tags: Title tags and meta descriptions should be unique, relevant, and include target keywords. Make sure they’re compelling to encourage clicks and are within the preferred range of characters.
• Headers: Use header tags (H1, H2, H3) appropriately to structure your content. Include keywords naturally within these headers.
• Keyword Usage: Use keywords naturally within the content, including in the first paragraph, headers, and throughout the text. Avoid keyword stuffing at all costs!
• Indexability Issues:  In addition to confirming your XML sitemap is up to date in Google Search Console, check crawl errors, robots.txt, canonical tags, mobile indexing, redirects and noindex tags for accurate search engine indexing and visibility.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO factors contribute significantly to your site’s authority:

• Backlink Profile: Analyze your backlink profile using tools like Ahrefs or Moz. Identify high-quality links and any toxic links that may need disavowing.
• Social Signals: Review social media mentions and shares. While social signals don’t directly impact SEO, they can drive traffic and enhance brand visibility.

Backlink Analysis

A thorough backlink analysis helps improve your site’s authority, too:

• High-Quality Links: Identify and secure high-quality backlinks from reputable websites. Focus on relevant industry sites and authoritative sources.
• Link Building Opportunities: Look for opportunities to build new links. This can include guest blogging, partnerships, and other outreach strategies.
• Disavowing Toxic Links: Identify and disavow toxic or spammy links that could harm your site’s SEO performance.
• Broken Backlinks: Fix any backlinks that might be pointing to broken pages.

Why It’s Important

A technical SEO audit helps make sure your website is optimized for search engines, enhancing its visibility and ability to attract organic traffic. By identifying and addressing SEO issues, you can improve your site’s performance, drive more qualified traffic, and ultimately increase conversions. Optimizing your site for SEO is crucial, especially before high-traffic periods like Q4, as it helps maximize your marketing efforts and achieve your business goals.

Audit 4: Website Performance Audit

Website Performance Audits are essential to delivering a fast and seamless user experience, which is crucial for retaining visitors and converting them into customers. This ties into Technical SEO audits and is a critical component for optimizing your natural SEO performance.

This type of audit helps identify and resolve page speed issues, server issues, loading errors, and much more. Here’s a detailed look at what to review:

Page Speed

Testing and optimizing your website’s page load times is critical for user satisfaction and SEO:

• Page Load Times: Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, or Catchpoint to measure your site’s load times. Slow page speeds can lead to higher bounce rates and lower search engine rankings. To improve natural SEO, aim to obtain passing grades for Google’s Core Web Vitals. Scoring green on all of the base metrics here will provide a boost in SERPs. 
• Optimization: Identify and implement strategies to improve page load times. This can include optimizing image file sizes, delivering images in Next-Gen formats , leveraging server and browser caching, minimizing HTTP requests, and using content delivery networks (CDNs).

Mobile Friendly

Confirm your website design is responsive and optimized for mobile usability:

• Responsive Design: Test your site’s responsiveness on various devices and screen sizes. Services like BrowserStack will help assess how well your site appears and performs on actual mobile devices. There is an infinite amount of testing you can do for mobile devices, so prioritize testing the most recent versions of popular devices (or specific devices you know your clients are using).
• Mobile Usability: Check to make sure the navigation, buttons, and links are optimized for mobile devices. Also consider simplifying forms and checkout processes to enhance the mobile shopping experience.

UX/UI

Evaluating the user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) ensures your site is easy to navigate and engaging:

• Ease of Navigation: Assess your site’s structure, sitemap and architecture. Users should be able to find information quickly and easily. For the testing phase of your UX/UI audit, consider using heatmaps to understand your user’s behaviors and preferences.
• Engagement: Make sure your design elements are visually appealing and your content is engaging. Ahead of Q4, test different layouts and elements to see what drives the most engagement.
• Conversion Paths: Review the paths users take to convert. Confirm CTAs are clear and strategically placed, and most importantly, that the checkout process is smooth and user-friendly.
• Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): Run A/B tests and use data-driven optimization to increase your conversions.

Security

Checking for security vulnerabilities and guaranteeing your site is secure is vital for protecting user data and maintaining trust:

• SSL Certificates: The HTTPS protocol lets your visitors know that your website is secure and that you are helping protect user data. This is also an important standardization for natural SEO.
• Firewall: Utilize a Firewall service, like Cloudflare, to run your DNS through. This will help block bad actors, robots, and/or hackers who are trolling for vulnerabilities from visiting your website.
• Vulnerability Scanning: Regularly scan your website for vulnerabilities using tools like Sucuri orQuttera. If any security issues are identified, you’ll want your developer or 3rd party vendor to address them quickly.
• Traffic Handling: Confirm your site is equipped to handle a significant increase in traffic, especially during high-volume periods. This might involve scaling your hosting solution or using a CDN to distribute traffic loads.

Accessibility

To help ensure that everyone has an equal opportunity to experience your website, you’ll want to check the technical specifications outlined in The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). This set of guidelines helps make websites more accessible for those with disabilities.

• Aim for AA Compliance: Although there is no official industry standard, addressing as many elements as possible at the AA level is a good rule of thumb.
• Use Accessibility Services: If you lack the funding or technical expertise for WCAG modifications, consider using services like accessiBe to add accessibility functionality to your website.
• WCAG Quick Reference Guide: For more accessibility specifications, refer to the WCAG Quick Reference Guide.

Why It’s Important

A website performance audit helps guarantee that your website delivers a seamless user experience, which is a critical component for retaining visitors and converting them into paying customers. By addressing performance issues, you can enhance user satisfaction, improve engagement, and boost conversion rates. As you prepare for high-traffic periods like Q4, optimizing your website’s performance is essential for maximizing your marketing efforts and achieving your business goals.

Audit 5: Creative Audit

Creative Audits help ensure your campaign creatives are visually appealing, relevant, and optimized for peak performance, which is especially important during a highly competitive time such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

In addition to helping identify new creative trends to consider testing, this audit provides a deeper understanding of which existing creative assets and platforms are most effective, which groups respond best to specific assets and channels, and much more. Here’s a detailed look at what to review:

Performance Review

Analyzing the performance of your creative assets across all channels is crucial for understanding their effectiveness:

• Metrics Analysis: Use analytics and reporting tools, such as Motion, to evaluate key performance metrics such as click-through rates (CTR), conversion rates, and engagement metrics (likes, shares, comments).
• Platform Performance: Compare performance across different platforms (e.g., Meta (Facebook, Instagram), TikTok, Pinterest) to identify where your creative assets are most effective.
• Creative Types: Assess the performance of various creative types (images, videos, GIFs, carousels) to determine which formats resonate best with your target audience.

Target and Reached Audience(s) Review

Your creative assets must resonate with the intended audience to drive engagement and conversions:

• Audience Segmentation: Review audience segments targeted by your creative assets. Make sure they are accurately defined and relevant to your campaign goals.
• Engagement Levels: Analyze engagement levels for different audience segments to identify which groups respond best to your creative assets.
• Feedback and Sentiment: Gather feedback and analyze sentiment from audience interactions to understand how your creative assets are perceived.

Channel Coherence

Maintaining consistency and coherence of your creative assets across different marketing channels is important for brand recognition and trust:

• Brand Guidelines: Confirm all creative assets adhere to your brand guidelines, including color schemes, fonts, and logos.
• Message Consistency: Check that the messaging across different channels is consistent and aligned with your overall brand narrative.
• Visual Cohesion: Ensure visual elements are coherent and reinforce your brand identity across all platforms.

Testing Roadmap

Developing a roadmap for testing new creative ideas helps you continually optimize and improve your marketing efforts:

• A/B Testing: Run creative tests to compare different versions of your creative assets and identify which performs better.
• Testing Schedule: Create a schedule for regular testing of new creative ideas to support ongoing optimization.
• Leverage Performance Data: Use the insights gained from testing to make data-driven decisions about future creative development.
• Best Practices: We’ve scaled countless creative tests and compiled answers to the trickiest questions uncovered along the way. Learn our best practices for successful creative tests here.

Opportunities for Growth

Identifying areas where creative assets can be improved, or new formats can be tested, is key to staying ahead of the competition:

• Creative Enhancements: Look for opportunities to enhance existing creative assets based on performance data and audience feedback.
• New Formats: Experiment with new creative formats to engage your audience in innovative ways. Foreplay is a great tool for gathering creative inspiration from other brands!
• Cross-Channel Opportunities: Identify opportunities to leverage high-performing creative assets across multiple channels to maximize their impact.

Why It’s Important

A creative audit confirms that your marketing messages are effective and engaging. By optimizing creative assets, you can improve brand perception, drive engagement, and increase conversions. As you prepare for high-traffic periods like Q4, prioritize making sure your creative strategy is finely tuned as it will help you maximize your marketing efforts and achieve your business goals.

Audit 6: Organic Social Media Audit

Social Media Audits are essential for ensuring your organic social media strategy is eye-catching, effective, and aligned with your digital marketing goals.

This audit helps verify that your social media efforts are successfully building brand loyalty, maintaining consistency and cohesiveness across all platforms, and much more. Here’s a detailed look at what to review:

Cross-Channel Cohesion

Ensuring your social media presence is consistent across all platforms is crucial for maintaining a cohesive brand image:

• Brand Consistency: While maintaining a uniform voice, style, and messaging across all social media platforms is crucial, it’s equally important to tailor your content to fit the unique nature and audience engagement style of each platform. For example, TikTok is more casual than Meta, requiring different types of content to effectively engage audiences.
• Content Alignment: Whether it’s on LinkedIn or Instagram, the content shared on different platforms must align with your overall brand narrative and marketing objectives.
• Outline Goals: By outlining reasonable goals for your organic social media channels, you can develop a unified strategy that allows all channels to support each other, providing a seamless experience for your audience.

Content Calendar

Reviewing and updating your content marketing calendar helps your posts stay relevant and timely:

• Post Frequency: Analyze the frequency of your posts to double check you are maintaining an optimal posting schedule that keeps your audience engaged without overwhelming them.
• Content Relevance: Make sure your content matches your audience’s interests. For platforms like Instagram and TikTok, it’s especially important to keep a close eye on what’s popular. Resources like Pinterest Predicts and TikTok’s Trends Report can help you stay on top of trending sounds, content formats, topics, and more. 
• Content Variety: During competitive times like Q4, you have 2-3 seconds to capture attention. Don’t be afraid to push the envelope creatively! Use a mix of content types—images, videos, stories, and live streams—to grab and hold your audience’s attention.

Organic Performance Metrics

Analyzing key performance metrics helps you understand the effectiveness of your social media efforts and highlights each platform’s strengths and weaknesses for your business:

• Engagement Metrics: Track likes, comments, shares, and other forms of engagement to understand how your audience interacts with your social media content. With more users holding conversations through social shares rather than the comment section, it’s important to identify how your target audience prefers to engage so you can analyze the metrics appropriately.
• Demographics: Demographic factors such as age, location, and income levels provide a clear image of your target audience.
• Psychographics: Understand what attracts your target audience to your business or service by looking at psychographic factors such as personality characteristics and habits.
• Top Posts: Analyze the posts that captured the most attention and engagement from your audience. Identify any patterns or similarities, such as time of day, day of the week, topic, or creative asset.
• Impressions and Reach: Measure the reach of your posts to understand how many people are seeing your posts and how effectively you are expanding your audience.

Why It’s Important

A social media marketing audit helps your social media strategy remain effective and aligned with your business goals. By optimizing your social media efforts, you can enhance engagement, build brand loyalty, and drive conversions. This is especially important as you prepare for high-traffic periods like Q4, ensuring your social media presence is cohesive and impactful across all platforms. Conducting a thorough social media audit will help you make informed decisions and maximize your marketing efforts, ultimately contributing to your business’s success.

In Conclusion

Conducting these six audits before Q4 safeguards your marketing activities and overall digital marketing strategy by making sure everything is optimized for the peak season. Each audit will help you identify areas for improvement, allowing your marketing plan, campaigns, website, and overall strategy to be ready to drive success during the critical BF/CM period.

Could your business benefit from a comprehensive digital marketing audit, but you don’t have the bandwidth to do it internally? Socium Media can help—for free! As an award-winning digital marketing agency, we’re seasoned vets in all things performance marketing.

With service offerings for Paid Search, Paid Social, SEO, Content Marketing, and more, we’ve got you covered! Reach out to Socium Media for a 100% free digital marketing audit today!