Online Marketing Campaign Audit

We often bring on clients who already have an online marketing campaign in place. They come to us because these campaigns just aren’t as effective as they would like. Usually when this happens, we begin with a Marketing Campaign Audit. We’ll review all of the channels you’re using to promote your website and deliver an assessment of effectiveness, next steps and how to prioritize the work required to make the campaign a success.

To start out, we analyze and review traffic, design and other factors on a very high level. Should we continue with a more in-depth plan after this initial phase, we will allocate more time to areas that require the most attention. For example, as part of this project we will typically spend a few hours doing a very basic SEO audit of the website. The purpose will be to look for quick wins and commonly overlooked issues. If needed, a full SEO Audit typically takes 20-40 hours to complete. At the end of our marketing study, we will determine whether such an SEO Audit should be a priority, versus other initiatives. For example, if you have an ecommerce website, then we may consider growing your affiliate marketing channel before putting all of our resources into SEO.

Expect that we will have questions before, during and after completion. Below is a typical outline for this study:

• Overall Marketing
  • Discuss what is currently being done on a daily, weekly and monthly basis to grow the business.
  • Interview team members to understand their roles in the process, how time is spent and how success is measured (KPIs).
  • Conversion, Design, Taxonomy & Merchandising
    • Review top performing products and categories for conversion & sales volume.
    • Review checkout & conversion funnel.
    • Review design and layout of category, product detail pages, shopping cart and other areas.
    • Make high level recommendations for steps to take for improvement. This may include specific design and navigational changes, or broader strategies and multivariate testing to improve conversion and user experience.
    • Ensure that changes do not have an adverse effect on SEO.
  • SEO
    • On-Site: High level audit of your website to find quick wins, common oversights and broad strategies for improvement.
    • Off-Site: Review top back-links, discover patterns and opportunities for future.
    • Keyword Discovery: review top-performing keywords based on sales volume, discover patterns and keyword themes that are not the focus of the campaign.
    • Competitor Analysis: Discover new opportunities that are easy to implement.
  • SEM
    • Review PPC campaigns and landing pages.
    • Produce high-level recommendations for optimizing the campaign. This may include restructuring ad campaigns, changing keyword bidding strategies, landing pages or other ideas.
  • Affiliate Program
    • Review existing campaign including creative assets, links, feed, network and other factors.
    • Explore placement with top affiliates.
    • High level recommendations for changes and improvement.
  • Email
    • Review existing email marketing campaign, including technical (e.g. coding issues) and non-technical (i.e. marketing strategy) elements.
    • Make recommendations for improvement and prioritize. For example, better segmentation may be very helpful in improving the campaign, however it can be very time-consuming to execute effectively and there may be other changes that should be done first for the most immediate ROI.
  • Social Media and Other Marketing Strategies
    • Review existing initiatives on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and other channels, and make recommendations for social media to become more engaging.
    • Determine proper Key Performance Indicators, as ROI is not generally the goal of social media. We tend to lean more toward improved customer engagement as the primary measure of success.

Deliverable: Marketing Report

Upon completion, we will deliver a full report of our findings. This includes the following:

• The existing state of various marketing channels (SEO, affiliate, etc) and conversion
• Quick wins – things that can be done immediately to improve conversion (i.e. Landing Page Optimization), traffic (e.g. SEO, SEM & Affiliate Marketing), average order value, ROI, Customer Lifetime Value, etc.
• Priorities – recommendations for the longer-term projects and strategies that need to be implemented and which to start with. Some may be done concurrently (resource-permitting). Others will be more sequential.
• Next steps – a proposal for an ongoing campaign to grow the business.