7 Crucial Metrics to Measure in a Digital Marketing Audit

Is your website measurably driving B2B lead generation, increasing sales opportunities, and deepening engagement with your target prospects? If not, when was the last time you conducted a digital marketing audit? It's critical to assess web performance and identify your strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities.

Conducting a routine website audit can provide a deeper understanding of why your site is not generating the leads you think it should or why your sales and conversions are not improving. While a weekly or even daily audit is ideal, you can get great insights from a monthly assessment. An audit is your first step to detect weak points in your content and campaigns — then utilize data to improve them.

Here are seven key metrics to track in your digital marketing audit.

Audit lead generation and traffic-to-lead conversions:

Utilize conversion pages to generate leads. Ideally, you will use content offers instead of contact forms to generate interest.

Your website should follow best practices for lead generation and conversion. So first, measure the number of leads you're generating and also your traffic-to-lead conversion rate. Then, you should ask deeper questions to analyze your strategy. For example:

• Are you using content offers to convert leads? 
• Is your value proposition clear and relevant to buyers' needs?
• Do you have calls-to-action above the "fold" on every page?
• Is your call-to-action copy relevant and enticing? I.e., "Get my IoT eBook" in place of "Submit."
• Have you considered UX: That you have provided accessibility, relevancy, clarity, and purpose with your website?

Your traffic-to-lead conversion rate should increase over time as you continue iterating and improving your web strategy. So if you are seeing a stagnating conversion rate, try these tips above. A thorough audit should identify obstacles that hurt your lead conversion rate.

Audit your SEO and link-building strategy:

Evaluate and benchmark the performance of your website for important search terms. For on-page SEO, your website content should revolve around a keyword strategy that's relevant to your buyers. And each page must contain a keyword target within its:

• HTML title
• Content
• Headers
• Meta descriptions
• Image alt text

Furthermore, you should be linking blog posts to SEO landing pages to drive authority upwards and also interlinking heavily on your website. I.e., linking blog posts to several related posts.

This graph shows an interlinking strategy for content SEO best practices.

Next, you should audit off-page SEO: That is, how many backlinks your site is receiving. This will tell you how much search authority your site has. If you're not seeing much referral traffic, you should prioritize a link-building strategy. Both on-page and off-page SEO are critical to ranking high above your competitors.

Audit content strategy:

Content is the foundation for many core functions of your website. So in your digital marketing audit, be very critical and assess your content strategy against these questions:

• Have you set up pages to accommodate the whole buyer's journey, from helpful blog posts to content downloads and bottom-of-funnel conversion pages?
• Do you have content to assist in the sales process, like white papers and case studies?
• Is your content appropriate for your target audience? This can be measured by the number of qualified leads sharing and converting on your content.
• Do you frequently publish — at least once or twice per week — to build authority?
• Does your content reach your audience via social media, paid advertising, organic search, and referral traffic?

If you answer "no" to any of these questions, prioritize them in your content marketing strategy.

Audit your lead nurturing initiatives:

Use different content offers to nurture leads through the sales funnel.

Lead generation is important but equally important is nurturing those leads into sales opportunities. Audit your conversion rate of qualified leads into sales opportunities. Ask, how many people do we bring into our funnel and then effectively nurture to become customers?

Nurturing is as much a function of your marketing strategy as your sales team. You can get more granular by asking:

• Do we send emails to our existing leads, encouraging them to reengage?
• Is the content we send appropriate for the buyer's expectations/hesitations and their place in the funnel?
• Are our email communications targeted to different segments?
• Does our marketing team share lead intelligence and data with sales reps?
• Do sales reps loop back to our marketing team to help guide content and strategy?

Audit messaging, value proposition & positioning: 

This is perhaps a business question first, but ask: Is our product or service positioned in a unique place for our buyers? Does it offer something rare and valuable?

46% of buyers will leave a website if it lacks a strong, cohesive brand message, according to Komarketing.

If so, then you must ask: Does our messaging and communications reflect a great value proposition? Buyers will not care about features — they care about fixing their pain points and meeting opportunities. So if your value proposition is company-centric, try flipping it around for your buyer. Then, make sure your value prop is front-and-center for first-time visitors.

Audit mobile responsiveness:

Having a mobile responsive website is no longer an option but a necessity:

42% of researchers use a mobile device during their B2B purchasing process and 52% are less likely to engage with a company that has no mobile website.

So if your website is not mobile-optimized and built with a responsive design, you are providing a poor experience. 

Audit your site's technical performance and speed:

A simple site report like WebsiteGrader.com can show you insights about speed and other technical problems.

Finally, audit technical performance — which can be the difference between someone leaving frustrated after 10 seconds and a prospect contacting you to learn more.

So take care in your audit to find error messages, clean up broken links, fix slow-loading images, and assess server response times. These small maintenance steps can go a long way toward improving the user experience for your website visitors.

Audit your website performance on mobile by running performance tests (like websitegrader.com) and also engaging with your site on mobile devices.

Avoid benchmarking in your digital marketing audit

It's important to note that industry benchmarks are a bad starting point to measure your business against. As you conduct a digital marketing audit, rely on your own historical data. Resist the temptation to search for "industry benchmarks" for conversion rates, traffic numbers, and sales quotas.

A benchmark conversion rate, for example, looks good on paper as an enterprise’s target. But since it lacks context for what the conversion measures and whom it targets, it doesn’t help the company set meaningful objectives to grow.

Digital audit conclusion

Performing a digital marketing audit can be daunting for many organizations that already suffer from a lack of time and human resources. Yet, it’s a necessary component of your overall digital marketing strategy.

However, companies struggling to gather these metrics — or unsure how to act on them — can partner with an experienced B2B marketing agency to conduct a thorough digital marketing audit. Moreover, an agency can help you assess your performance across these seven areas, spearhead improvements, and meet business goals.