The beginning of a new year is a prime time for year-end reviews. For many businesses, it’s the time to review annual budgets, expenditures, goals and traffic, and for good reason. There’s nothing like looking back to look forward, since it helps business owners reflect on strengths and weaknesses and figure out where to lean in or pivot for the year ahead.
Where some businesses go wrong, however, is making the start of a new year the only time they do a check-in. When it comes to their digital presence in particular, business owners would do well to make dedicated time for review sessions not once a year, but every single quarter (at a minimum). The digital space is changing faster than ever, and entrepreneurs need to stay abreast of these changes to maintain a healthy brand footprint online.
Here are five areas to consider during a quarterly audit:
1 | On-site traffic
Before you take a deep dive into your entire digital presence, start at the source: your website. If you have Google Analytics or a similar data tracking platform set up, you can see which pages people visit most often, how long they stay on a page, which pages they enter/exit on, and more. Looking at your traffic and site performance over the past quarter can help you assess which topics your consumers are most interested in and see how those interests may change over time.
2 | Acquisition sources
Once you know what people are looking at on your site, the next step is to determine where those users are coming from. To do this, it’s time to look at your acquisition sources. These can be found on Google Analytics, Parse.ly, or whichever analytics platform you use. Here, you’ll want to assess how much traffic is coming from sectors like search, email, social and direct. These ratios can change year to year, but also quarter to quarter, so it’s important to stay on top of understanding how your audience finds your page. Are they coming through an email newsletter? Are they finding you on Google? Based on these breakdowns, you can then look at areas that may need more improvement while simultaneously bolstering sectors that continue to perform well.
3 | Areas of diminishing returns
You’ve looked at your traffic and your audience. Now it’s time to consider the not-so-fun stuff, namely the digital areas of your brand that aren’t doing so hot. This will likely require going into reporting on different platforms, whether that means your analytics platform, your email service provider, or the analytics reports on your social media pages. In each of these, filter for longer time periods, such as the last 90 days or last year. By doing so, you’ll have a better sense of trend patterns so you can see things like whether your reach on Facebook continues to decrease or whether your email newsletter subscribers have taken a 30% nosedive. While it may not be the brightest spot in your assessment, it’s important to figure out where you can improve so you can then plan out how to improve.
4 | 404s and technical issues
The next step leans into the technical side of things, so you may want to recruit your IT support person for this if you have one. Either way, you’ll want to check your site for any pages that may be leading to 404 errors or have long load times. Check if any images aren’t loading or if links are broken. Go page by page if your site isn’t too big, and make sure to test everything. It’s better to find something that may be broken now than for a potential consumer to find a dead link and leave your page because they couldn’t find what they were looking for.
5 | Social platforms
Last, but certainly not least, it’s time to take your social accounts into consideration. While you likely don’t want to change your profile names and images every quarter (hello, brand consistency!), you do want to make sure your profile looks its best. Little things like making sure your links are up to date, your Instagram highlights are fresh, and your pinned posts on Facebook and Twitter reflect the latest updates, can all make a difference in the long run.
Want to learn more about site audits and craft a custom one for your business? Or want us to take care of it for you? Reach out to TMCC’s experts at newbusiness@todaymediacustom.com.
