PPC | Search Marketing Year-End Audit Tips

Article by Josh McCoy.

A year-end audit is always a good idea. You will gain insight into improvements that need to be made. Here's how to do it right.

As much as it didn’t seem possible, we’ve made it to the end of 2020. It’s been quite a “different” year for many of us as search marketers.

Interesting challenges presented themselves with shrunken budgets for many, or even altered tactics to see success during this year’s darkest days.

For a fortunate few, business actually grew digitally in certain industry verticals through the year that afforded them the ability to test new ideas. If anything, this year has forced us to think differently.

This provides a great chance to look at your digital campaigns; and in avoidance of complacency, audit your year to see the success that may help you in 2021.

Let’s take a look into five areas that glean future insight!

Traffic

Take to analytics for a year-over-year view of site traffic.

What happened in the last year, comparatively speaking, that you should take note of?

Did usual website traffic seasonality change due to the pandemic that you may need to consider (as we will likely spend another half year in this climate)?
Have you seen specific channels, whether in search or not, that have seen a positive or negative transient in user behavior and engagement with site touchpoints?
Overall, have specific landing pages or exit pages made drastic changes over the last year that may be a call for revision or enhancement?

Technical

A year-end technical site audit is always a best practice.

Often, much is added to your website over the course of a year, and little is removed.

From within your Google Analytics account, do a year-over-year review (month of December) comparison of page load speed.

You may see some obvious offenders that you need to review specifically for – invalid file references, large file-size image additions, etc. that should be revised.

Review the development deployment calendar. How many tags have manually placed on the site? Are these still in use? Can we clean things up a bit and deploy through a tag manager?