In today’s dynamic business landscape, conducting a digital marketing audit is vital for growth.
Sixty-three percent of businesses have increased their marketing budget in recent years, crowding the market and signaling that now, more than ever, organizations need to regularly assess and optimize their marketing strategies to maintain a competitive edge.
To help you get started, here’s what a digital marketing audit is, its significance in enhancing your marketing strategy, and a comprehensive approach to conducting your own.
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A digital marketing audit is a thorough, objective evaluation of an organization's marketing strategies. It assesses marketing activities’ effectiveness, relevance, and alignment with business goals and surfaces opportunities for improvement.
Digital marketing audits are crucial for determining whether your campaigns deliver quantifiable success.
“At the simplest level, you need to measure what you set out to achieve with your marketing objectives,” says Harvard Business School Professor Sunil Gupta, who teaches the online course Digital Marketing Strategy
By focusing on actionable data, a digital marketing audit can help you make informed decisions that will benefit your organization long-term. If you want to take your marketing strategy to the next level, follow this step-by-step guide to conduct a digital marketing audit.
4 Steps to Conducting a Digital Marketing Audit
1. Define Clear Objectives
A successful digital marketing audit starts with setting clear, measurable objectives as a baseline for evaluating your marketing efforts’ performance and identifying growth opportunities.
In Digital Marketing Strategy, Gupta outlines the importance of framing objectives using the marketing funnel, which breaks down customers’ purchase journey into three stages:
- Awareness: When potential consumers first become aware of your brand
- Consideration: When they actively compare your product or service against the competition
- Conversion: When they decide to purchase your product or service

Understanding these stages allows marketers to strategically focus their efforts, ensuring they use the most effective techniques based on where potential customers are in the funnel.
A real-world example of this approach is the case of recovery footwear brand OOFOS, explored in Digital Marketing Strategy. Confronted with rising competition in 2022 and a decline in return on ad spend (ROAS)—the revenue generated from each dollar spent—the marketing team needed to quickly redefine their objectives.
They conducted an audit to determine their priorities. After careful analysis, OOFOS established one primary objective and two supporting goals:
Primary Objective
- Increase company revenue
Supporting Goals
- Build brand awareness
- Boost sales performance
By looking at the marketing funnel, OOFOS could identify where customers were getting stuck in the user journey and start mapping out specific engagement strategies at each stage to help achieve their objectives.
Related: Listen to Professor Gupta explain data analytics’ pivotal role in digital marketing on The Parlor Room podcast, or watch the episode on YouTube.
2. Evaluate Current Performance
An essential step in the audit process is evaluating how your current digital marketing plan is performing. By analyzing your strategies at each funnel stage, you can identify areas where you excel to maintain consistency while discovering opportunities for improvement.
This performance analysis should prioritize key performance indicators (KPIs) that provide critical insights and pinpoint areas for improvement to accurately measure campaign success.
Awareness
Understanding brand awareness is crucial for measuring your marketing efforts’ reach, which, according to Digital Marketing Strategy, can be measured in two primary ways:
- Unaided awareness: The percentage of consumers who mention your brand in a product category without prompting
- Aided awareness: The percentage of consumers who mention your brand in a product category when prompted
For example, to assess OOFOS's aided awareness, you’d measure how many consumers mention OOFOS when asked about recovery footwear options. What OOFOS found is that their aided awareness significantly surpassed their unaided, revealing a valuable opportunity to allocate resources toward driving greater brand recognition.
The awareness stage is the optimal phase to amplify impressions, which measure how often your brand’s content is displayed, laying the groundwork for increased brand visibility.
Related: How to Create a Digital Marketing Plan: 4 Steps
Consideration
During this stage, potential customers evaluate competing products based on factors such as price, style, and reviews. Shaping positive brand perceptions is vital for guiding purchasing decisions as consumers consider your product over others.
"At this stage, a compelling value proposition becomes critical in order to give consumers a reason to buy your brand instead of competing products,” Gupta says in Digital Marketing Strategy.
For OOFOS, this meant differentiating its recovery footwear to engage one of its primary target audiences—athletes—by showcasing how its products stand out compared to other athletic performance brands.
During the conversion stage, marketers typically focus on improving engagement-related KPIs, including:
- Clicks: The number of times your ad was clicked by users interested in your brand or product
- Click-through rate (CTR): The ratio of clicks to impressions
- Cost per click (CPC): What it costs your company to get a click on its ad
Successfully navigating the consideration stage plays a major role in increasing the likelihood of converting potential consumers into loyal buyers.
Related: How to Create an Effective Value Proposition
Conversion
At the conversion stage, consumers take decisive actions that indicate the effectiveness of a company’s digital marketing efforts.
One of the most valuable KPIs is conversion rate, which measures the ratio of consumers who complete a desired action, such as purchasing a product, after clicking on your ad.
Tracking your conversion rate helps identify which parts of your marketing strategy work and which need adjustment. It also paves the way for analyzing other important conversion-stage KPIs, such as:
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC): The cost of acquiring a new customer
- Return on ad spend (ROAS): Revenue generated from each dollar spent on advertising
- Return on investment (ROI): The return (profit) on each dollar spent
OOFOS's conversion rate data highlighted the importance of unaided awareness. In a competitive market, customers must instantly recognize the brand through strategic advertising.
3. Identify Opportunity Gaps
Once you gather and analyze your data, leverage it to identify opportunities for improving your marketing strategies, platforms, or audience targeting.
OOFOS identified several opportunity gaps that required attention—one of the biggest being brand awareness.
“We now have a tremendous amount of learning we can apply to a mixed-media approach in our marketing and advertising,” says OOFOS’s Head of Marketing Darren Brown in Digital Marketing Strategy. “This insight tells us how much we need to fill the funnel with enough prospects to effectively allocate resources to higher-return tactics that drive conversions.”
OOFOS saw an opportunity to engage with key segments of its target audience: athletes and active individuals who experience stress on their feet and joints. By showcasing its products’ unique benefits—like its trademarked technology that absorbs 37 percent more impact than traditional foam footwear—the team crafted a compelling brand story that positioned OOFOS as the ideal solution.
This not only strengthened top-of-funnel engagement but guided potential customers further down toward making a purchase.
Related: How to Identify Business & Market Opportunities
4. Implement Your Improvements
After identifying opportunity gaps, the next step is implementing your refined strategies.
For OOFOS, that meant focusing on top-of-funnel initiatives to expand brand awareness. A pivotal moment, explored in Digital Marketing Strategy, was the launch of their “mOOvers” campaign. It featured high-profile athletes sharing authentic stories about how OOFOS’s products enhanced their recovery.
These testimonials became part of a paid media campaign to educate consumers on recovery footwear’s value. The brand also began producing additional video content for TV ads to enhance awareness.
What set the strategy apart was that the athletes proactively approached OOFOS, demonstrating a genuine connection with its products. That authenticity played a major role in capturing consumer attention but also resonated with a broader audience, enhancing brand awareness and credibility.
As OOFOS wrapped its digital marketing audit, the team reflected on how their success stemmed not only from strategic decisions but also from a deep understanding of their audience, value proposition, data-driven insights, and the customer journey. This renewed perspective allowed them to identify obstacles, refine their strategy, and keep their efforts on track with their new business goals.
The Power of Conducting a Digital Marketing Audit
“The important takeaway is that marketers need to consider which dimensions of the value proposition are more likely to resonate, or be deal breakers, at each stage of the customer journey,” Gupta says in Digital Marketing Strategy.
A well-executed digital marketing audit can transform a company's performance, giving it a competitive edge. By uncovering critical insights and identifying areas for improvement, it empowers businesses to adapt, innovate, and strategically align their marketing efforts—positioning them for long-term success in an increasingly crowded market.
If you want to enhance your marketing efforts, consider taking an online course, such as Digital Marketing Strategy. Through interactive activities and real-world examples from leading brands, like OOFOS, you’ll learn how to effectively reach, convert, and retain customers in a dynamic online environment.
Do you want to improve your marketing strategy with a data-driven approach? Explore Digital Marketing Strategy—one of our online marketing courses—and download our interactive online learning success guide to discover the benefits of online programs and how to prepare for one.
