How to conduct a small business marketing audit

If you’re a small business owner, you really only want to know one thing about your marketing: does it make you more money than it costs?

You would think, given the plethora of analytics platforms on the market (like Google Analytics), that this would be a relatively easy question to answer. 

But good use of data in the small business marketing community is, unfortunately, rare. Many marketers think they know how to use the data, but don’t. So ideas that seem good are assumed to work and ideas that seem bad are assumed not to, and not all small business marketers bother to learn how to read and analyze data and know for sure. 

Or, they depend on paid reporting platforms (like Agency Analytics), which have an economic incentive to keep agency clients on them, and that’s not gonna happen if small businesses see their numbers and results going down month by month. Or if they realize what they pay for a marketing program doesn’t return results. To get around that, they tend to focus on top of funnel metrics (like impressions or “engagement”) that can be easily cherry picked or boosted with a little reallocation of budget. 

The business owner sees some numbers that look bigger one month than the last, assumes things are performing well, and pays their bill to both agency and 3rd party platforms.

This isn’t to say that all agencies and all 3rd party platforms are only in it for themselves. There are plenty of honest marketers and marketing services out there. But they all use the same pitch, the same reporting, and the same marketing channels.

So unless you’re intimately familiar with the marketing ecosystem and data, it can be hard to distinguish what marketing is working and what marketing isn’t. 

If there were ever something that every small business owner should know, it’s how to read marketing data and audit their marketing campaigns. 

Components of Marketing For Small Business

The components of small business marketing vary wildly depending on the business, offer, and target market. Typically, a standard small business marketing setup will include:

A website

A landing page for paid traffic

A blog for organic traffic (SEO/content marketing)

Google Ads

Facebook Ads

To start your audit, you’ll want to make sure you have access to all of these. If you don’t already have access, call your marketing agency and ask for access.

If they tell you that they can’t give you access to your Google Ads account because it would expose the data of other clients, see the last section. 

What are inbound and outbound marketing?

The traditional definitions are:

Outbound marketing: actions taken to push a message far and wide, like trade shows, cold calling, and putting up billboards all over the country. 

Traditionally, the definition doesn’t include things like social media and YouTube, but I think it should. 

I think a more appropriate definition for outbound marketing is “any action that seeks to interrupt a user’s expected experience with an ad.” In other words, they weren’t looking for you, your business, or a business like yours, and you got in front of them anyway. 

This would include the traditional trade shows, cold calling, and billboards, along with social media ads, YouTube, TV ads, etc.

Inbound marketing, then, is the act of getting in front of people who are already looking for you, your business, or a business like yours. 

Inbound marketing would include: Google or Bing Ads and SEO/Content Marketing. 

For example, if I go to Google and search for “plumber near me” and your plumbing company comes up, that’s inbound. If while searching for a local plumber, a marketing agency’s ad comes up (something that I wasn’t looking for), that would be outbound. 

Inbound Audit for Small Business

If you’re a small business, there’s only one thing you want to know about your inbound marketing: does it bring in more money than it costs.

And luckily, inbound is the easier of the two to audit, but you’ll still need a fair amount of analytics know-how to do it.

There are x steps to an inbound audit:

How to Conduct An Inbound Audit For Lead Generation

1. Audit your conversions. If you’re lead gen you use forms and phone calls, so go through each one and audit for quality. Was this actually a lead or was it spam, someone looking for a job, a sales call, etc? You want to know which percentage of leads are actually good and qualified (they were interested in your products or services).

   1. If you have too many leads to go through manually, you can select a statistically significant percentage and audit those. You can figure out how many that should be using a sample size calculator. 

2. Know your closing rate. Is it 20%? 50%? Don’t guess. Go through your “good leads” audit above and then figure out how many of those turned into business. If they were interested in your product/service and gave you money, they’re closed. If not, they weren’t. Calculate your close rate by dividing total leads closed/total leads.

3. Segment your conversions into the following buckets in a custom channel grouping.

   1. Organic Brand - Google Organic searches that include your brand name

   2. Organic Nonbrand - Google Organic searches that don’t include your brand name

   3. Paid Brand - Google Ads searches that include your brand name

   4. Paid Nonbrand - Google Ads searches that don’t include your brand name.

4. Dig. It’s going to take some time, grit, and creativity to dig through it all, but you’ll want to calculate your total spend and how much business was closed from each segment.

5. Once you have all that in a spreadsheet, you’ll just need to do a little bit of math to figure out which segments are making you money and which have room for improvement. 

How to Conduct An Inbound Audit For Ecommerce

If Google analytics is set up correctly, auditing ecommerce websites is much easier than lead generation, because the final sale happens on the site and is recorded. 

You should still be using Universal Analytics (instead of just using Google Analytics 4).

1. You’ll need to segment your site visitors the same way you’d segment them for lead generation in the custom channel grouping.

   1. Organic Brand - Google Organic searches that include your brand name

   2. Organic Nonbrand - Google Organic searches that don’t include your brand name

   3. Paid Brand - Google Ads searches that include your brand name

   4. Paid Nonbrand - Google Ads searches that don’t include your brand name.

2. Once you have that set up, head over to the Multi Channel Conversions tab (on the left side nav bar) and go clicks on Assisted Conversions. 

3. Load up your custom channel grouping, and you’ll see the performance of each individual channel you just created. 

4. Compare that spend/revenue (and take your profit margin into consideration) and you’ll see what works and what doesn’t. 

Outbound Audit for Small Business

Outbound can be more difficult to analyze, because the channels can be so different.

You might need a professional auditor to help you with some of these, but this should at least get you started.

YouTube audit

In Google Analytics you can set the source/medium to YouTube/paid (or YouTube/CPC, depending on how things are set up) in the Acquisition tab, or set up a custom channel grouping for paid YouTube and check the Assisted Conversions tab. 

Either way, you should be able to get both your spend and earned revenue. Take your profit margin into account, and see if YouTube is worth your time. 

You can further segment this by ads, as some ads will naturally perform better than others. 

Social Media audit (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok)

Similar to YouTube, you’ll want to create audience and/or custom channel groupings for each of these source/medium you want to analyze. 

From there (if you’re using a custom channel group) you can head over to the conversions tab in Analytics and have what you need to calculate your spend and revenue for that channel.

Disconnected Channel Audit

A disconnected channel are things like digital TV ads, billboards, or other advertising that isn’t directly connected to your website (there’s no way I can click a physical billboard and go to your website). 

To audit these, there are a couple steps you can take.

You can do a Matched Market Test

Or you can do a Marketing Incrementality Study

The details of either of these are well beyond the scope of a blog post, however. If you start digging in, you’ll quickly see why. 

Conclusion

Auditing your marketing channels in a granular way allows you to really see what’s making you money and what’s losing it. 

In my time marketing, I’ve rarely seen marketers who focus on small businesses actually use data in a way that truly informs the strategy and is used for optimization. 

Which, again, isn’t to say all small business marketing is bad. I’ve seen as many good marketers as I have bad ones, but that means you’re risking a 50/50 chance of marketing success and failure if you don’t go in and audit your marketing accounts and hold your agency accountable for results (and not just impressions, clicks, and other easy to manipulate metrics). 

If you’re interested in having someone do this for you so you can know if your marketing is really working or not, get in touch. 

We’d be happy to help. 

In case you hear: “Giving You Access Will Expose Other Client’s Account Data”

I haven’t seen this often, but it infuriates me when I do.

A Google Ads account for an agency is split into two parts, the MCC, which is the account that manages and holds client accounts, and the client account itself. 

The Google Ads MCC is useful for agencies, because they can give their staff access to all client accounts by adding them to the MCC instead of manually adding them to dozens or hundreds of accounts manually.

They can give access to your subaccount without revealing data from other accounts.  

But this excuse is typically used to hold accounts hostage. If you want to leave, they keep your Google Ads account, and all the useful data, hostage. The only agencies I’ve seen do this don’t ever seem to know how to get good performance out of an account (which would keep clients), so their strategy to keep clients is to string them along with promises that “it will get better” until things miraculously start working or the client goes bankrupt.

This is all to say, if your agency says they can’t give you access to an account, or that they own the account, you’re probably in trouble.  If you want some help, get in touch.