Introduction
Modern companies and organizations often use social media profiles and platforms and websites according to their strategy of development. The performance of those profiles and websites are analysed in order to take future decisions and to understand how the audience respond to them. For that, accurate data flow from each source of social media and websites are very important. Here’s where the term analytics audit comes to the scene.
Increase your confidence in decision-making
Organizations struggle to maintain accurate, complete data from their digital analytics sources in order to create the trust when decisions need to be made.
Some common issues that organizations experience when considering an analytics audit include:
- Lack of internal resources to maintain analytics solutions, and it can’t be reviewed for a long period of time.
- The team responsible has changed and there is no documentation available.
- Having multiple domains with lack of consistency in data collection. That makes reporting and insights impossible.
If you have similar issues in your organization, it’s a sign that an analytics audit must be performed and restructure and document a concrete analytics scheme.
What is an analytics audit?
Analytics audit is a process of reviewing a website’s analytics or a social media page/profile setup and configuration with the intention to make sure everything important is being tracked as well as that different data sources match.
When you properly develop a strategy, an analytics audit is often one of the first steps to take. For start-ups and evolving organizations, a clear measurement strategy is a must need, in order to continuously adapt to changing customer demands, competition, and business needs. The analytics audit sets the foundation for the long term measurement by designing your analytics solution, documenting that architecture and its implementation.
Analytics Audit Process
It doesn’t matter the technology you use, an analytics audit should follow the following format to ensure the end results provide accurate, complete data to support decision-making of your organization.
Discover the strategy
Document a clear set of objectives and requirements in the first place. Discussions, site and application reviews, expertise and experience, can help to create the list. Then, map the objectives and requirements to the tracking of the website or social media.
Data collection and implementation
Once the analytics tracking strategy is approved, translate the requirements and the architecture into the data collection method. In this step, it is important to compare your analytics data to your actual business data. This can be a tool such as Google Analytics, custom-made code or a hybrid of both the tool and customized dimensions and metrics attribution model, and you may have to assign your development team to properly deploy it. When the data collection method is implemented and enabled, all the analytics tracking setup is complete.
Establish a reporting setup
Parallel to the data collection implementation, a reporting foundation is built. The reports must be delivered to the right people at the right frequency. Analytics tools or business intelligence tools can be utilized to identify actionable insights from the data collected.
Best practices for an analytics audit
It is a good practice to not audit your own analytics setup, but to have someone professional, not directly related to your business, do it for you.
If you are a small business and don’t have a budget to get an expert audit, you might probably do it by yourself . Creating and implementing an audit of your own analytics setups is also a good way to learn your setups really well. But it is time-consuming.
Further readings:
Google Analytics audit
Follow this link to read further about performing a Google Analytics audit, and this link to find the checklist that is published by Google Analytics itself so that you can use to guide you through the process.
Facebook audit
Follow this link to read further about Facebook audits and how to do it within a few minutes.
Twitter audit
You can read about how to conduct a Twitter audit to improve your brand’s presence through this link.
Instagram audit
You will find many tools and instructions about conducting an Instagram audit if follow this link
YouTube audit
Read about why you should audit your YouTube channel and watch some videos about auditing your YouTube channel through this link