How to Conduct a Social Media Audit with Ease in 2023

The majority of internet resources for conducting a social media audit concentrate largely on examining organic content, engagement, and social listening research (I prefer this outline from Hootsuite as a good jumping-off point). Less accessible are the criteria for conducting a paid social media audit, which are equally as vital, if not more so.

AZK Digital conducts paid and organic social media audits for a variety of reasons. Before beginning work with a new client, as a consulting service and as a standard component of ongoing management, we do a thorough assessment. These audits assist inform strategy and take stock of what is working in the channel as a whole when it is easy to become mired in platform-specific performance analysis.

A sponsored social media audit can be time-consuming, but the required tools are straightforward: access to the ad accounts, pixel, and Google Analytics (or a similar reporting platform). While doing a social media audit, we always run through a variant of the following checklist:

1. Account Protection
2. 2. Information Technology Infrastructure
3. Campaign Architecture
4. 4. Ad Set Structure
5. 5. Target Audience and Exclusions
6. Ad Set Placement and Distribution
7. 7. Ad Innovative
8. 8. Landing Page Review
9. Competitive Evaluation

The aforementioned categories can provide a plethora of data and insights regarding your paid social media initiatives. But, just as each social media strategy is unique, so too will each social media audit be unique. This post will focus on the four most significant auditing areas and how to begin.

Infrastructure Analytics

A social media ad account’s analytics infrastructure consists of the account’s concrete components: the Facebook pixel and events, the catalogue, and any associated apps.

At AZK Digital, we rely significantly on Google Tag Manager, which allows us to examine pixel changes in preview mode. If you do not presently use a tag management system, Facebook provides a few platform capabilities that can assist you diagnose any infrastructure-level faults you encounter. One of these is the Facebook Test Events Tool, which enables you to navigate across various portions of your website to verify if events are triggering.

After troubleshooting your existing properties, you should search for event tracking gaps. For Facebook, we recommend adhering as closely as possible to the published Facebook standard events. Facebook also has an Event Setup Tool, which allows you to create events directly from the platform if you find gaps in your tracked events. Creating events in this manner lowers your control over aspects like as pixel fire order and double-counting, as you can only alter these through a tag management tool.

Following an evaluation of your social media accounts’ analytics architecture, it should be devoid of faults and back-end inconsistencies.

Campaign and Ad Set Organization

The structure of the account’s campaigns and ad groups should be assessed next. We handle the following concerns across all platforms:

Are campaign objectives aligned with enterprise objectives?

2. If not, are campaigns organised by specific customer journey touchpoints?

3.Are campaigns and ad groups organised to avoid audience overlap (both within and across platforms)?

4.Are the campaigns built to permit maximal automatic optimization (using Facebook’s campaign budget optimization or LinkedIn’s lifetime pacing for campaign spending, for instance)?

Ad account management will always involve manual tuning and testing. Ensuring that campaigns are planned to maximise efficiency and reduce redundancy produces more accurate test results and facilitates optimizations. This strategy is outlined in Facebook’s Power 5 playbook.

Landing Page Review

Although not directly in the ad account, ad destination pages are frequently ignored during a paid social media audit. We suggest examining landing pages based on two categories:

Relevancy

When a person clicks on an advertisement, he or she should have a seamless experience with few surprises. Does the landing page correspond to the ad creative’s creative style and call to action? Is the landing page pertinent to the user’s stage in the customer journey? Each piece of creative in the account should have a landing page that is optimised for experience relevance.

Quality

The landing page that receives paid traffic must be of good quality. Not only will a huge number of users visit this page, but there are additional costs associated with bringing them there. Focusing on page speed, accessible information, and action-oriented design will significantly increase the effectiveness of your advertisements. The 7 Principles of Conversion-Centered Design by Unbounce is a great resource for people who wish to convert users.

In alternative terms

If you are conducting your first paid social media audit, this is an excellent starting point. As I indicated previously, checking your accounts should be a regular component of your social media management activities; we recommend examining this checklist in full at least once every quarter.

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