Why (and how) We Re-Audited All Of Our Client’s Sites
No agency likes when a client leaves. Worse yet is when it’s unexpected.
We try to find ways to eliminate that element of surprise and keep a pulse on client happiness & success:
- Regularly scheduled client meetings
- Recurring reminders to email clients about something great happening in their account
- Weekly strategy team meetings where we dive into several client accounts at a time and to diagnose issues before they become ~issues~. In this meeting, we rate that client’s risk, their happiness with Adster and their happiness with results.
These touchpoints, paired with the work done on a client’s account, and still, we miss things and a client may end their time with us.
Hopefully other digital marketers would agree that website work is never complete and one can always make improvements. We’ve also seen so many changes over the years that can affect a client site. From new industry knowledge affecting how we’d look at a site to a client changing their service offering without updating us – nothing in digital marketing is static.
So, in the name of proactivity, our strategy team decided to take December 2019 to re-audit everything about our client’s engagement with us.
Why re-audit?
We wanted to get away from our normal process, take a step back and reevaluate.
We have some clients who have been with us for years, for whom we are only running Google Ads campaigns and that’s it. We aren’t making ongoing website adjustments, or peeking at their Google My Business profile, etc. We wanted an opportunity to ensure their entire online presence was getting a holistic review.
AND since some clients have been with us so long, we’ve learnt new things in the time since they onboarded with Adster Creative. We’ve gained access to new knowledge & tools that we’ve applied to most accounts, so this was an opportunity to ensure that knowledge is applied across all clients.
How did we do this?
To start, we listed our clients. We skipped clients that recently joined Adster Creative- they were fresh out of our standard audit process anyways, so there was no sense in throwing them right back in.
We prioritized clients based on need, their service offering with us and their level of risk.
To avoid bias and to get a fresh set of eyes on websites and online advertising campaigns, we assigned specific teams to clients, ensuring those team members who worked on those accounts didn’t do these re-audits.
After this, we made a list of important areas we would consider looking at:
- Website assessment
- There are so many subcategories to this area, but on an extremely high level: can any visitor to the site accomplish what we want them to, like find and complete a contact form, on any device, with no issues?
- Any wacky traffic issues?
- What is the content like – is anything missing? Are all the technical best practices still intact from their initial audit?
- Online presence assessment
- What does a branded search result look like?
- What’s the GMB profile looking like? What’s the state of their reviews?
- What about links – has there been an address change without updated citations?
- Is there any sort of social media strategy present?
- Digital strategy assessment
- We’ve developed a checklist that is used when we audit a client’s existing Google Ads or Facebook Ads campaign. Here, we would quickly run through this checklist to ensure the client had all the best practices.
It was obvious fairly quickly where we’d need to focus our energy for each client.
We also took the rough amount of time we’d spend on that client’s work in December and applied it to whatever updates or changes we wanted to make. If we found large issues that required either feedback or more resources, we created proposals and reached out to the client to review our findings. Otherwise, we executed the improvements.
What happened next?
Remember above when I said it would be obvious fairly quickly where we’d need to focus? That was 100% accurate, but it also became clear quickly if that focus area was required because we missed something, or they did. Generally, the recommendations for fixes fell into three categories:
Lingering Issues
When the client came to us, they couldn’t afford to fix all issues on their site at one time so we prioritized, fixed what we had to, and started their ads. A year later, the same issues remain – duh.
Re-examination Required
Some client sites are so large or have the same team members looking at it too often that we were missing little things that can be quickly fixed: this button wasn’t styled like the rest, poor font contrast, this link is going somewhere a little wacky. Read: quick wins!
Deep Divin’
If everything on-site was looking good, it came down to a careful analysis of their online marketing. What tweaks can be made to their Google Ads or Facebook Ads campaign that can increase click through rates or conversion rates? This is again where a fresh set of eyes comes in handy to identify a missed second space, an errant negative keyword or an old ad format (oops!).
This practice in proactivity allowed our team to identify issues now, fix them, and show them to our clients before they go unnoticed. Pobody’s nerfect, as the kids say, but we want to keep an open & transparent line of communication between us and our clients so they know that we are working to make their account as great as it can be. You’ll never be able to prevent every single client from leaving or moving on, but these sorts of activities go a long way to keeping client retention and client happiness high.