Social media audit

The backbone of any high-performing paid social media campaign is data analysis. With that, it is important to be running regular social media audits to ensure that you’re hitting the right targets and driving results.

What Is a Social Media Audit?

A social media audit is a way in which to analyse and evaluate the performance of your paid and/or organic social media efforts. It is both a subjective and objective, data-driven process designed to evaluate, review, and optimise your social media performance. This can be carried out on a regular basis, to ensure the strategy remains aligned but is most often performed when a new advertiser takes over the campaigns.

We understand that not everyone has weeks and weeks to review every aspect of their paid social media performance. So that’s why at Embryo, we’re here to be the experts at completing social media audits that deliver for your organisation, driving actionable insights that can propel your business forward. Get in touch with us today and let’s discuss how we can support you.

Why is a Social Media Audit Important?

With a detailed social audit, you are able to identify any potential issues, such as:

Tracking discrepancies
Creative fatigue
Exhausted campaigns

A social audit can also highlight growth areas, such as:

High-performing ads to scale
High-performing audiences
Budget scaling opportunity
Creative performance trends

Our Team

Meet Our Paid Social experts

Harriet Tuite
Head of Paid Social
Tom Jowle
Paid Social Manager
Emma Sowersby
Senior Paid Social Executive
Megan Atkinson
Senior Paid Social Executive
Jenny Byrne
Paid Social Manager

Our Approach to Social Media Audits

Without understanding the core objectives of your social media channel, it is difficult to put data into context. For example, if your TikTok advertising aims to drive sales, but you run your audit and start referring to the amount of impressions and video views as a success, even though you’ve not driven any purchases, you’re missing the mark.

With established KPIs and objectives in place, we can start to look at reviewing and analysing your performance.

The first step to any useful social media audit, such as the kind we run at Embryo, is to understand the objectives of the channel. We first start by asking the following:

What are the goals of the channel?
Who are we targeting with the channel?
What is classed as a success for the channel?

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Paid Social Media Audit Key Elements

Once we have an understanding of the objectives of the social channels, we can use this to form the basis of our audit. Here at Embryo, we can summarise the audit process into 6 key steps:

1. Creative review

Creative is a key element of any paid social media strategy. It is important that as part of your paid social audit you are analysing your best and worst performing creative and identifying any trends.

Creative reviews should not only look at what is performing well, but the opportunities that you could be missing out on. This includes changing up ad formats/styles to see what works best for your account.

This could mean, if you see that carousel formats drive the best ROAS, perhaps it is worth testing more of this style. If the account only contains single images, it might be a good idea to test video. This can be highlighted within any thorough paid social audit.
2. Setup and structure review

One of the first elements to analyse when undertaking a paid social audit is to take a look at the account setup and structure. This review takes a look at the foundations of the account, covering aspects such as:
- Are we covering all aspects of the funnel?
- Do we have the correct campaign types live?
- Are we taking advantage of the platform’s features?
- Do we have the correct objectives set up?
By ensuring that the answer to all the above questions is ‘yes’, we are giving our clients the best chance at driving success.
3. Audience insight analysis

Once we have completed a structure review, it is time to take a look at audiences. It’s important to check for potential issues, such as audience overlap or particular audiences that aren’t receiving any budget.

We analyse audiences regarding:
- Spend – are there any audiences that are taking the most spend? Are any underspending due to audience size?
- Creative – are some creatives working better with certain audiences than others?
- Ad focus – are certain focuses resonating more with particular audiences than others?
By diving deep into your audience’s engagement, we can identify growth opportunities and potential audience expansion that the strategy may be missing.
4. Tracking checks

When first launching campaigns, one of the first things to be checked is that tracking is accurate and working. It can be quite easy after that initial launch period to just accept that tracking is firing as it should and go about your day to day, however that isn’t always the case.

If page URLs change, tags are updated or website structures are amended, this can mean that tracking fails.

At Embryo, we ensure we’re running regular tracking checks and there’s no better time to do that than during a social media audit. We don’t just rest on the laurels of functioning tracking, we ensure that all the events are the core events that we need to measure success properly and accurately.
5. Budget analysis

Once we’ve analysed structure, creative, audiences and ensured tracking is accurate, we will ensure that budget is being spent effectively across all campaigns and ads.

Here we’ll analyse if you’re overspending on underperforming campaigns, or if your account could utilise additional spend to drive further results.

This review is vital for driving efficiencies and growth without paid social accounts.
6. Performance review

Now that we’re sure that everything in place is accurate and we’ve identified improvement areas, it is important that we take a step back to review the overall performance of the client.

It is best practice to be pushing a full-funnel approach across Meta, but if the client is utilising the channel to mainly build top of funnel awareness and convert through other channels, it may not be wise to implement purely ‘best practice’.

We will analyse an account’s performance on its own, but also within the context of wider business objectives to ensure that we are driving tangible results.

FAQs answered by the experts

Harriet Tuite- Head of Paid Social

"When running social media campaigns, it is very easy to get caught up in the day-to-day running and optimisations. A social media audit allows you to take a step back from the detail and analyse whether you’re hitting the business objectives and if not, how to make sure that you do."

Why are social media audits important?

Social media audits allow you to analyse your performance by taking a deep dive into the wider strategy, as opposed to your day to day checks.
How long should a social media audit take?

It depends on the size of account and depth of analysis, but a social media audit can take from a few hours to a few days.
How often should you perform a social media audit?

An in depth social media audit should be actioned at the start of a new account takeover at the very least, to then be reviewed at least twice per year. A more top level audit can be performed on a monthly basis.
Are social media audits for paid or organic strategies?

Social media audits are useful for both paid and organic social media strategies. An audit could reveal opportunities where paid ads can support your organic strategy and vice versa, which is why we always recommend a dual approach.