For us Kiwis the first of September heralds the start of spring. The evenings are becoming lighter, warmer and — for Auckland, especially — a lot dryer. Just four months sit between us and the end-of-year rush, so now is a great time to spring clean your website marketing in preparation.

So let’s pull out the “spring cleaning broom” and give the four core areas a good once-over. Spend a few hours following the points below and you can bring each area back to the shiny state it was in at the start of the year.

1. Email Marketing

Are there new subscribers hidden in the dead-subscriber reports? You can tell this by digging into your hard-bounce reports. These are usually email addresses that will never resolve properly because of some basic error in the domain name. For instance too many or too few dots — or basic spelling mistakes like gmale.com that can be easily corrected.

Probably not the most enticing of jobs, but once someone has loaded them up into a spreadsheet and corrected the ones that you can baboom, you are now instantly connected with “new” subscribers who inadvertently entered their addresses incorrectly.

That done, now ask whether your Welcome Message is the best it can be. (That’s the message that people receive upon joining your email list.) Now would be a good time to check over the content to ensure all is still relevant and the links resolve properly. While you are at it, you may want to inspect any regular automatically generated messages to ensure their content works. Perhaps your mobile audience has grown and an upgrade to a responsive driven content could be worthwhile?

  2. Website Analytics

Is your “net of measurement” covering all your website content? Over the last few months you may have added some groovy new content to your site but not included it in your measurement plans. Now is an ideal time to review all your Google Analytics goals and events to ensure they accurately reflect your site’s content. Likewise, if you have removed sections of your website you may want to disable any goals related to these, now very quiet, places.

Next question, can your reports reveal new opportunities for lead generation content? If you run a blog you may want to see which posts have been the most popular so far this year. Perhaps there’s an e-book you can create by weaving the top five pages into the one seamless document?

3. Google AdWords Advertising

Are you making the most of the space provided by Google? The recent upgrade to Expanded Text Ads could mean your old-school ads are decidedly skinny compared to the competitor ones surrounding them. Time to get in there and make the most of the nearly 50% increase in space available to you.

Next step, can you hoover out any wasted clicks? Running an AdWords account on a set-and-forget basis is probably never a good idea — however, we are told that thousands of accounts are run this very way. So if it’s a month since you last looked at your account, dig into the AdWords search queries report in your Google Analytics account to ensure there’s nothing scary in there — like paying for clicks that are not relevant to your business. Pull out the obvious bad ones and amend your negative keyword list asap to stop the wastage.

4. Your Own Online Marketing Knowledge

Is new thinking required to help you achieve new goals? (That’s a rhetorical question.) Not knowing what you don’t know is always a challenging space to be in. Why not take the “spring cleaning broom” to your online marketing knowledge and invest some time and money in expanding it? Our Group Training courses are designed with the business owner in mind — short dollops of information delivered in an affordable way. You can find out more on what we offer in both Google Analytics and Google AdWords here.