The Marketing Ops Audit: 12 Things to Check Before Any Major Campaign

Running a major campaign against a broken marketing stack is a guaranteed way to generate bad data, waste budget, and create attribution arguments that last for months. A pre-campaign audit takes half a day. Skipping it can cost weeks of post-campaign cleanup and a significant percentage of your budget sent to suppressed contacts or tracked against the wrong campaign.

"Marketing operations is the connective tissue of a modern marketing organization. When that tissue is unhealthy — broken tracking, misaligned systems, dirty data — every campaign you run is built on a foundation that undermines the very metrics you use to make decisions."

— Scott Brinker, VP Platform Ecosystem, HubSpot and Editor of chiefmartec.com (2023)

UTM hygiene

Check your UTM taxonomy document is current and that the team is using it. UTM parameters on campaign links should follow a consistent structure: source, medium, campaign name, content, and term where relevant. If your UTM document has not been updated in six months, it is probably being ignored, and your campaign attribution will be a mess.

Specifically verify that campaign names are consistent across channels, that paid social is using medium equals cpc or paid-social consistently, and that email is medium equals email with source matching your ESP name.

Suppression lists

Verify your suppression lists are synced and current. This means: unsubscribed contacts are in your suppression list, hard bounces are suppressed, spam complaints are suppressed, and any GDPR or CCPA opt-out requests processed in the last 30 days are reflected. Sending to a suppressed contact is a compliance and deliverability risk, not just a wasted send.

If you are running a campaign across multiple platforms, verify that the suppression state is synced across all of them. A contact who unsubscribed from email but is still in your paid social custom audience list is still being messaged.

Domain warm-up status

If you are increasing send volume significantly from a domain or IP that has not been warmed to that volume, inbox placement will suffer. Check your domain warm-up plan against your planned send volume. If you are planning a send at 5x your normal weekly volume, you need a warm-up ramp, not a single blast.

Segment accuracy

Spot-check your campaign segments. Pull a sample of 20 contacts from the segment and verify they actually match the criteria. Segment logic in Mautic, HubSpot, or any MA platform can drift. A segment built six months ago may have logic based on field values that have since been renamed or restructured. Specifically check: are any test contacts in the segment? Are any employees in the segment who should not receive the campaign? Does the segment size match your expected audience?

The remaining eight checks

Check tracking pixel fires correctly on all landing pages. Verify form submissions are flowing to the correct list or segment. Confirm your conversion events in your analytics platform are firing and categorized correctly. Review unsubscribe link placement and functionality in your email templates. Test your landing page on mobile. Verify that any dynamic content rules are correct, because wrong personalization is worse than no personalization. Confirm your campaign reporting dashboard is set up before launch, not after. And check that your post-campaign analysis process is documented: who will pull the report, when, and what decisions will be made based on it.

📊By the numbers