Marketing Reporting QA Checklist
April 2026 • Reporting • Data Quality
Use this checklist before launching a dashboard, sending a recurring report, or changing an automated marketing reporting workflow.
Goal: catch broken data, unclear definitions, and stakeholder-facing mistakes before the report is trusted by a team.
1. Source Data Checks
- Confirm every expected source refreshed successfully.
- Check the latest available date for each source.
- Compare row counts against the previous reporting period.
- Look for unexpected missing values in campaign, source, medium, date, spend, clicks, conversions, and revenue fields.
- Confirm currency, timezone, and account filters match the report definition.
2. Metric Definition Checks
- Document the formula for each headline metric.
- Confirm spend, revenue, conversion, and lead definitions match stakeholder expectations.
- Check whether metrics are pre-aggregated before calculating ratios like CPA, ROAS, CTR, or CVR.
- Confirm whether canceled orders, refunds, test leads, internal traffic, or duplicate events are excluded.
- Validate that naming conventions map channels and campaigns into the right reporting groups.
3. Reconciliation Checks
- Compare dashboard spend to platform spend for each major channel.
- Compare conversions or revenue to the source of truth, such as CRM, ecommerce, or backend data.
- Investigate large week-over-week or month-over-month changes before sharing the report.
- Check whether recent tracking, attribution, campaign naming, or data pipeline changes explain variance.
- Write down known gaps so users do not mistake them for hidden errors.
4. Dashboard Experience Checks
- Test every filter, date selector, drill path, and tab.
- Confirm default filters show the intended business view.
- Check that charts do not hide important categories because of sorting, limits, or null handling.
- Confirm labels, legends, and titles use business language instead of raw field names.
- Open the dashboard in a stakeholder account or permission level when possible.
5. Automation Checks
- Confirm scheduled jobs run in the correct order.
- Confirm failure alerts go to someone who can act on them.
- Check whether late-arriving data can update previously reported periods.
- Store report logic in a place the team can review, not only inside one dashboard.
- Keep a short changelog for metric, source, and dashboard updates.
6. Pre-Send Review
- Scan the report as if you are the executive or channel owner receiving it.
- Add context for major increases, decreases, or gaps.
- Remove draft views, test filters, and unused charts.
- Confirm the report answers the business question it was built for.
- Send a preview to one reviewer before broad distribution.