Monthly Marketing KPI Review Checklist

Export last month's spend, revenue, and ROAS from Google Ads and Meta Ads Manager. Reconcile platform totals against the finance ledger before reporting — platform-reported spend often drifts from invoiced spend by 1–3% due to invalid-traffic credits and currency rounding.

Compare blended ROAS and channel-level ROAS against the targets set in the FY plan. Flag any channel below 80% of target for the action-items section.

CPA targets are derived from the payback-period model — a CPA that hits the click target but breaks the 12-month payback assumption is still a miss. Cross-check against LTV:CAC by segment.

Run the Acquisition → Traffic acquisition report in GA4 and look for unbranded source/medium values like (not set), lowercase/uppercase drift in campaign names, or auto-tagged Google Ads sessions arriving as google / cpc while manual UTMs say Google / paid. Inconsistent tagging breaks attribution downstream.

Confirm key conversion events (lead_submit, signup, purchase) are firing on actual form submission, not on field-blur or page-view. A mis-mapped conversion event will inflate CTR-driven dashboards by 3–5x and distort budget allocation.

Pull engagement rate, reach, impressions, and follower growth by channel (LinkedIn, X, Instagram, TikTok). Separate organic from paid/boosted so engagement-rate trend isn't masked by ad spend changes.

Export from HubSpot or Marketo. Apple Mail Privacy Protection inflates open rates — track click rate and unique-click rate as the real engagement signals. Flag any send with unsubscribe rate above 0.5% or complaint rate above 0.1%.

Check Google Postmaster Tools for IP and domain reputation, spam rate, and authentication pass rate (SPF, DKIM, DMARC). Spam rate above 0.3% triggers Gmail throttling within days.

GA4 defines an engaged session as 10+ seconds, a conversion, or 2+ pageviews. Compare engaged-session rate by landing page and channel — paid landing pages below 40% engaged usually indicate message-match or page-speed problems.

Pull MQLs from HubSpot, Marketo, or Pardot, broken out by lead source and campaign. Filter out test records, internal email domains, and known bot submissions before reporting the headline number.

Use a lagged cohort — last month's MQLs converting to SQL this month, not same-month conversion. Same-month conversion always understates the rate because most MQLs need 2–3 weeks to qualify.

LinkedIn CPL is typically 3–5x Google Search CPL but should produce higher-fit MQLs — judge each channel against its own benchmark, not blended CPL. Document any channel where CPL doubled month-over-month.

Sample 20 leads scored MQL last month and review whether sales accepted them. If acceptance rate is below 60%, the scoring rules need recalibration — common drift sources are competitor visits scoring as intent and form-fill scoring weighted too high vs. firmographic fit.

Compare original-source values in Salesforce/HubSpot against the MAP's first-touch attribution. Direct-traffic share above 25% is usually a sign UTM tagging is broken on a referring page or email link.

Rank pages by engaged sessions, conversions, and assisted conversions — not by raw pageviews. A high-pageview blog post that drives zero conversions is not high-performing content; flag it for the next content audit.

In Google Search Console, sort queries by impressions descending and look for high-impression / low-CTR queries — these are title-tag and meta-description optimization opportunities. Also flag any query that lost more than 30% of impressions month-over-month.

Pull the tracked-keyword report and isolate movements of 5+ positions on commercial-intent keywords. Correlate drops with the Google update calendar before assuming the cause is on-page.

Use GA4's data-driven attribution or your CRM's first-touch report to identify which posts and gated assets drove MQLs. The 80/20 typically holds — surface the top-five assets so the next content cycle doubles down.

Export opportunities created last month with marketing-sourced lead-source values from Salesforce or HubSpot CRM. Use the opportunity-creation date, not the lead-creation date, to keep the report aligned with the sales team's number.

Marketing-sourced pipeline divided by total marketing spend. The healthy B2B SaaS benchmark is 5:1 to 10:1 depending on segment; below 3:1 sustained over a quarter is a flag for the CMO review.

Compare average days-to-close by lead source. Inbound SEO leads typically close 30–40% faster than cold-outbound; if that gap is narrowing, content quality or routing latency may be slipping.

Confirm the attribution model (first-touch, last-touch, multi-touch) matches what was agreed with RevOps. Mid-quarter model changes silently shift credit between marketing and sales and create unreliable trend lines.

A KPI miss is any headline metric (ROAS, CPA, MQLs, MQL→SQL rate, marketing-sourced pipeline) below 90% of the monthly target. Marking Yes triggers the root-cause and optimization-review steps below.

Write a short root-cause note: which KPI, by how much, and the most likely driver (channel-level, attribution, market, creative fatigue, list health, tracking break). Avoid the single-cause trap — most misses are 2–3 contributing factors.

Book a 60-minute working session for week 3 with the demand-gen lead, content lead, and RevOps. Bring the root-cause note and a proposed reallocation — do not show up with only the problem.

Final review by the marketing director. Attach the published dashboard PDF, capture reviewer notes for the QBR deck, and record the sign-off decision.