The Complete Marketing Compliance Checklist for 2024

Compliance in marketing is essential for avoiding costly mistakes that can lead to fines, wasted ad spend, and damage to your brand’s reputation. Whether it’s adhering to internal guidelines or broader regulations, such as GDPR, marketers must ensure campaigns are set up properly and data is handled responsibly.

This checklist outlines the essential steps to ensure your campaigns and data management processes meet all necessary compliance standards, safeguarding your business while optimizing marketing performance.

What Is Marketing Compliance?

Marketing compliance refers to the process of ensuring that all marketing activities, including campaign setup, messaging, data collection, and reporting, adhere to legal regulations, industry standards, and internal company policies. This involves following guidelines for ad content, respecting consumer privacy laws like GDPR or CCPA, and ensuring data is collected, stored, and used responsibly.

In the following sections, we will explore the key areas of marketing compliance, focusing on how to ensure that every aspect of your campaigns—from setup to data handling—meets legal requirements, industry standards, and internal guidelines.

The Complete Marketing Compliance Checklist

Here's a comprehensive checklist. In the following sections, we will dive deeper into each marketing compliance category to ensure thorough understanding and implementation.

Campaign Setup Compliance

Verify targeting parameters match the intended audience.
Ensure budget allocation aligns with campaign goals.
Confirm creative assets adhere to platform guidelines.
Review compliance with internal brand guidelines and targeting policies.

Campaign Performance Compliance

Set clear performance benchmarks (e.g., ROAS, CAC).
Monitor key metrics (CTR, conversion rates) to ensure compliance with campaign goals.
Automate alerts for underperforming campaigns that fall below predefined thresholds.

Campaign Analytics Compliance

Validate UTM naming conventions for consistent tracking across platforms.
Ensure data extractions are complete, accurate, and up-to-date.
Detect and resolve anomalies or irregularities in campaign data.

Data Collection and Privacy Compliance

Implement clear opt-in mechanisms for data collection.
Ensure data is consistent, accurate, and relevant to campaign goals.
Regularly audit data hygiene to maintain quality and eliminate duplicates or outdated records.

Privacy Laws and Regulations

Obtain explicit consent before collecting or using personal data.
Provide clear opt-out mechanisms.
Ensure compliance with regional privacy laws (HIPAA, CCPA, etc.).
Implement strong data protection measures to safeguard consumer information.

Monitor Compliance

Use tools like Marketing Data Governance to automate compliance checks.
Utilize Improvado Workspaces to manage campaign data access and integrity.
Conduct regular audits of data collection practices and logs to ensure ongoing compliance.

1. Campaign Setup Compliance

Campaign setup compliance involves ensuring that every element of your marketing campaign—targeting, budgeting, and creative assets—meets both internal guidelines and external regulations. It’s about making sure that ads are served to the right audience, budgets are spent efficiently, and creatives adhere to platform and legal standards.

External Regulations	Internal Regulations
GDPR: Requires consent for data use and transparency in data collection.	Brand Guidelines: Ensure creatives align with company tone, style, and messaging.
CCPA: Allows California residents to opt out of data use, affecting targeting.	Targeting Policies: Define audience targeting rules based on internal criteria.
CAN-SPAM Act: Requires consent and sender identification for email campaigns.	Budget Allocation Rules: Set limits on budget spending per channel or campaign.
FTC Advertising Guidelines: Ensure all creatives are truthful and non-deceptive.	Creative Approval Processes: Require internal review before campaign launch.
HIPAA: Limits targeting and data use in healthcare-related marketing.	Compliance Checklists: Verify campaigns meet legal and platform-specific standards.
COPPA: Restricts targeting of children under 13, requiring parental consent.	Data Usage Policies: Govern how customer data can be used in campaigns and retargeting.

Failure to maintain setup compliance can lead to misaligned targeting, wasted ad spend, or even penalties for violating platform policies.

Marketing Data Governance assists Advertising Operations and Marketing Operations by running campaign setup validation. — *Campaign data governance dashboard*

To simplify the process of campaign setup validation, Marketing Data Governance offers a solution that monitors compliance on autopilot. It verifies that targeting parameters accurately match the intended audience, ensuring your budget is allocated effectively and aligns with campaign goals. Additionally, it checks that all creative elements are correctly configured and meet compliance standards.

Such automated approach streamlines launching multi-regional and multi-brand campaigns. Marketing Data Governance eliminates the need for manual checks and allows brands to scale campaigns seamlessly, regardless of their complexity or size.

Here’s an example of DV360 campaign setup parameters Marketing Data Governance can validate:

Keywords added for the insertion order
Position selected for the insertion order
A specific number of deals selected for the insertion order
A specific amount of public inventory chosen
Geographical targets set for the insertion order
Keyword exclusions are used (Display & Video)
Third-party brand safety partner solution is integrated
Sensitive content placements were removed

Get a demo of Marketing Data Governance to easily launch complex campaigns in multi-brand and multi-region settings.

2. Campaign Performance or Advertising Compliance

Campaign performance compliance focuses on ensuring that all marketing activities meet predefined performance benchmarks and adhere to key metrics.

This involves continuously monitoring campaign KPIs—such as click-through rates (CTR), conversion rates, return on ad spend (ROAS), and customer acquisition costs (CAC)—to ensure they align with the goals established during the planning phase.

Effective performance compliance requires setting clear thresholds for each metric before launching a campaign.

For example, establishing acceptable limits for CAC or ROAS allows you to quickly identify underperforming campaigns and take corrective action, such as reallocating budget or adjusting targeting parameters.

It’s not just about tracking, but about actively ensuring that campaigns meet these benchmarks, thus optimizing performance and avoiding wasted ad spend.

The Marketing Data Governance budget pacing dashboard monitors how quickly campaigns are spending allocated budget relative to the planned spend. — *Marketing Data Governance budget pacing dashboard*

Automated tools like Marketing Data Governance can further streamline this process, providing real-time insights into how campaigns are performing against these benchmarks and sending alerts when performance dips below acceptable levels.

Example of The Trade Desk metrics guidelines you can track with Marketing Data Governance:

Advertiser account has an Avg. CPC of $X or less
Advertiser account is at or less $X cost per conversion
Insertion order is at or less $X CPM
Insertion order is at or above X% conversion rate
Line Item is at or above X% clicks

This proactive approach ensures that campaigns remain on track to achieve business goals while minimizing inefficiencies and maximizing returns.

3. Campaign Analytics Compliance

Marketing Data Governance improves the reliability and value of campaign data. — *Marketing Data Governance taxonomy compliance dashboard closeup*

Campaign analytics compliance involves ensuring that the data you collect is accurate, consistent, and actionable. This is critical for validating the reliability of your campaign analytics and maintaining the integrity of your insights.

One key aspect of analytics compliance is monitoring the status of data extractions to confirm that all necessary data is accurately captured and up-to-date. Missing or incomplete data can lead to skewed reports and poor decision-making. Regular checks of your data pipelines and extraction processes help ensure that no critical information is overlooked or delayed.

Another important aspect is detecting anomalies in your data for identifying any irregularities or unexpected patterns that could distort your analytics. These anomalies may arise from technical errors, misconfigurations, or even fraudulent activity. By promptly addressing these data discrepancies, you ensure that your campaign performance is measured accurately and that the insights you derive are both reliable and actionable.

4. Data Collection and Privacy Compliance

Data collection and privacy compliance are essential for ensuring the quality and integrity of the data you rely on for marketing insights.

High-quality data starts with responsible collection practices—gathering accurate, relevant, and timely information. Ensuring that the data you collect aligns with your tracking and campaign objectives is key to avoiding unnecessary clutter and irrelevant data points that could compromise your analysis.

Marketing analytics and intelligence tools like Improvado implement anomaly detection at the data extraction stage and keep logs to ease troubleshooting issues, ensuring data integrity and maintaining transparency in the data collection process.

Additionally, maintaining strict data hygiene—through frequent audits and data validation—helps prevent inaccuracies caused by duplicate records, outdated information, or incomplete data sets.

By focusing on quality data collection and maintaining consistency, you ensure that your campaign analytics are based on reliable, actionable information, ultimately leading to better decision-making and more effective marketing strategies.

5. Privacy Laws and Regulations

Privacy laws and regulations govern how marketers collect, store, and use consumer data. Laws such as HIPAA in the U.S. for healthcare data and CCPA in California set strict guidelines on how personal information must be handled, ensuring that businesses protect consumer privacy. Compliance with these regulations is crucial to avoid legal penalties and maintain customer trust.

To comply with these regulations, companies usually need to:

Obtain explicit consent before collecting any personal data.
Provide clear opt-out mechanisms to allow consumers to control how their data is used.
Ensure transparency by informing consumers how their data will be collected, stored, and utilized.
Implement strong data protection measures to prevent breaches and unauthorized access.
Conduct regular audits and data reviews to ensure all data collection practices are compliant with the latest regulations.

By adhering to these practices, businesses can minimize the risk of non-compliance while fostering trust and protecting consumer privacy.

Monitor Adherence to Marketing Compliance

Ensuring ongoing compliance with marketing regulations requires continuous monitoring and the use of dedicated tools to track adherence to both external laws and internal policies.

These tools provide features such as audit trails, real-time alerts, and detailed logs to ensure that campaign setups, data collection, and performance remain within the required legal and operational frameworks.

For example, Improvado offers multiple powerful solutions for managing compliance across campaigns and clients:

Improvado Workspaces allow marketers to create tailored environments for specific accounts or data sources (for example, , controlling access and ensuring that each workspace adheres to its unique compliance requirements. This setup helps streamline campaign management while ensuring the right data is accessible only to the right people.
Marketing Data Governance provides an automated way to ensure campaign, brand and data compliance helping brands achieve better performance by continuously optimizing ROAS.

By leveraging these and other compliance tools, marketers can ensure their campaigns are properly monitored, reducing the risk of non-compliance and optimizing overall performance.

Get a demo with Improvado to ensure seamless marketing compliance across all campaigns.

FAQ

What is marketing compliance?

Marketing compliance is the process of ensuring that all marketing activities, including campaign setup, data collection, and performance tracking, adhere to legal regulations, industry standards, and internal company policies. It involves following guidelines for privacy, data usage, ad content, and targeting to avoid legal risks, financial penalties, and reputational damage, while also optimizing campaign performance.

What is a compliance review of marketing materials?

A compliance review of marketing materials ensures that all promotional content follows legal regulations, such as advertising standards and privacy laws, as well as internal brand guidelines. It checks for accuracy, proper claims, and adherence to rules on data usage and audience targeting, helping prevent legal risks and maintain credibility.

What is the role of marketing compliance?

The role of marketing compliance is to ensure that all marketing activities align with legal regulations, industry standards, and internal policies. It helps protect a business from legal risks, fines, and reputational damage by ensuring that campaigns are accurately targeted, data is handled responsibly, and all content adheres to advertising laws and ethical guidelines. Compliance also enhances trust with customers and optimizes campaign effectiveness by maintaining high standards.