A Meta Ads checklist earns its place because the expensive mistakes in paid social almost never happen mid-campaign. They are baked in before launch — a wrong conversion event, a page that does not load, a claim that gets the account restricted. Once the budget starts moving, you are just watching the consequence.
This is the list we run before anything goes live. It takes about forty minutes.
The Meta Ads checklist starts with tracking
- Pixel fires on every page. Not just the homepage. Check with the browser extension on the landing page, the thank-you page and one blog page.
- The conversion event is the right one. Optimising to a page view or an add-to-cart will get you exactly those. Pick the event that means money.
- Conversions API is connected. Browser-only tracking loses a meaningful share of events now. This is the single most common gap we find in inherited accounts.
- Test event fired and confirmed. Submit the form yourself and watch it arrive in Events Manager. Do not assume.
- UTM parameters on every ad. Without them you cannot tell which campaign produced which lead in your own CRM, whatever the platform claims.
The destination
- The landing page matches the ad. Same promise, same offer, same language. Mismatch is both a conversion killer and a policy risk.
- Loads in under three seconds on 4G. Test on a real mid-range phone, not your laptop.
- The form works on mobile. Right keyboard for the phone field, button not hidden under the browser bar, dropdowns that open. This fails more often than anyone expects — see the nine mistakes we find most.
- Something happens after submit. A thank-you state that says what happens next, and ideally an automated WhatsApp message already sent.
Creative
- At least four genuinely different angles. Not four crops of one image. Different reasons to care.
- Policy read, not skimmed. No before-and-after, no personal attributes, no income or health claims — including inside a creator's script you did not write.
- Captions burned in. Most of your audience is watching on mute.
Structure and budget
- Budget is enough for the concepts you are running. Roughly three to five times target CPA per concept before it can be judged. If the maths does not work, cut concepts, not budget per concept.
- The kill rule is written down. Before launch, while nobody is attached to anything. Our testing framework has the version we use.
Forty minutes of checking beats three weeks of wondering why a campaign underperformed.
The two most commonly skipped
In audits, the two that are missing most often are the Conversions API connection and the written kill rule. The first quietly costs you conversion data all month. The second costs you the Friday argument about whether to give a losing ad one more weekend.
Neither is difficult. Both are boring, which is why they get skipped.
If the account behind this needs someone in it every day rather than every Friday, that is what we do on Meta.
Questions people ask
What should I check before launching a Meta campaign?
That the pixel and Conversions API both fire the right event, that the event appears in Events Manager as a test purchase or lead, that the landing page loads quickly on a phone, and that the budget clears the learning phase on your chosen event.
How much budget does a new campaign need?
Enough for roughly fifty optimisation events a week. Work backwards from your expected cost per event rather than choosing a round daily number, because below that threshold delivery never stabilises and nothing you test can be read.
How long before I judge a new campaign?
Leave it alone until the learning phase closes, which usually takes about a week of steady delivery. Editing budgets, audiences or creative before then restarts learning and buys you another week of unreadable data.
What gets accounts restricted at launch?
Claims about health outcomes, income or personal attributes, before-and-after imagery, and landing pages that do not match the ad. Review the page as carefully as the creative, because the page is what most restrictions actually cite.
Want us to run this over your account before you scale? Send us the details.