Meta Ads Launch Checklist: 23 Checks Before You Go Live

A missed check at launch rarely costs you straight away. It costs you three days later, when you find out the conversion event was never firing, or that Meta’s CTA button covered your hook on 100% of Reels impressions.

Here are the 23 checks we run before every launch. The full checklist is below: nothing is held back for the PDF. The PDF is there so you can tick it off on screen or on paper.

Where these numbers come from. The dimensions, character limits and safe zone percentages on this page were taken from Meta’s official ads guide (facebook.com/business/ads-guide) on 18 August 2026. Meta changes them: check again before a major launch.

Tracking (4 checks)

1. The pixel fires in Test Events. Open Test Events and trigger the event by hand on the site. If it does not show up live, it will not show up in production either.

2. The optimisation event matches the actual goal. Optimising for AddToCart when you sell means buying add-to-carts. Meta delivers exactly what you ask for.

3. The domain is verified and the 8 events are prioritised. Without a priority order in Aggregated Event Measurement, the order is Meta’s choice, not yours.

4. UTMs are in place and consistent with your naming convention. If the creative name in Meta and utm_content in GA do not line up, reconciling the two sources becomes manual work at every reporting cycle.

Targeting (4 checks)

5. Exclusions are set. Recent buyers, customer lists, retention audiences. This is the most frequently forgotten check and the most expensive one: you are paying to talk to people who already bought.

6. Audience overlap is checked. The Audience Overlap tool shows it in two clicks. Above 30% between two ad sets, you are bidding against yourself.

7. Location and language are explicit. The default setting often reaches wider than intended. Also check that the creative’s language matches the region.

8. Automatic or manual placements is a decision, not a default. Automatic placements are a good default if your creatives exist in every ratio. If not, they will serve a 4:5 image cropped to 9:16.

Placements and formats (4 checks)

This is the section where mistakes are most visible and easiest to avoid.

9. The ratio matches the placement.

10. Technical minimums are met. Feed: 600 px minimum width, 750 px height. Stories: 500 px minimum width. Ratio tolerance is 3% for Feed, 1% for Stories.

11. Safe zones are respected on vertical formats. Meta recommends keeping free of text, logos and key creative elements:

• 14% at the top
• 35% at the bottom
• 6% on each side

These percentages are identical for Stories and Reels. On a 1,440 × 2,560 px canvas that means roughly 358 px at the top, 896 px at the bottom and 86 px on each side. What is left is a usable band of about 1,268 × 1,306 px, barely half the height.

The bottom 35% is the one people forget: that is where the account name, the description and the call-to-action button sit. A hook placed 20% from the bottom is invisible to everyone.

12. File weight and format pass. Image: JPG or PNG, 30 MB maximum. Reels video: MP4 or MOV, H.264 compression, AAC stereo audio at 128 kbps or higher, 4 GB maximum, duration from 0 seconds to 15 minutes.

Creative (4 checks)

13. Advantage+ Enhancements is off, creative by creative, if you do not want it. The setting cannot be turned off globally: you uncheck it on each creative, and it comes back on new ones. It is the most common trap of 2026.

14. Primary text fits the placement limit. 44 characters on Reels, 125 on Stories, 50 to 150 recommended on Feed. Past that, Meta truncates, and the cut rarely lands in a good place.

15. The headline fits in 27 characters on Feed. That is short. Write it first, not last.

16. The video reads with the sound off. Burned-in captions, or the message carried by the image. A significant share of impressions happen muted.

Budget (3 checks)

17. ABO or CBO is a settled, owned decision. CBO spends faster on what works, ABO distributes regardless. Neither is better: they answer two different questions.

18. Each ad set has enough to exit the learning phase. Multiplying ad sets on a fixed budget guarantees that none of them reaches enough conversions to leave learning.

19. The attribution window is the one you think it is. A 7-day-click ROAS and a 1-day-click ROAS do not describe the same campaign.

Naming (4 checks)

20. The convention is applied at all three levels. Campaign, ad set, creative. A convention applied at one level only is useless for reporting.

21. Concept, format and iteration are readable in the creative name. Otherwise you will know that a creative performs, but not which of the three variants of the same concept it is.

22. No character that breaks the export. Accents, slashes, semicolons and double spaces all turn against you when you cross Meta’s export with a spreadsheet.

23. The name matches what your reporting expects. If your dashboard splits the name on a given separator, the creative has to carry that separator in the right place. Test it on one creative before launching fifty.

What this checklist does not do

It does not judge your creative strategy, your offer or your price. It checks that what you decided is what actually ships. A campaign that passes every line here can still fail because the angle is wrong: that is a different problem, and no checklist solves it.

It also does not replace a real test. Check 23 is verified by launching one creative, not by re-reading the convention.

Automating checks 9 to 12 and 20 to 23

Format, safe zone and naming checks are the only ones on this list that can be verified mechanically. Apogee detects formats on import, turns off Advantage+ on every creative, and reads your naming convention to rebuild the structure. The other nineteen checks stay your job.