DWC Freebie Meta Ads Pre-Launch Checklist
Free from DWC Magazine
Before You Spend a Penny on Meta Ads
A 30-point pre-launch checklist for women running their own ads. Work through it, and your first campaign goes live built correctly — instead of quietly burning money for a fortnight while you work out what the settings mean.
Start the ChecklistWhat this covers, and where it stops
This checklist takes you from a standing start to a correctly built campaign that is live. Account structure, tracking, objective, audience, placements, creative specs, and the settings that cost the most money when they are wrong.
It stops at launch. Reading your numbers, working out whether an ad is profitable, fixing one that is failing, scaling one that is working — that is a different job, and it starts once money is moving. There is a link at the foot of this page for that part.
The three levels, in plain terms
Almost every point of confusion in Meta Ads Manager comes from being on the wrong screen. There are three levels, and every setting lives on exactly one of them.
What you want to happen. The objective lives here. So does the campaign-level budget toggle.
Who sees it, where, and for how much. Audience, placements, budget and schedule live here.
What they actually see. Image or video, caption, headline, and the link it sends them to.
The placement trap
Read this one twice
Meta added new placement inventory in August 2026. If you leave placements on the automatic setting — and automatic is the default — your budget flows into it without you choosing anything.
That inventory is cheap per impression and weak per result. Your reach numbers look healthy, your spend climbs, and your sales sit still. It is the single most common way a small budget disappears with nothing to show for it.
Switch placements to manual. Tick Facebook Feed, Instagram Feed and Reels. Leave everything else unticked. Your cost per thousand impressions will rise, because you are competing for better inventory. Judge the change on cost per result instead.
Work out your maximum cost per sale
Checklist point three asks for the most you can pay to win one sale. Here is how to arrive at it. Enter the figures in whatever currency your ad account is set in.
Pay this to win a sale and you finish level. Every penny above it comes out of your pocket.
Aim here instead. It keeps roughly two fifths of your contribution as actual profit rather than spending all of it on the sale.
Write the target figure on your log sheet before you launch. It is the line your campaign is measured against, and the only reason to keep an ad running or switch it off.
Knowing the number is the easy half. Deciding what to do when your actual cost per sale lands above it — which ad to keep, what to change first, and when to stop paying for the answer — is what Conversations 11 walks through.
The pre-launch checklist
Thirty points, in the order you will meet them. Tick as you go — the counter follows you down the page.
That last one matters more than it sounds. Editing a live campaign restarts Meta's learning, so a budget you cannot leave alone is a budget you cannot test with.
Skip the test purchase and every number you look at afterwards is a guess. Do it before you spend, not after.
One broad ad set gives Meta the cleanest signal it can get. Splitting your budget across audiences you have yet to validate makes every result harder to read and each one slower to arrive.
Words you will meet on the way
What day four looks like
Three of the most common things to see once money has moved, and what each one is actually telling you.
Conversations 11
Your campaign is live. Now what?
This page got you built correctly. Meta Ads Uncomplicated picks up on day four, when the numbers arrive and every one of them can be read two ways.
- The profit gate: break-even and target cost per sale, worked against your own margin
- Metric benchmarks, and what each one is telling you when it drifts
- A troubleshooting table for every way a campaign goes wrong
- Identifying the winner after seventy-two hours, and consolidating around it
- Scaling without resetting everything you have built
- Retargeting, exclusions, and what to do when Meta says no
It costs less than a single day of the budget most people lose while they work this out by guessing.
Read Conversations 11Know a woman about to spend her first hundred on ads?
Send her this page before she does. It is free, it stays free, and it will save her the fortnight most people lose working this out alone.
Campaign live? Conversations 11 covers reading your day four numbers.
Read Conversations 11