Facebook Ads Checklist

How to use this checklist

Sections 1 to 7 are pre-launch, in order. Sections 8 to 10 are launch day, the first two weeks and the weekly routine. If you are checking an account that already runs, start with section 2, because a Pixel that fires the wrong event, or fires it twice, is the fault I find most often and the one that quietly wastes the most money.

This list applies to Facebook and Instagram together, since both are bought through the same Ads Manager.

1. Business Manager and asset ownership

1. A Meta Business Manager exists and is owned by the business, with the owner as admin. If a former agency or a staff member owns your ad account, page or Pixel, fix that before anything else.
2. The Facebook Page, Instagram account, Pixel or dataset, catalogue and WhatsApp number are all inside that Business Manager as assets, not as personal property.
3. Partners and staff have the least access their job needs, and access is removed when people leave.
4. Two-factor authentication is enforced for everyone with access.
5. The payment method belongs to the business and has a backup, because a declined card pauses everything without warning.
6. The domain is verified in Business Manager, which you need for event configuration and for controlling how your links appear.
7. The page has a real profile: complete information, current contact details, recent posts. Ads from an empty page convert worse and attract more scrutiny.

2. Pixel, Conversions API and events

1. The Pixel is installed once on every page, including the thank-you page. Two installations double-count everything.
2. Standard events are used for standard actions: Lead, Contact, Purchase, ViewContent, InitiateCheckout, AddToCart. Custom events only where nothing standard fits.
3. Every event has been tested in the Events Manager test tool by performing the action yourself.
4. Purchase events send a value and a currency, so return on ad spend can be measured at all.
5. The Conversions API is set up alongside the browser Pixel, with event deduplication configured, so conversions are still recorded when browser tracking is blocked.
6. Event match quality is checked, and the parameters you can legitimately send (email, phone, name, city, country) are being sent, hashed.
7. No health, financial or otherwise sensitive detail is sent as a parameter. For a clinic, record that a lead happened, not what the enquiry was about.
8. Aggregated Event Measurement priorities are set, with the conversion that matters most at the top.
9. Lead form submissions, WhatsApp conversations and calls are all counted somewhere, not just website forms.
10. A UTM convention is applied to every link so analytics can attribute traffic independently of Meta’s own reporting.

This section is the Meta Pixel and Conversions API service in full.

3. Audiences

1. Custom audiences exist from your own data: website visitors by page, video viewers, page and profile engagers, lead form openers, and a customer list where you have consent to upload it.
2. Retention windows are deliberate: 7 to 14 days for hot retargeting, 180 days for broad remarketing.
3. Lookalike audiences are built from the best source you have, which is customers rather than all visitors, and only once that source has enough people to be meaningful.
4. Exclusions are set so buyers and existing leads do not keep seeing acquisition ads.
5. Interest stacking is not so narrow that the audience cannot deliver. Meta’s delivery works better with room to optimize.
6. Location targeting uses “people living in this location” unless you deliberately want travellers.
7. Language is set where your creative is in Nepali, English or both, and the ad copy matches it.
8. Audience overlap between ad sets has been checked, so you are not bidding against yourself.

4. Campaign structure and objective

1. The objective matches the outcome: Leads for enquiries, Sales for purchases, Traffic only when you genuinely want visits, Awareness only when you are paying for reach on purpose.
2. Nothing important is being run as a boosted post from the page. Boosting has almost none of the controls that make Meta Ads work.
3. Ad sets are few enough that each can exit the learning phase. Splitting a small budget across eight ad sets keeps all of them learning and none of them optimized.
4. One ad set per meaningful audience, not one per idea you had.
5. Naming convention is readable months later: objective, audience, creative theme, date.
6. Placements are left to Advantage+ placements unless you have a measured reason to restrict them, and the creative is supplied in the ratios each placement needs.
7. If you use Advantage+ campaigns, you know which controls you have given up and you have an existing-customer budget cap set.
8. Retargeting and acquisition sit in separate campaigns with separate budgets and separate expectations.

5. Creative

1. At least three distinct creative concepts per ad set, not three colour variations of one.
2. Vertical 9:16 video and 4:5 image versions exist for Reels and Stories; square for feed.
3. The first three seconds of every video show the subject, not a logo animation.
4. Video works with the sound off: captions burned in or added as a file.
5. Text on images is minimal and legible on a phone.
6. Faces, real locations and real staff outperform stock imagery in almost every account I have run.
7. Where the audience is Nepali, the creative is in the language the audience actually speaks, and a doctor, owner or specialist speaking to camera outperforms a designed graphic.
8. Safe zones are respected so nothing important sits under the Reels interface.
9. A refresh schedule exists, because frequency climbs and the same creative stops working within weeks on a small local audience.

Concept and production are covered by the Meta ad creative service.

6. Copy, offer and destination

1. The first line says who the ad is for and what they get. Meta truncates the rest.
2. The offer is specific: a price range, a free consultation, a date, a place.
3. The call to action button matches the destination.
4. The destination is decided on purpose: a landing page for detail, an instant lead form for speed, or a WhatsApp or Messenger conversation where that is how your customers prefer to talk.
5. Instant forms use higher-intent settings and add one qualifying question, or you will pay for cheap leads that never answer the phone.
6. Landing pages load in under three seconds on mobile data and repeat the ad’s promise in the headline.
7. Somebody replies to lead form and WhatsApp enquiries within minutes, not the next working day. This single operational fact changes cost per acquired customer more than most targeting decisions.

The messaging route is covered on the WhatsApp and Messenger ads page; forms are lead generation ads.

7. Budget, bidding and policy

1. Budget per ad set is enough for roughly 50 optimization events a week, or you accept that delivery will stay in learning.
2. Bidding starts at lowest cost without a cap while you find the real cost per result, then a cost cap or bid cap once you know it.
3. Campaign budget optimization is used deliberately, knowing it will favour the ad set that is cheapest rather than the one that is most valuable.
4. Ad spend is at a level that can teach you something. Nepal campaigns generally need NPR 15,000 to 30,000 a month to gather usable data, and international campaigns USD or AUD 500 to 1,000 a month.
5. Ads are checked against the advertising policies before submission, especially for health, finance, employment, housing and credit, which carry extra restrictions.
6. No before-and-after body imagery, no personal-attribute copy (“are you diabetic?”), no claims you cannot support.
7. Special ad categories are declared where they apply, and you know the targeting restrictions that come with them.
8. You have a second page and a business verification in order, because restrictions do happen and recovery is slow.

If the account or page is already restricted, start at Meta account restriction and policy compliance.

8. Launch day

1. Preview every ad on mobile feed, Stories and Reels.
2. Click your own ad and confirm the Pixel fires and the UTM lands in analytics.
3. Submit a test lead and confirm it reaches the inbox, the CRM and the Events Manager.
4. Confirm the schedule, the daily budget and the end date.
5. Check the page is not about to run out of payment method.

9. The first two weeks

1. Leave the campaign alone for the first three to four days unless it is clearly broken. Every edit restarts learning.
2. Watch frequency: above roughly 3 on a small local audience means fatigue is coming.
3. Compare Meta’s reported results with actual enquiries received. Where they disagree, trust the inbox.
4. Read the comments on the ads. They tell you the objections your landing page has not answered, and unanswered negative comments cost you conversions.
5. Kill the clearly failing creative, not the whole ad set.
6. Note which creative concept, not which audience, is doing the work. On Meta the creative is usually the variable that matters.

10. Weekly and monthly checks

1. New creative queued to replace the fatiguing one.
2. Frequency, cost per result and result volume reviewed together rather than separately.
3. Audience exclusions updated with recent buyers and leads.
4. Retargeting audiences confirmed to be populating.
5. Pixel and Conversions API health checked after any website change.
6. Lead quality checked with the person answering the enquiries, not from the dashboard.
7. Budget shifted toward what produces qualified enquiries, with a reason written down.

What this looked like in practice

For a Kathmandu fertility clinic, the parts of this list that produced the result were narrow: doctor-led video in Nepali, mobile lead forms with a qualifying question, and WhatsApp follow-up fast enough to catch people while they were still interested. That campaign produced more than 150 qualified leads at about NPR 180 per lead. The targeting was not clever; the creative and the follow-up were.

Send me the ad account for a free Meta Ads audit and I will tell you which of these items are failing. Ongoing work is Meta Ads management, a one-off review is the Meta Ads audit, and the long-form version of this list is the Meta Ads guide. The rest of the checklists are on the resources page.

Last updated 2026-09-03.

Updated September 26, 2026