Paid Advertising Campaign Checklist

Steps a demand-gen or performance marketing lead runs to plan, launch, and optimize a paid media campaign across search, social, and programmatic channels. Covers budget, creative, audience targeting, platform setup, tracking, and post-launch optimization.

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1

Strategy & Budget

  1. Define campaign objective and primary KPI

    • Pick one primary objective — awareness, consideration, lead-gen, or conversion — and the KPI that proves it (CPM for awareness, CPL for lead-gen, ROAS or CPA for conversion). A campaign with three co-equal KPIs gets optimized for none.

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  2. Confirm total budget and per-platform split

    • Document gross media spend, agency fees, and creative production separately. Set a 10-15% test budget aside for new creative or audience experiments rather than burning it inside the main campaign line.

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  3. Define ICP and audience segments

    • Pull the ICP doc and named-account list from RevOps. For B2B, decide whether to layer ABM account lists onto LinkedIn Campaign Manager. For B2C, identify the seed audiences for lookalike modeling on Meta and TikTok.

  4. Audit competitor ad placements

    • Pull active ads from Meta Ad Library, LinkedIn Ad Library, and Google Ads Transparency Center. Note offer angles, CTAs, and creative formats — not to copy, but to understand the auction landscape your bids will compete in.

2

Creative & Messaging

  1. Write the creative brief

    • Include: campaign objective, audience, value prop, primary CTA, brand voice notes, mandatory legal disclosures, and the channels the assets must ship to. Reference the brand guidelines (logo lockup, color palette, type) so the designer doesn't have to ask.

  2. Produce ad copy variants for testing

    • Ship at least 3 headline variants and 2 body variants per ad set so the platform has enough volume to optimize. For Google RSAs, supply 15 headlines and 4 descriptions; for Meta, use Advantage+ creative with 5+ variations.

  3. Design ad creative for each placement

    • Build the full size matrix: 1:1 feed (1080x1080), 9:16 stories/reels (1080x1920), 16:9 video (1920x1080), and responsive display sizes (300x250, 728x90, 300x600, 320x100). Don't crop a single 1:1 asset to fill all slots — it kills CTR in stories.

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  4. Run brand and legal review on all assets

    • Capture a timestamped approval — not a Slack DM. Substantiate any comparative or quantitative claim ('2x faster', 'most loved') with a citation file. For regulated verticals (financial, health, pharma) loop in compliance before the design is final, not after.

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  5. Revise rejected creative and resubmit for approval

    • Address each reviewer comment with a tracked-change note; don't simply re-upload. Re-route through the same approvers — a partial approval (brand only, not legal) cannot ship.

3

Platform & Tracking Setup

  1. Select ad platforms for the media mix

    • Match channel to objective and audience: Google Search for high-intent demand capture, LinkedIn for B2B account targeting, Meta for B2C broad reach and retargeting, TikTok for younger audiences, programmatic (DV360, The Trade Desk) for awareness scale.

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  2. Build UTM parameters using the convention doc

    • Use the shared UTM builder so source / medium / campaign values match the team's convention — drift breaks GA4 reports the day they're needed. Lowercase everything; use hyphens not underscores; spell out the channel name consistently (linkedin, not li).

  3. Verify conversion pixels and GA4 events fire correctly

    • Test in GTM Preview and the Meta Pixel Helper / LinkedIn Insight Tag Helper. Confirm conversion fires on actual submit, not on blur or page-view — mis-mapped events inflate reported conversions 3-5x and distort budget allocation downstream.

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  4. Fix tracking issues before launch

    • Coordinate with marketing ops or the developer who owns the tag. Re-verify in GTM Preview after each fix; do not launch on faith.

  5. Configure brand safety on programmatic buys

    • Apply DoubleVerify or IAS brand-suitability pre-bid segments. Upload your domain blocklist; auto-bid platforms will place ads next to brand-incompatible content without it. Whitelist preferred publisher list for top-tier inventory.

  6. Verify consent banner gates marketing pixels

    • For EU and California traffic, marketing pixels must not fire before consent. Test the OneTrust / Cookiebot integration in GTM consent mode. Pre-consent firing is the most common GDPR / CPRA finding in marketing audits.

4

Launch & Scheduling

  1. Set campaign flight dates and dayparting

    • Match dayparting to when your audience converts, not when they're online. B2B SaaS conversions cluster 9am-5pm in the prospect's timezone — running ads at 2am wastes spend. Confirm flight end date matches the campaign budget runway.

  2. Set frequency caps per audience

    • Prospecting: 3-5 impressions per user per week. Retargeting: 7-10 per week max. Past 10/week, frequency drives diminishing returns and brand fatigue. Set the cap at the ad-set level, not just the campaign level.

  3. Run pre-launch QA on every ad

    • For each live ad: click the destination URL from the preview, confirm UTM tags arrive in GA4 real-time, verify the landing page renders without 404s or broken images, and confirm any required FTC disclosures appear on influencer/affiliate placements.

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  4. Launch campaign and confirm delivery

    • Watch first-hour delivery to confirm impressions are pacing. A campaign showing zero spend after 4 hours typically means a disapproval, budget cap, or audience too narrow — investigate before end of day.

5

Optimization & Reporting

  1. Review week-one performance against KPI

    • Compare CPA, ROAS, CTR, and conversion rate to target. Don't optimize on day 2 — most platforms need 5-7 days of learning before performance stabilizes. Note which ad sets are under target so you can shift budget at the next checkpoint.

  2. Shift budget to top-performing ad sets

    • Reallocate budget in 20% increments to the highest-ROAS ad sets; pause anything 2x over target CPA. Avoid making >30% budget changes in a single day — it resets the learning phase on Meta and TikTok.

  3. Refresh creative on fatigued ad sets

    • Creative fatigue shows up as rising CPM and falling CTR on the same audience. Rotate in fresh variants from the production batch; don't wait for performance to crater before swapping.

  4. Compile end-of-flight performance report

    • Include spend, impressions, clicks, conversions, CPA, ROAS, by channel and by ad set. Pull GA4 attribution alongside platform-reported numbers — they will disagree, and the WBR audience needs to see both with the discrepancy explained.

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Sections 5
Steps 23
Category Marketing
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