Your first Facebook campaign: a checklist before you press publish
2026-08-04Ten things worth verifying before your first euro is spent, in the order they cause problems.
Most first campaigns fail for boring reasons rather than strategic ones. This is the list we would run through before spending anything.
Before you build
Have a Facebook Page ready. Every ad runs in the name of a Page, and picking one at the last moment is how people end up advertising under the wrong brand.
Add a payment method to the ad account, not just your personal profile. Meta will publish without one and then refuse to deliver.
Install the pixel and confirm it fires. Buy something on your own site and watch the event arrive. Do this before launch, because data you did not collect on day one is gone.
Building the campaign
Pick one objective and mean it. If you want purchases, optimise for purchases, not for clicks. Optimising for the easy metric gets you the easy metric.
Start broader than feels comfortable. Meta's targeting works better with room to learn. Layering five interests on top of a small city is the classic beginner mistake.
Put your budget on one ad set. Splitting three hundred euros across five ad sets gives you five sets of data too thin to read.
The creative
Lead with the problem your customer has, not with your company name. Nobody scrolling is looking for you.
Make the first line work on its own; most people never see the second.
Check the preview on every placement. A design that reads beautifully in Feed is often unreadable in Stories, where text gets cropped by the interface.
The destination
Send people to the page that does the thing the ad promised, not to your homepage. This is the single most common leak, and it is free to fix.
Add UTM parameters to the link so your own analytics can tell you where signups came from. Retrofitting this later means losing the early data.
After launch
Leave it alone for a few days. Every edit resets the learning phase, and impatience is the most reliable way to make your own results worse.
Judge it on cost per result against what a customer is worth to you, not on likes.