A pre-flight checklist for every paid campaign launch

A pre-flight checklist for every paid campaign launch
The 8 minutes that save the 8-hour fire drill.

1 — Click every link in a private window and confirm the UTM lands intact.
Why: a stripped or malformed UTM means the whole campaign reports as direct.

2 — Fire a test conversion end-to-end before spend goes live.
Why: a broken conversion tag turns a working campaign into a blind one.

3 — Verify the audience exclusions actually exclude existing customers.
Why: paying to retarget people who already bought is the most common silent waste.

4 — Confirm the landing page passes the consent banner without blocking the pixel.
Why: a campaign that can't track on EU traffic is half-blind from launch.

5 — Screenshot the final settings.
Why: 'who changed the budget' is unanswerable without a baseline.

That's the stack for this week. Forward to a teammate.