Every Google Ads Launch Needs a Pre-Flight Checklist. Here's Ours.
Campaign launches used to be the most stressful part of the job. Wrong settings, no conversion tracking, launching on a Friday — all of it avoidable. This 7-step checklist is what we walk through before every single campaign goes live.
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Timing & Strategy
When to launch (hint: not on a Friday), how to time campaigns around your busy season, and why a soft launch with 10-50% of your budget saves you from expensive mistakes.
CPA Targets & Tracking
Calculate your target cost per acquisition before spending a dollar, then verify conversion tracking is actually firing on the right pages.
The Final Settings Check
Google will spend 120% of your daily budget on day one. The settings triple-check catches geo-targeting errors, budget overruns, and extension conflicts before they cost you.
Works for Search, Shopping, Performance Max, and Display campaigns.
Google makes it dangerously easy to hit "Enable" on a campaign. Three clicks and your budget is live. What they don't warn you about is that the first 48 hours of a campaign set the tone for everything that follows — and most of the damage happens before you even realize something's wrong.
This checklist has 7 steps. They take about 20 minutes total. The payoff is that you know your timing is right, your tracking works, and your settings won't burn through your budget before lunch.
- ✓ Launching during your busy season? Step 1 explains why that's actually the wrong time — and when to start so your campaigns are optimized before demand peaks.
- ✓ Not sure what your target CPA should be? Step 4 walks you through the math: start with the outcome you want and work backwards to a number Google can actually hit.
- ✓ Worried about wasting money on day one? Step 3 covers the soft launch approach — run at 10-50% budget for a week, kill bad keywords, then go full throttle.
- ✓ Is your conversion tracking actually working? Step 5 has you verify your tracking pixels before launch, not after you've spent $500 with no data to show for it.
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Born from Hundreds of Campaign Launches
Jeff Sauer has been running Google Ads campaigns since 2005. This checklist started as a personal note he kept next to his monitor. After using it on hundreds of client launches, he turned it into a printable PDF that the MeasureU team still uses today.
7 steps between you and a campaign launch you can feel good about
Download the checklist. Walk through it before your next campaign goes live. It takes 20 minutes and saves you from the mistakes that cost real money.