Checklist: How to Prepare Paid Ads

4 Key Elements for Your Paid SEA Campaign (aka Google / Facebook / LinkedIn ad preparation)

Last Update: 20.03.2025 • Author: Marius Jost • Time to read: 3 Min.

Before a paid advertisement can go live on Google Ads, Meta (Facebook), or LinkedIn, four essential pieces need to be in place, which you should develop together with your agency. This small checklist is based on our experience and will hopefully help you avoid delays or project issues in your performance marketing efforts.
1

Goal of your campaign

2

Content

3

Visual Design

4

Tech Setup & Tracking

Project Plan for your Paid Ads - your SEA Preparation Plan

To get a meaningful SEA preparation plan in a waterfall-style, we will have to order the tasks above in a new way: not by topic, but by priority.

We have learned that the set-up of facebook page, your payment method, or ad account approvals can consume valuable time.

The blue highlights indicate how long certain tasks may take.

This waterfall plan illustrates that in each planning phase (A-D), you should tackle different types of tasks.

For example, in Phase A, you will find tasks related to “campaign objective,” “visual design,” and “technical setup.”

PHASE A PHASE B PHASE C PHASE D
1) Set up Meta-Page /
Google-Ads-Acc.
& Payment Method
2) Grant all necessary
ad account permissions
to agency / colleagues
3) Define your
advertising objective
in 2-3 sentences
4) Discuss 2 basic
ideas / concepts
for the visual design
and order 3 drafts
with your creative team.
1) Decide on when your campaign
will start and when it has to end.
2) Discuss and decide the
campaign's daily budget(s)
3) Craft 2-3 key messages for the
landing page (concentrate on
benefits rather than features)
4) Agree on one single master design
(out of your 3 drafts),
then create assets
- for Meta: 1:1, 16:9, 9:16 & 4:5
- for Google: 1:1, 1.91:1 & 4:5
1) Select the best creative assets from the step before
2) Create all texts
for the ad copy part
of your ads
3) Define URL of
your landing page
4) Set noindex for your landing
page & optimize it for speed
1) Decide which ad
extensions to use (for
example, which phone number
to provide and who
will be responsible for
it)
2) Create the ads,
start them and control
their performance each day.

The following tasks are to be repeated periodically:

1) Create weekly mini-report and reconcile with all decision makers

2) Deactivate the ads which do not perform well.

Need Help with Your Paid Ads?

Our team of experts can help you implement this checklist and optimize your campaigns for maximum ROI.