Pre-Launch QA Checklist: 45 Checks Before You Spend a Dollar
Forty-five pass/fail checks covering creative specs, copy and claims, tracking, campaign structure, landing page and launch gates — with numeric thresholds, not vibes.
The cheapest way to lose a testing budget is launching an ad that was never eligible to learn: wrong spec, broken pixel, mismatched landing page, or a claim that will be rejected on day two. These 45 checks are pass/fail gates with numbers — run them before the first dollar, not after the first wasted hundred.
QA is a gate, not a vibe pass on the cut
Most ‘we checked it’ reviews are a playback of the video at full volume on a laptop. That catches a bad line; it does not catch a 9:16 file served into 4:5, a pixel firing the thank-you page as ViewContent, a UTM that collides with last week’s test, or a headline that truncates on mobile. A launch has five surfaces that can independently kill learning: the file, the copy and claims, the tracking, the campaign structure, and the landing page. Fail any one and the spend produces no usable signal. Treat the list as a red/green sheet: if a row is red, the campaign does not go live, even if creative is ‘done’.
Tracking errors are invisible in Ads Manager until the CPA is a lie
A duplicated purchase event, a missing value parameter, or a landing page that is not the same URL as the ad will still spend. The platform will even exit learning. You will just scale a number that is not real. The tracking block below is written as pass thresholds: event fires once per purchase, value matches cart, UTM is unique per ad, and the thank-you page is not firing a second Purchase. If you cannot see a test event in Events Manager from a real checkout in the last 24 hours, you do not have tracking — you have a hope. Do not start a creative test on a hope.
Structure and landing page are part of the creative test
One ad set with five unrelated angles is not a creative test; it is a blender. A 4:5 video clicking through to a desktop-only PDP with a 6-second LCP is not a creative test either. The structure block locks objective, CBO/ABO, audience exclusions and budget to the test design. The landing-page block locks LCP, offer match, mobile CTA and inventory. If the page cannot convert a warm click, no hook formula will save the CPA. Fix the page first, then launch the ads — the order is not optional when the budget is finite.
How to run the 45 in under 20 minutes
One owner, one pass, top to bottom. Creative and copy can be QAd from the export folder; tracking needs Events Manager plus a real test purchase; structure is a screenshot of the campaign; landing page is a phone on cellular, not office wifi. Anything that needs a designer or a developer is a block, not a note. Once the sheet is green, the first-day spend cap in the last section is the only remaining brake. Klip Kanvas exports already sized to common Meta and TikTok specs, which knocks several file-spec rows out in seconds — still run the rest of the list.
45 pass/fail checks in 6 gates: creative file & spec (8), copy & claims (8), tracking (8), campaign structure (7), landing page & offer (8), budget & launch (6) — each row is Pass if · Fail if · threshold.
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Win/Loss Creative Readout Sheet
A scoring sheet for creative tests: sample-size floors, win/loss/inconclusive bands by metric, what to scale vs kill vs iterate, and the one-page readout the next sprint actually uses.
TikTok Spark Ads Cheatsheet
Spark Ads as a lookup sheet: authorization codes, post-first rules, inherited social proof, CTA overlay, expiry bands and QA versus cold in-feed uploads.
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