What should you check before launching a UA campaign?
Review campaign names, tracking-link parameters, scheduled dates, country codes, bids and remaining budget. Keep missing and skipped checks visible. TruthPane Preflight checks the supplied launch sheet locally; a clean finding within available evidence does not verify live platform settings or guarantee a safe launch.
- What you need: A CSV or tab-separated launch sheet with names and any available links, budgets, bids, dates and countries.
- What you get: Row-level findings and check coverage showing what was checked, missing or skipped.
- Limits: No ad publishing, live link testing, creative-policy review or verification of actual account settings.
A launch checklist is useful only if you can tell which checks actually ran. A sheet with campaign names and no dates, links or budgets may have clean names while leaving most of the launch unverified. Keep missing evidence visible alongside the problems you find.
Prepare one row per intended campaign or ad set
Use a CSV or a tab-separated table with headers. Include the entity name and, where available, tracking link, daily budget, bid amount, country codes, start date, end date and campaign objective. These are planned settings, so confirm that the file represents the version you intend to publish.
TruthPane Preflight maps your existing column names to the fields it checks. Name is required; other fields participate when provided. Loading a file is not itself proof that every row contains valid values.
What to check
- Names: look for duplicates, inconsistent segments and unexpected value variants. Use the Naming Validator for deeper format editing and generation.
- Tracking links: check supported link formats and visible parameters. Use the Link Auditor to inspect individual issues.
- Dates: inspect start/end order and past start dates. Confirm whether the tool's past-date blocking setting fits your workflow.
- Countries: check country codes and disagreements with a country inferred from the name.
- Bids: compare provided bid amounts with an explicit CPA limit, if you have supplied one.
- Budget: compare remaining planned spend this month against the budget still available, not the original full-month allowance.
Illustrative example: remaining budget
Suppose two rows each have a daily budget of $100 and both are active for the same five remaining days this month. Their planned spend over that interval is 2 × $100 × 5 = $1,000. If the remaining budget is $800, the plan exceeds it by $200.
The comparison changes when the rows have different schedules. A row starting next month does not consume this month's remaining allocation. Missing dates require an explicit conservative assumption and an incomplete-evidence notice. Do not silently assume a full schedule and label the result completely checked.
Use the verdict and the coverage together
Blocking findings take priority. With no blockers, missing evidence can still produce INCOMPLETE. Review each check's checked, missing and total row counts. A skipped link check says nothing about whether the link will work; a dynamic tracking macro may not be fully resolvable from a static file.
Fix the identified row or field, replace the input, and run the checks again. After changing an input, the old result must no longer be treated as current. Export the findings when you need a review record, but do not substitute the export for an actual platform check.
After publishing, compare the actual settings
A preflight report checks the intended sheet. It does not verify that a platform accepted those settings. Export the actual configuration after publishing and compare it with the intended file in Launch Diff. Review name-matching ambiguities, missing entities and field-level changes. A match to a historical default is a clue, not proof of who supplied the value.
Common questions
Does Preflight publish or change ads?
No. It performs local checks on the supplied sheet and returns findings. It does not connect to or change an ad account.
Does a clean result guarantee a safe launch?
No. It means no problems were found within the checks and evidence available. Creative policy, landing-page availability and actual account settings still require their own review.