Facebook is often the first stop for campaigners looking to advertise online. For good reason, too—the platform reaches a broad swath of voters, offers precise targeting, and provides a self-service advertising setup. But if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can waste money and earn unwanted attention (because political ads are all saved in the Ads Library).
Follow this checklist to avoid expensive and potentially embarrassing mistakes when running paid ads on Facebook.
Before You Launch
Before a single dollar leaves the budget, confirm that your data plumbing and internal alignment are rock-solid.
- Ensure you are personally verified to run political ads and your campaign’s Facebook page is authorized. If you haven’t done this already and try to run ads about political topics, they’ll likely be rejected by Facebook.
- Agree internally on the objective for your campaign. How will you measure success?
- Setup and test analytics. Make sure your Meta pixel is present on every page of your site and WinRed to measure ad performance. Have Google Analytics installed as well.
Campaign Setup
This is where structure and quality control prevent expensive errors.
- Test your landing page that it is capturing data and you can access it. That it triggers with Facebook’s measurement.
- Confirm that your creative is the correct version. Even mistakes will get saved in the Facebook ad library.
- Verify that you are targeting the intended audiences. You don’t want to waste impressions on individuals outside of your state or district.
After Launch
Early vigilance protects your budget.
- Confirm that your ads are delivering. Ads should receive impressions and spend within two hours of launch. If not, check for disapprovals, limited-learning status, or audience size issues.
- Monitor comments and reactions; hide spam and respond where appropriate.
Post Campaign
A thorough debrief turns data into better strategy.
- Report on the primary metric related to your objective. For example, if the goal was to grow your email list, how many new email subscribers did you gain? Everything else is secondary. If it didn’t perform as expected, why or why not?
- Identify your best and worst performing ads. This will help you improve the next time.
- Propose recommendations for future ad campaigns. What should you do again, avoid, or test out?
Conclusion
The Facebook ads algorithm is ruthlessly efficient—at spending your budget exactly as you instruct it. Clear objectives, clean data, airtight processes, and disciplined follow‑up are the difference between a money pit and a vote‑winning machine.
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