The pre-flight checklist I run before any paid social creative goes live
Nine checks. Most of them catch mistakes that are free to fix before launch and expensive after.
Paid creative fails in two ways. It underperforms, which is a strategy problem and takes weeks to learn from. Or it breaks — wrong crop, unreadable text, a link that goes nowhere — which is a checklist problem and takes two minutes to prevent. This is the checklist for the second kind.
The creative itself
- Read it at thumbnail size. Shrink the export to the size of your thumbnail on a phone. If the main line is unreadable there, it is unreadable in the feed.
- Check the safe zones. Vertical placements crop the top and bottom for the interface. Anything important near an edge will be sitting under a button.
- Watch it silently. Most video in feed plays with no sound. If the message needs audio, it needs captions burned in.
- Confirm the first frame stands alone. It is the still that shows before playback, and often the only thing seen.
The mechanics
- Click every link yourself, on a phone, logged out. Not the preview — the real destination.
- Verify tracking parameters survive the redirect. Some landing pages strip them, and you find out at reporting time.
- Match the creative to the landing page. Same offer, same wording, same image. A mismatch here reads as a bait and switch even when it is only carelessness.
- Re-read the platform's rules for your category. Health, finance and anything money-adjacent have restrictions that change often.
- Check the claims. Anything stated as a fact must be something you can point to a source for — and any promotional relationship must be disclosed on the page.
The habit
Run the list on the export, not the design file. The export is what people see, and the difference between the two is exactly where these mistakes live.
None of this makes a weak idea work. It stops a good idea from being wasted on a technical error, which over a year is a large amount of budget.