Post-mortems on burned ad budgets almost never find a strategy problem. They find a UTM that was never set, a pixel firing on the wrong page, a daily budget with an extra zero. QA is boring, which is exactly why it works.
The five checks that catch most of the damage
- Click every link in every ad. Not the preview — the actual destination URL, on a phone. Broken and mistyped links are still the #1 launch error we see.
- Fire a test conversion. Submit the form or complete a test checkout and watch the event arrive in Events Manager. “The pixel is installed” is not the same as “the pixel works”.
- Read the budget out loud, with the currency. ₹2,000 daily and ₹20,000 daily look very similar at 11pm.
- Check the optimisation event. Optimising for link clicks when you wanted purchases is the most expensive dropdown in the platform.
- Verify UTMs in GA4 in real time. Launch traffic that lands as “direct / none” is unmeasurable forever — there is no retroactive fix.
Why a written checklist beats experience
Experienced buyers make these mistakes too — usually because experience breeds speed and speed skips steps. A checklist is not training wheels; it is the same instrument pilots with 10,000 hours still use before every takeoff.
Cohort students get the full 20-point QA sheet in Week 2 and run it live on launch day. The campaign does not go live until every box is ticked. House rule.