🚀 What Is Launchpad?
Launchpad is the starting point for every Meta ad campaign you create in Meta Ads. From here, Atlas (Meta Ads's AI) guides you through selecting your audience, generating creatives, setting your budget, and publishing directly to Facebook and Instagram — all in one place.
Before you begin, make sure you have a Meta ad account connected to your Search Atlas workspace. Without a connected account, campaigns cannot be published.
📋 Campaign Statuses and Filters
Every campaign in Launchpad is tracked by one of three statuses:
- In Progress — the campaign is still being built and has not been published.
- Ready — the campaign is fully configured and ready to go live.
- Published — the campaign has been sent to Meta and is active or scheduled.
You can filter your campaign list by brand and by goal to quickly find what you need.
🎯 Step 1 — Choose a Campaign Objective
Meta Ads supports all six objectives in Meta's ODAX framework. Select the one that matches your goal:
- Awareness — reach people most likely to remember your brand.
- Traffic — drive people to a website, app, or other destination.
- Engagement — get more interactions, video views, or messages.
- Leads — collect contact information from potential customers.
- App Promotion — grow installs or in-app activity.
- Sales — find people likely to make a purchase.
All objectives are available on every plan. Your plan determines how many campaigns you can run and how many AI-generated images are included — not which objectives you can use. See the Plans & Quota article for details.
🛒 Step 2 — Select a Buying Type and Bid Strategy
Choose how you want Meta to buy your ad inventory:
- Auction — compete in real-time for ad placements.
- Reservation — reserve placements in advance at a fixed price.
Then pick a bid strategy that fits your cost goals:
- Lowest Cost — get the most results for your budget.
- Lowest Cost with Bid Cap — control the maximum bid per auction.
- Cost Cap — keep your average cost per result at or below a target.
- Lowest Cost with Minimum ROAS — set a minimum return on ad spend threshold.
🗂️ Step 3 — Pick a Funnel Stage or Promotion Type
Tell Atlas where this campaign fits in your marketing funnel so it can tailor audiences and creatives accordingly:
- TOFU (Top of Funnel) — build awareness with new audiences.
- MOFU (Middle of Funnel) — nurture people who already know your brand.
- BOFU (Bottom of Funnel) — convert high-intent audiences ready to act.
- Advantage+ Shopping (ASC) — let Meta's automation find the best buyers for your products.
🤖 Step 4 — Let Atlas Build Your Campaign
Once your settings are in place, Atlas takes over. It uses your brand information (pulled from the Brands section of Meta Ads) to:
- Suggest and refine target audiences.
- Generate ad creatives — copy, images, and formats — using AI.
- Recommend a budget aligned with your objective and funnel stage.
Review everything Atlas produces. You can edit any element before moving forward.
📤 Step 5 — Publish Your Campaign
The one thing to remember: when every requirement is met, publishing sends your campaign to Meta always paused — it is never live without you. Nothing spends money until you manually flip the campaign live.
Once published, the campaign status updates to Published and performance data begins flowing into the Analytics section of Meta Ads as soon as you flip it live.
⚠️ A Note on AI Image Quotas
AI-generated images count against your plan's monthly quota. If you see a "credit exhausted" message during creative generation, you have reached your image limit for the current period. You can upload your own images or review your quota in the Plans & Quota section.
💡 Tips for a Stronger Campaign
- Make sure your brand profile in the Brands section is complete — Atlas uses that information to generate more relevant creatives and messaging.
- Use the funnel stage filters to build a full-funnel strategy across multiple campaigns.
- Check Creative Drive to review, manage, and reuse assets generated by Atlas.
Have questions or ran into something unexpected? Start a live chat with us — type "human teammate" at any point and you will be connected with a real person right away.