The Post-Launch Checklist Everyone Forgets

You hit the button.

The campaign is live. The ads are serving, the landing page is up, and the email is sent. There's that brief moment of relief. The big push is over. You can finally breathe.

But this is exactly where things fall apart.

The execution doesn’t stop at "go live." Honestly, the first 48 hours are the most fragile period of any campaign. This is when the assumptions you made in a spreadsheet meet reality. It’s when a tiny tracking error, a broken link, or a misconfigured lead form can silently sabotage the entire effort.

Most teams move on to the next thing. But disciplined teams know that a clean launch requires a post-launch checklist. It’s not about paranoia; it’s about process. It’s the work that ensures the data you collect over the next few weeks is clean, the budget you spend is effective, and the leads you generate actually make it to sales.

Here is the simple, systematic check we run.

The First Hour: Check the Plumbing

Before you even look at the creative, make sure the data is flowing correctly. If the plumbing is broken, everything else is a waste.

• UTM Governance: Click your own live ads. Use a UTM inspector to see if the parameters are firing as you intended. Are they consistent across all channels? This is the foundation of your attribution. If it’s messy now, your final report will be useless.
• Lead Flow: Fill out the form on your landing page with a test email. Now, trace its journey. Did it land in the right CRM queue? Was it assigned to the right person? Are all the fields mapped and populated correctly? A lead that ends up in a black hole is a lost opportunity.
• Pixels and Tags: Use a tag assistant to confirm that your tracking pixels (Google, LinkedIn, etc.) are firing correctly on your landing and thank-you pages. If they aren’t, your retargeting audiences won’t build, and your conversion tracking won't work.

The Next 24 Hours: Check the Experience

Now that you know the system works, look at it from a human perspective. What is the buyer actually experiencing?

• The Live Asset: Check your ads in the wild. How do they actually render on a mobile device versus a desktop? Do the links go to the right place? You’d be surprised how often a final link gets pasted incorrectly.
• The Landing Page: Do a final check for typos, broken images, or formatting issues. More importantly, what’s the page load speed? A slow page is the fastest way to lose someone who just clicked your ad.
• Cross-Platform Check: Open the page on different browsers and devices. Does the form work on a phone? Does the layout hold up? The experience should be seamless everywhere.

The 48-Hour Mark: Check the Early Signals

You don't have enough data to optimize yet, but you have enough to spot a disaster. You're looking for red flags.

• Impressions and Clicks: Are the ads actually serving? Are you getting clicks at a reasonable rate? A near-zero click-through rate might not be a creative problem; it could be an audience mismatch you need to fix immediately.
• Bounce Rate: Look at the bounce rate on your landing page. If it’s abnormally high (like 90%+), that's a huge warning sign. It usually means there’s a massive disconnect between what your ad promised and what your landing page delivered.
• Initial Engagement: Are people scrolling? Are they spending more than a few seconds on the page? These early signals tell you if you've captured any interest at all.

This checklist turns a launch from a moment of anxious hope into a controlled process. It ensures the system you've built is working as designed, and it protects the integrity of your campaign from day one. It’s the boring work that makes the exciting results possible.