Introduction

You can come up with the best advertising campaign, but it is worth nothing if your website is not ready to handle traffic. It is difficult to sell a product or offer when pages take a long time to load or do not respond at all. On top of that, customers may not understand the offer because of a lack of visual clarity, while those who do understand it may be unable to act because the form simply does not work. As a result, the advertising campaign budget is wasted. 

To prevent this from happening, let’s go through the checklist together: “What needs to be done before launching an advertising campaign”.

Step 1: Checking the functionality of the offer and landing page

At this stage, the following points need to be checked: 

  • Clarity of the offer from the first screen – can a customer understand what is being offered by looking at the headline, text, or video; 

  • Consistency with the advertisement – does the transition from the ad to the landing page actually match the information stated in the advertisement; 

  • What “case” the offer covers – it should be clear what problem the offer solves or what benefit it provides; 

  • Clear “Call-to-Action” (CTA) – not an abstract “Learn more”, but a specific action: “Get a consultation”, “Calculate the cost”, or “Submit an inquiry”;

  • Unnecessary “noise” – check whether the screens are overloaded with information and whether the Tone of Voice matches your target audience. 

You can learn more about landing page structuring guidelines in our article. 

Step 2: Technical condition of the website

Probably one of the most important aspects of preparation. Here you should check: 

  • Loading speed – how quickly users can move from one page to another. The slower the website works, the less likely it is that a customer will reach the end; 

  • Mobile device adaptation – pages should adapt correctly to all screen sizes without requiring unnecessary zooming or scrolling; 

  • Correct links – before launch, check that links lead to the correct destinations and are not broken; 

Step 3: Go through the user journey yourself

It may not be obvious to everyone, but it is a very important step. Go through the entire journey yourself before the customer does. It may seem unimportant, but ignoring this step can cost your business money. 

In other words, before launching the advertising campaign, follow the ad through to the page, make sure the CTA leads to the correct link, the forms work, and feedback is available. All messengers, e-mail addresses, and phone numbers should also be up to date and functional. Make sure the user journey from start to finish works exactly as intended. 

Step 4: Setting up the advertising campaign

Next, we move on to setting up the advertising itself. The following actions should be taken into account:

  • Building the semantic core – determine which keywords and search queries potential customers will use to find the product or service. At this stage, irrelevant queries and negative keywords should be identified – words or phrases that do not correspond to the campaign’s objectives, such as “free”, “vacancy”, “find out”, etc. This helps preserve the budget by avoiding clicks from users who are not initially interested in the desired action.

  • Grouping keywords – the next logical step following the previous one. The semantic core is divided according to user queries and specific offers. Relevant ads and landing pages should be created for each group. For example, if a company specializes in design, phrases such as “logo design” or “corporate website design” may belong to the same overall campaign direction, but they should be divided into separate groups for each individual ad or, conditionally, landing page. In other words, just as in the first point, we do not spend the budget on irrelevant traffic.

  • Creating independent advertising campaigns – this is the stage at which the campaign itself is formed: ad types, target audience, and budget are determined. This helps separate offers and their respective target audiences. Again, using the design studio example from the previous point, “corporate website design” may generate relatively more expensive orders than “logo design”, so these two services should not be combined into a single advertising campaign, as this could spread the budget across less relevant queries. 

  • Ad development – several versions of headlines, descriptions, visual elements, and CTA buttons should be prepared for different ads. Multiple ad variations help test different ways of presenting information and eventually determine which ones attract the target audience more effectively. Relying on just one version, on the other hand, can result in a significant portion of the budget being spent on a less effective ad.

  • Setting up conversions and analytics – at this stage, it is determined what exactly counts as a successful advertising campaign. This may include submitting an inquiry, registration, purchasing a product or service, etc. Without configuring conversions according to the business’s needs, you may see the number of visitors but cannot determine which campaigns performed well or which ads or keywords brought users to the site. Configured conversions and subsequent analytics make it possible to distinguish the areas where the budget should not be spent from those that deserve more attention. We will discuss analytics setup in more detail in the next section. 

Step 5: Set up website analytics before launching advertising

Before launching, make sure that analytics are properly configured, including:

  • Goals and conversions – determine in advance which actions are valuable to the business, whether they are submitted inquiries, website registrations, or purchases;

  • Matching advertising expenses – analyze the number of purchases and their value by comparing them with advertising costs and the final result;

  • Google Analytics – one of the most important points. It allows you to see which pages users are visiting and how they behave on them; 

  • Form analysis – helps determine not simply how many users visited a page, but how many actually submitted inquiries; 

  • UTM tags – using these tags makes it possible to determine which advertising sources generate the majority of traffic.

By taking every point into account, you can see not only the number of clicks but also fully evaluate the user journey and the overall effectiveness of the advertising campaign.

Step 6: Take mobile traffic into account

We partially mentioned this in the section on the technical condition of the website, but mobile traffic deserves to be considered as a separate step. According to Statista, mobile devices accounted for an average of 58.5% of global web traffic in 2025. Therefore, it is difficult to overestimate the importance of a high-quality mobile version of a website.

At this stage, it is important to check not only responsiveness but also go through the entire user journey, as mentioned in Step 3, specifically on mobile devices. Ask yourself several questions: 

  • How clearly is the CTA button visible, and how easy is it to tap? 

  • Is the inquiry form convenient to fill out? 

  • Do any image and text elements overlap? 

Step 7: Website preparation does not end after launching the advertising

The setup of contextual and targeted advertising is complete, all pages are working correctly, and the advertising campaign has been launched, but this is not the end. After launch, real data begins to appear: at what stage users leave the page, how effective CTA buttons are, where technical difficulties arise, and so on. 

This is a useful stage for collecting data, identifying weak points, and further optimizing the advertising campaign.

Conclusion

An advertising budget can be wasted not only because of errors in ad setup and irrelevant advertising campaigns, but also because of an improperly configured website, broken links, or poor mobile adaptation. 

Therefore, before investing in traffic, it is worth making sure that this traffic is ready to turn into inquiries. At Geniustudio, we are ready to make sure that advertising on the internet and social media works for your business needs!