How to create a campaign or ad set during launch

Sometimes the campaign or ad set you want to launch into doesn't exist yet. Instead of jumping over to Meta Ads Manager and breaking your flow, uplads lets you create a brand-new campaign or ad set right from the Ad Sets card of the Ad Launcher. The new entity is created live on Meta and is selected for you automatically, so you can keep moving toward launch.

If you haven't met the launcher yet, start with Understanding the Ad Launcher and How to select your Page, campaign and ad sets.

Opening the inline create dialog for a campaign

In the header of the Ad Sets card, next to the title, sit two buttons: New Ad Set and New Campaign.

1. Click New Campaign. A small menu offers Start from scratch or Duplicate campaign (a copy of something that already runs in the account).
2. Choose Start from scratch. A dialog titled "Create new campaign" opens on top of the launcher, locked to the campaign type, so you go straight to the campaign fields.

In this dialog you set:

• Objective - pick from Meta's outcome objectives (Traffic, Awareness, Engagement, Leads, Sales, App promotion). This is required and can't be changed after creation.
• Campaign name - what the campaign is called in Ads Manager.
• Create as active - locked in the launcher. The campaign is created paused and is switched on when your launch puts ads into it, so an empty campaign can never go live by accident.
• Budget (Advantage+ campaign budget / CBO) - optionally turn on campaign budget optimization and set a daily or lifetime amount plus a bid strategy.
• Special ad categories - declare credit, employment, housing, or social issues/elections/politics if they apply. This restricts who you can target later.

Click Create campaign to save it on Meta. You can also click Validate first to have Meta confirm the settings are accepted before committing.

Creating a new ad set within a campaign

1. Click New Ad Set in the Ad Sets card header. The menu offers Start from scratch or Duplicate ad set.
2. Choose Start from scratch. The "Create ad set" dialog opens.
3. Pick the Campaign the ad set belongs to. The campaign's objective is shown beneath it.
4. Fill in the ad set fields and click Create ad set.

Key ad set fields:

• Ad set name and Create as active (locked in the launcher: the ad set is created paused and switched on when your launch puts ads into it).
• Performance goal and Billing event - the options shown adapt to the campaign's objective.
• Conversion location, promoted object (pixel/page), and attribution setting where relevant.
• Budget & schedule - daily or lifetime budget, optional start/end times, bid strategy, bid amount, and dayparting. Start and end times are read in the Meta ad account's timezone, even when your device is elsewhere.
• Audience - geo, age, and detailed targeting. If the campaign uses a special ad category, detailed interest and behavior targeting is disabled automatically.

If a campaign has no ad sets yet, the picker says so ("No ad sets in this campaign"); use New Ad Set or duplicate an existing one.

Required fields and objective selection

A campaign needs a name and an objective at minimum. The objective drives everything downstream, so choose it deliberately - it determines which performance goals, billing events, and conversion locations are available on the ad set, and it can't be edited later.

An ad set needs a name and a campaign to belong to. Targeting defaults to a sensible starting point (US, ages 18-65) if you don't change it. Budgets are entered as normal amounts in the account's currency; uplads converts them to Meta's cent-based values for you.

How the new entity appears in the selectors immediately

After a successful create, uplads refreshes the relevant list and auto-selects what you just made:

• A new campaign appears in the ad set picker as its own section, marked New (created in this session), so you can pick or create ad sets inside it.
• A new ad set is added to the picker, marked New, and ticked, ready to receive your ads.

There's no manual refresh and no need to reopen any dropdowns - the launcher keeps moving forward. Because the entity already exists on Meta, uplads also keeps an eye on it: if you leave the page before launching, it reminds you that the new campaign or ad set has no ads yet.

When to create inline vs. in the ads manager

Inline creation is built for the launch you're in the middle of: you need one campaign or a couple of ad sets so you can drop creatives into them now.

Reach for the full ads manager instead when you want to:

• Build out a structure of many campaigns and ad sets before launching.
• Edit existing campaigns or ad sets (the inline dialog only creates new ones - see How to edit targeting, placements and dayparting).
• Duplicate or delete entities in bulk.

Either way, everything you create is real, live structure on Meta - the inline dialog simply saves you the round trip.