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 inside the Targeting step of the launch wizard. 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 wizard yet, start with Understanding the bulk launch wizard steps and How to select your Page, campaign and ad sets.

Opening the inline create dialog for a campaign

On the Targeting step, look at the Campaign field. To the right of the label there's a New campaign button.

1. Click New campaign. A dialog titled "Create new campaign" opens on top of the wizard.
2. The dialog is 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 — a toggle. Leave it off to create the campaign paused (the default), or turn it on to go live immediately.
• 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 the selected campaign

Once a campaign is selected, an Ad Sets section appears with a New ad set button next to the label.

1. Click New ad set. The "Create ad set" dialog opens.
2. The Campaign is pre-filled with the campaign you already selected, so the ad set lands in the right place. The campaign's objective is shown beneath it.
3. Fill in the ad set fields and click Create ad set.

Key ad set fields:

• Ad set name and Create as active (off = created paused).
• 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.
• 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 wizard prompts you to use New ad set or to 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 in normal dollar amounts; 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 becomes the selected campaign, its objective is recorded, and the ad set list resets so you can pick or create ad sets inside it.
• A new ad set is added to the ad set list and checked, ready to receive your creatives.

There's no manual refresh and no need to reopen any dropdowns — the wizard keeps moving forward.

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.