How to set ad status and schedule a launch

Before your ads go to Meta, you decide whether they should start spending right away or wait paused. uplads also lets you launch ads paused now and have them flip live automatically at a future time, so you can prep a campaign during the day and have it switch on overnight without you being at your desk. This article covers both.

Choosing ACTIVE or PAUSED status

You set the starting state in the Ad Setup card of the Ad Launcher, with the Launch ads as Paused / Active toggle:

• Active: ads are created live and begin delivering (and spending) as soon as Meta finishes reviewing them.
• Paused: ads are created but stay off. Nothing spends until you switch them on, either manually in the ads manager or via the scheduling option below.

Paused is the safer default when you want a final look inside Meta Ads Manager before anything goes live. The status you pick here applies to every ad in the launch. The toggle's starting position comes from the delivery setting in Default ad settings for this ad account. If you're not sure where the card sits, see Understanding the Ad Launcher.

Enabling scheduling to auto-activate paused ads later

Above the Ads panel, next to Preview and Save, sits the Schedule button. Use it when you want the ads created now but switched live at a specific time later.

1. Click Schedule. The Schedule activation popover explains that ads upload now but stay paused, and go live at the time you pick.
2. Pick a date and time in the date-time picker. You can only choose a time in the future; past times are blocked.
3. The button now shows the armed time. Click the small X on it to clear the schedule again.
4. Click Launch N Ads. In the launch view the summary reads Paused until your time, and the confirm button reads Launch paused & schedule. Click it to proceed.

When scheduling is armed, the launch always runs paused regardless of the toggle in Ad Setup. The ads are created hidden in Meta and stay that way until the scheduled moment, when uplads flips them to active for you.

Scheduling is available for standard creative launches. The Schedule button is not offered for relaunching existing ads or partnership/Spark ad flows, since those paths create ads differently.

Understanding the ad account timezone for the datetime

The time you pick is interpreted in your ad account's timezone, not your browser clock. uplads loads the account's timezone from Meta and shows it with the schedule (for example, America/New_York), so you can pick a time confidently even if you're traveling or in a different region.

Under the hood, your wall-clock selection is converted to UTC using the account's timezone offset, and the conversion is daylight-saving aware. So "8:00 AM" means 8:00 AM in the ad account's local time on that date.

Clicking Launch to queue the job to Meta

When you click Confirm & Launch (or Launch paused & schedule) in the launch view, uplads creates the launch and hands it off:

• Your loaded creatives are uploaded to Meta and the ads are built across your ticked ad sets.
• A live progress view shows each creative move through upload, processing, and ad creation. See How to track launch progress and read results for what each state means.
• If anything fails, you can retry just the failed ads from the same view.

If you scheduled activation, the launch view shows how many ads will go live and at what time, and reminds you the ads stay hidden in Meta until then.

How scheduled activation runs as a background job

Once the paused ads are created, uplads registers a background activation job:

• It reads the newly created Meta ad IDs from the finished launch and stores a scheduled-activation record.
• A delayed job is queued for your chosen time. At that moment, a worker flips all of those ads to active in Meta; no further action needed from you.
• The job is durable: if the system restarts before the scheduled time, pending activations are re-hydrated so nothing is lost. Past-due schedules activate immediately on recovery.

Pending activations are listed in the Scheduled Ads tab under the launcher, where Cancel activation removes the queued job and leaves the ads paused. The Scheduled tab on the Launch history page (/launches) lets you reschedule a pending activation to a new time as well.

For a refresher on the whole flow, see Quickstart: launch your first ads with uplads.