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 on the Review step, in the Ad Status on Creation dropdown:

• 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. If you're not sure where Review fits, see Understanding the bulk launch wizard steps.

Enabling scheduling to auto-activate paused ads later

On the final Launch step you'll find a Schedule activation toggle. Turn it on when you want the ads created now but switched live at a specific time later.

1. Flip the Schedule activation switch on.
2. Pick a date and time in the datetime picker. You can only choose a time in the future — past times are blocked.
3. The Launch button changes to Launch paused & schedule. Click it to proceed.

When scheduling is enabled, the launch always runs paused regardless of the status you chose on Review. 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. It 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 next to the picker (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), uplads creates the launch and hands it off:

• Your selected creatives are uploaded to Meta and the ads are built across your chosen ad sets.
• A live progress view appears so you can watch each creative move through uploading, 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 completion screen.

If you scheduled activation, the confirmation card 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.

You can manage these from the Scheduled tab on the Launches page, where you can reschedule a pending activation to a new time or cancel it entirely. Cancelling removes the queued job and leaves the ads paused.

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