Copy, Paste, Lose the Likes

Launch day looks the same at every agency. A folder of new creatives, a list of ad sets, and someone in Ads Manager for the afternoon, duplicating, renaming and pasting copy.

Why launching by hand breaks

The volume is going up. Meta says more than a million advertisers made more than 15 million ads with its generative AI tools in a single month, and expects the number of creatives in its systems "to grow significantly."¹

The limits are real. Meta caps an ad set at 50 live ads² and limits how many API calls an ad account can make per hour.³

Copies lose their proof. Duplicate an ad that was customised by placement and Ads Manager won't carry its likes and comments across. The workaround is reusing the original post ID by hand.⁴

Names drift. Every hand-typed ad name is a chance to break the naming convention that reporting depends on.

What we built

• A sheet and a folder in. One row per ad: copy, link, call to action and target ad sets. Creatives sit in a Drive folder.
• Each asset uploaded once. Then reused wherever it's needed.
• Names written by the system. Every name follows brand_concept_format_hook_date, so reports can read it.
• One post, many ad sets. The same post ID runs in every ad set, so likes and comments stack in one place.
• Limits handled. Ad sets that would pass 50 ads are split, and calls are paced under the hourly quota.
• Checks before launch. Missing 9:16 or 1:1 versions, broken links or missing UTMs, copy over length, and duplicate names.
• A person presses go. Everything launches paused until someone on the team switches it on.

What it can't do

• One or the other. Meta's API no longer supports placement customisation on existing posts,⁵ so each launch picks either custom placements or a shared post ID.
• Faster isn't better. The launcher ships more ads. It doesn't make them more different from each other.