Solved: Ad stuck in 'Preparing' - How long to impressions?

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

That's a good question. The short answer is it varies, but the real issue isn't how long your ads are 'preparing', it's what happens after they start showing impressions. Tbh, focusing on the wait time is like worrying about how long it takes to turn the key in a car that has no engine. You can get it running, but you're not going anywhere.

The success or failure of your ads is decided long before you hit the 'publish' button. Let me give you some of my thoughts on what really drives performance and how to fix the underlying problems that make issues like delivery time feel so frustrating.

Let's start with the direct answer: Why your ads are 'stuck' in review...

So, you're asking about the time between hitting 'publish' and seeing impressions. Usually, for platforms like Meta (Facebook/Instagram) or Google, you're looking at anything from a couple of hours to a full 24 hours. Sometimes, especially on weekends or if it's a new account, it can stretch to 48 hours. It's annoying, but it's pretty normal.

This delay is down to a few things happening behind the scenes:

1. The Automatic Ad Review: First, your ad goes into a queue to be checked by an algorithm. It's scanning your image, copy, and landing page for any policy violations. This is the most common bottleneck. Things that can trip it up include:

• -> Making specific claims without proof (e.g., "lose 10 pounds in a week").
• -> Using 'before and after' images, which is a big no-no in many categories.
• -> Advertising in restricted categories like finance, housing, or health without following the specific rules.
• -> Your landing page being broken, slow to load, or not matching the promise in your ad. A shoddy website will get your ads rejected fast.

2. The 'Learning Phase': Once your ad is approved, it enters what Meta and Google call the 'Learning Phase'. This is crucial. The algorithm is spending your money to figure out who in your target audience is most likely to take the action you want (e.g., click, sign up, buy). It needs about 50 of these actions in a week to exit this phase. If your budget is too low or your targeting is too narrow, you'll get stuck here, and your ad delivery will be sporadic and expensive. It's tempting to tweak things during this phase, but you shouldent. Let it run. Interfering just resets the process.

3. Auction Competition: Your ad doesn't just get shown because it's approved. It has to win an auction against every other advertiser trying to reach the same person at the same moment. The winner is determined by a combination of your bid and your ad's 'quality score'. A low quality score (meaning your ad is deemed less relevant to the audience) means you'll have to bid higher to get impressions, and even then, the platform might favour showing a competitor's ad over yours. This can make delivery slow to start.

So yes, a delay is normal. But as you can probably see, the real problem isnt the wait. The real problem is that most advertisers set themselves up to fail before the auction even begins.

We need to look at your ICP... It should be a Nightmare, Not a Demographic

Forget the sterile, demographic-based profile your last marketing hire made. "Companies in the finance sector with 50-200 employees" tells you nothing of value. It's a guess. It leads to generic ads that speak to no one, which results in a low quality score, poor performance, and you sitting there wondering why your ads have no impressions.

To stop burning cash, you must define your customer by their pain. A specific, urgent, expensive, career-threatening nightmare.

Your Head of Engineering client isn't just a job title; she's a leader terrified of her best developers quitting out of frustration with a broken workflow. For a legal tech SaaS, the nightmare isn't 'needing document management'; it's 'a partner missing a critical filing deadline and exposing the firm to a malpractice suit.' Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a person; it's a problem state.

Once you've isolated that nightmare, you can find out where these people congregate online. What niche podcasts do they listen to on their commute, like 'Acquired'? What industry newsletters do they actually open, like 'Stratechery'? What SaaS tools do they already pay for, like HubSpot or Salesforce? Are they members of the 'SaaS Growth Hacks' Facebook group? Do they follow people like Jason Lemkin on Twitter?

This intelligence isn't just data; it's the blueprint for your entire targeting strategy. Do this work first, or you have no business spending a single pound on ads. You're just gambling.

I'd say you should probably delete the "Request a Demo" button...

Now we arrive at the most common failure point in all of B2B advertising: the offer. The "Request a Demo" button is perhaps the most arrogant Call to Action ever conceived. It presumes your prospect, a busy decision-maker, has nothing better to do than book a meeting to be sold to. It is high-friction, low-value, and instantly positions you as a commoditised vendor fighting for their time.

Your offer’s only job is to deliver a moment of undeniable value—an "aha!" moment that makes the prospect sell themselves on your solution. It has to solve a small piece of their nightmare for free, right now.

For SaaS founders, this is your unfair advantage. I've run loads of campaigns for software companies, and the offers that always win are a free trial (no card details) or a freemium plan. Let them use the actual product. Let them feel the transformation. When the product itself proves its value, the sale becomes a formality. You aren't generating 'Marketing Qualified Leads' for a sales team to chase; you are creating 'Product Qualified Leads' who are already convinced. For example, a campaign we ran for a B2B software client generated 4,622 registrations at just $2.38 each, showing how powerful a compelling, low-friction offer can be.

If you're not a SaaS company, you are not exempt. You must bottle your expertise into a tool, content, or asset that provides instant value.

• -> For a marketing agency, this could be a free, automated SEO audit that shows them their top 3 keyword opportunities.
• -> For a data analytics platform, it could be a free 'Data Health Check' that flags the top issues in their database.
• -> For us, as a B2B advertising consultancy, it's a 20-minute strategy session where we audit failing ad campaigns completely free.

You must solve a small, real problem for free to earn the right to solve the whole thing.

You'll need a message they can't ignore...

Once you know their nightmare and have an offer that acts as the painkiller, you can finally write an ad. The ad's only job is to connect the nightmare to the painkiller. Here are three simple frameworks that work:

1. For High-Touch Services: Problem-Agitate-Solve

You don't sell "fractional CFO services"; you sell a good night's sleep.
Problem: "Are your cash flow projections just a shot in the dark?"
Agitate: "Are you one bad month away from a payroll crisis while your competitors are confidently raising their next round?"
Solve: "Get expert financial strategy for a fraction of a full-time hire. We build dashboards that turn uncertainty into predictable growth."

2. For B2B SaaS Products: Before-After-Bridge

You don't sell a "FinOps platform"; you sell the feeling of relief.
Before: "Your AWS bill just arrived. It’s 30% higher than last month, and your engineers have no idea why. Another fire to put out."
After: "Imagine opening your cloud bill and smiling. You see where every dollar is going and waste is automatically eliminated."
Bridge: "Our platform is the bridge that gets you there. Start a free trial and find your first £1,000 in savings today."

3. For High-Ticket Physical Products: Feature -> Consequence

You don't sell the spec; you sell what the spec makes possible.
Feature: "Our new mass spectrometer has a 0.001% margin of error."
So What? (The Consequence): "So your lab can publish results with unshakeable confidence, securing more funding and attracting top talent that other labs can only dream of."

Notice that none of these ads talk about how long the company has been in business or lists a dozen features. They talk about the customer's world and their problems. This is what creates relevance, drives clicks, and tells the platform algorithms that your ad is high quality.

You also need to think about the maths... and if you can afford to win

Here's a truth that most people running ads ignore: you can't optimise what you don't measure. The real question isn't "How low can my Cost Per Lead go?" but "How high a CPL can I afford to acquire a truly great customer?" The answer lies in its counterpart: Lifetime Value (LTV).

Before you spend another penny, you need to know this number. It's the North Star for your entire advertising budget. Here's how you calculate it:

• Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you make per customer, per month?
• Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue?
• Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of customers do you lose each month?

The calculation is simple: LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

With an LTV in hand, you can work backwards to figure out what you can afford to spend to acquire a customer (your Customer Acquisition Cost, or CAC). A healthy business model typically aims for an LTV:CAC ratio of 3:1 or higher. This means for every £1 you spend to acquire a customer, you should get at least £3 back in gross margin over their lifetime.

This simple bit of maths changes everything. Suddenly, you're not just trying to get the cheapest clicks. You're making strategic investments to acquire customers you know are profitable. A £250 lead from a CTO on LinkedIn might seem expensive, but if your LTV is £10,000 and you have a 3:1 target ratio, you can afford to spend up to £3,333 to acquire a single customer. If you convert 1 in 10 of those leads, you can pay £333 per lead. That £250 lead is now a bargain.

I've built a calculator for you below to figure this out for your own business. Play around with the numbers and see what your LTV is, and what your maximum affordable CPL should be.

This is the advice I have for you:

So, to bring this all together, forget about the 'preparing' status. It's a distraction. Your path to successful advertising isn't about tweaking bids and daily budgets. It's about fixing the fundamentals. If you've done the hard work on your ICP, offer, message, and maths, the tactical platform stuff becomes much, much easier.

Here’s the actionable plan I’d recommend:

As you can see, this is a lot more involved than just setting up an ad and hoping for the best. It's a systematic process of understanding your customer, building an irresistible offer, and using data to make intelligent decisions. It requires expertise in strategy, copywriting, analytics, and platform mechanics.

Getting this right can be the difference between burning through cash with no results and building a predictable, scalable engine for growth. If you feel like you're stuck guessing and would like an expert second opinion on your strategy, we offer a completely free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy session where we can look at your specific situation and give you some clear, actionable advice.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh