Solved: Ad Stuck in Preparing Status - Getting Impressions

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

Happy to give you some initial thoughts on your question. It's a really common one, especially when you're just starting out with paid ads and you're anxious to see if things are working. You've set everything up, hit the 'publish' button, and now you're just staring at the dashboard waiting for something to happen. I get it.

The short answer is, it varies. Sometimes it's minutes, sometimes it's a few hours, sometimes it can even be a day. But honestly, and I say this to be helpful, not dismissive, the time your ad spends in review is probably the least important factor in your campaign's success. You're focusing on the stopwatch when you should be focusing on the engine, the fuel, and the map.

So, instead of just giving you a vague answer, I'm going to walk you through what actually determines whether your ads will succeed or fail, long before you even see that first impression. We'll cover the stuff that really moves the needle: crafting an offer people can't ignore, understanding the maths of profitable advertising, and building campaigns that actually find you customers, not just clicks. By the end of this, you won't be worrying about review times anymore, you'll be focused on building a proper growth engine for your business.

Why "How Long Until Impressions?" is the Wrong Question to Ask...

Let's get your actual question out of the way first so you have the context. When you submit a new ad, it enters a review process. On platforms like Meta (Facebook & Instagram) or Google, this is mostly automated. An AI scans your ad creative, copy, and landing page for any policy violations – things like prohibited content, misleading claims, or poor user experience. This automated review can be incredibly fast, sometimes just a few minutes.

However, if the algorithm flags something it's unsure about, or for certain types of ads (like finance, health, or politics), it might get kicked to a human reviewer. That's when it can take longer, maybe a few hours or, in rare cases, over a day. So, the 1-2 hour timeframe you mentioned is a pretty reasonable expectation, but it's not a guarantee. There are a few other things that can affect it too:

• -> Platform: Google Ads is often a bit quicker to get going than Meta, in my experience. Meta's 'learning phase' can sometimes feel like it takes a bit longer to ramp up.
• -> Budget: A larger budget can sometimes seem to get things moving quicker because the platform is more eager to start spending your cash. A tiny budget might take longer to gain momentum.
• -> Account History: An established ad account with a good history of compliant ads often sees faster review times than a brand new account, which might be under more scrutiny.

But here’s the brutally honest truth: none of this matters. Whether your ad starts showing impressions in 10 minutes or 10 hours has virtually zero correlation with its long-term success. Obsessing over this initial delay is like a chef worrying about how long it takes for the oven to preheat while they're using rotten ingredients. The preheating is a necessary step, but the quality of the final dish was decided long before the oven was even turned on.

Your campaign's fate was sealed when you decided on your offer, defined your audience, and wrote your ad copy. That's where the real work is. The ad platform's job is just distribution. If you give it a brilliant message for a hungry audience, it will work. If you give it a confusing message for an indifferent audience, it will fail, no matter how quickly it gets approved. The first few hours are a rounding error in a campaign that should be designed to run for weeks or months. So, lets talk about the ingredients that actually make a winning recipe.

We'll need to look at your offer... because a great ad can't save a bad one

This is, without a doubt, the number one reason I see campaigns fail. Founders and marketers spend weeks agonising over ad creative, bidding strategies, and button colours, but they've spent almost no time validating the thing they're actually trying to sell. A powerful offer isn't just about your product or service; it's about how you frame it as an undeniable solution to a painful, urgent problem.

Think about it. People don't buy drills; they buy holes. They don't buy accounting software; they buy peace of mind at tax time and the ability to make confident financial decisions. If your ads are just listing features, you're selling the drill. You need to sell the hole. I've seen so many businesses struggle because their offer is simply not compelling enough. They're trying to gain traction with a product that lacks clear demand, or they're communicating its value poorly.

To fix this, you need to build your offer around your customer's pain. Two simple but incredibly powerful copywriting frameworks we use for this are Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS) and Before-After-Bridge (BAB).

Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS): This is perfect for high-touch services. You start by identifying the core problem, then you pour salt on the wound by describing the frustration and negative consequences of that problem, and finally, you present your service as the perfect solution.

• Don't say: "We offer fractional CFO services." (This is a feature)
• Instead, say: "(Problem) Are your cash flow projections just a wild guess? (Agitate) Are you secretly terrified that one slow month could lead to a payroll crisis, while your competitors are confidently raising their next funding round? (Solve) We give you expert financial strategy for a fraction of a full-time hire, turning that uncertainty into predictable, scalable growth."

Before-After-Bridge (BAB): This works brilliantly for SaaS products. You paint a picture of their current frustrating reality (the Before state), show them the desired, aspirational reality (the After state), and then position your product as the vehicle that gets them there (the Bridge).

• Don't say: "Our platform helps you manage your cloud spend." (This is a feature)
• Instead, say: "(Before) Your monthly AWS bill just landed. It’s 30% higher than last month, and your engineers have no idea why. Another fire to put out, another weekend ruined. (After) Imagine opening your cloud bill and actually smiling. You see exactly where every single pound is going, and waste is automatically eliminated before it even happens. (Bridge) Our platform is the bridge that gets you there. Start a free trial and find your first £1,000 in savings today."

Notice how these examples don't just describe a service; they sell an outcome. They sell a transformation from a state of pain to a state of relief. A strong offer is tangible, clear, and solves a specific, urgent problem for a specific type of person. I remember one client, a medical job matching SaaS platform, was really struggling. Their Cost Per User Acquisition was around £100. We helped them reframe their offer from "Find medical jobs" to "Stop wasting hours on applications and let the perfect jobs find you." We focused on the pain of the job search. Their Cost Per User Acquisition dropped to £7. That's the power of a compelling offer.

I'd say you need to define your customer's nightmare, not their demographics...

Once you have a powerful offer, you need to get it in front of the right people. This is where most advertisers make their second critical mistake. They define their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) using sterile, useless demographics. "Our ICP is companies in the finance sector with 50-200 employees, and we target the CTO."

This tells you absolutely nothing of value. It leads to generic ads that speak to a job title, not a person with a career-threatening problem. To stop burning cash, you have to define your customer by their pain. Your ICP isn't a demographic; it's a problem state. It's a nightmare.

You need to become an obsessive expert in their specific, urgent, and expensive problem. That CTO you're targeting isn't just a job title. She's a leader who lies awake at night terrified that her company's creaking legacy systems will fail during a critical transaction, costing millions and damaging her reputation. Your product doesn't just "improve infrastructure"; it "eliminates the risk of catastrophic system failure so you can sleep at night."

Here's how to make this shift:

1. Identify the Pain: What is the one thing that, if it goes wrong, causes massive professional or financial pain for your ideal customer? What keeps them up at night? What problem makes them look bad in front of their boss or their board?
2. Find Their Watering Holes: Once you've isolated that nightmare, you need to find where these people congregate to talk about it. It’s not about demographics, it's about psychographics and behaviour.
   • What niche podcasts do they listen to on their commute (e.g., 'Acquired', 'The All-In Podcast')?
   • What industry newsletters do they actually open and read (e.g., 'Stratechery', 'Fintech Brain Food')?
   • What SaaS tools do they already pay for (e.g., Salesforce, HubSpot, Jira)? These are massive clues about their priorities and budget.
   • What influencers or thought leaders do they follow on LinkedIn or Twitter (e.g., Jason Lemkin, Gergely Orosz)?
   • What specific subreddits or Facebook groups are they members of?
3. Build Your Targeting Around the Pain: This intelligence becomes the blueprint for your ad targeting. On Meta ads, you don't target "CTOs". You layer interests: people who like 'AWS', follow 'Gergely Orosz', and are members of the 'High Scalability' Facebook group. Now you're not just reaching people with the right job title; you're reaching people who are actively engaged in solving the exact problems your product addresses. One of our B2B software clients was struggling to get leads. They were targeting broad job titles on LinkedIn. We switched their targeting to focus on members of specific industry groups and followers of key software engineering publications. Their Cost Per Lead dropped to just $22.

This level of detailed work is non-negotiable. If you haven't done it, you have no business spending a single pound on ads, because you're just firing a cannon in the dark and hoping to hit something.

You probably should calculate what you can actually afford to spend...

Okay, so you've got a killer offer and you know exactly whose nightmare you're solving. Now we need to talk about money. Most new advertisers are obsessed with the wrong metric: Cost Per Lead (CPL) or Cost Per Click (CPC). They try to get it as low as possible, thinking that's the goal. This is a trap that leads to cheap, low-quality traffic that never converts.

The real question isn't "How low can my CPL go?" but "How high a CPL can I afford to pay to acquire a truly great customer?" The answer to this liberating question lies in its counterpart: Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). Your LTV is the total profit you can expect to make from an average customer over the entire duration of their relationship with your business. Once you know this number, everything changes.

Let's walk through a simple calculation for a subscription business, for example a SaaS company.

• Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What's the average amount a customer pays you each month? Let's say it's £200.
• Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue after accounting for costs like servers, support, etc.? Let's say it's 80%.
• Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of your customers cancel their subscription each month? This is a crucial metric. Let's say it's 5%.

Now, the formula is:

LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

So in our example:

LTV = (£200 * 0.80) / 0.05

LTV = £160 / 0.05 = £3,200

This means that, on average, each new customer you acquire is worth £3,200 in gross margin to your business over their lifetime. Now you have the truth. A healthy benchmark for a sustainable business is a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. This means you can afford to spend up to £3,200 / 3 = ~£1,067 to acquire a single new customer and still have a very profitable model.

This changes your perspective completely. Suddenly, that £50 CPL you were stressing about looks incredibly cheap. If your sales process converts 1 in 10 qualified leads into a customer, you could afford to pay up to £106 per lead and still be well within your target. This is the maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent scaling. It frees you from the tyranny of cheap clicks and allows you to focus on acquiring high-value customers, even if they cost more upfront.

You'll need to structure your campaigns to find customers, not just clicks...

So, we have a great offer, a well-defined audience, and we know our numbers. Now, finally, we can talk about actually setting up the ads. The way you structure your campaigns on a platform like Meta is critical. A common, and costly, mistake is to create a "Brand Awareness" or "Reach" campaign.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: when you set your campaign objective to "Brand Awareness," you are giving the algorithm a very specific, and very literal, command: "Find me the largest number of people for the lowest possible price." The algorithm, being an obedient servant, does exactly what you asked. It seeks out the users inside your targeting who are the least likely to click, least likely to engage, and absolutely, positively, least likely to ever pull out a credit card and buy something. Why? Because those users are not in demand by other advertisers. Their attention is cheap. You are literally paying Facebook to find you the worst possible audience for your product.

Real awareness is a byproduct of performance. It comes from a competitor's customer switching to your product and raving about it online. It comes from delivering so much value that people talk about you. That only happens through conversion.

Therefore, you should almost always optimise your campaigns for a conversion event – a lead, a sale, a trial signup. This tells the algorithm, "Don't just show my ad to anyone; show it to people within my target audience who, based on their past behaviour, are most likely to take the action I actually want." This is a fundamentally different instruction and leads to fundamentally different results.

To do this effectively, we structure our campaigns using a classic funnel model: Top of Funnel (ToFu), Middle of Funnel (MoFu), and Bottom of Funnel (BoFu).

• Top of Funnel (ToFu): Reaching Cold Audiences. This is your first touchpoint. The goal here is to introduce your brand to people who have never heard of you but fit your pain-point ICP.
  • Audiences: This is where you use your ICP research. You'll test audiences based on Detailed Targeting (interests, behaviours) and Lookalike Audiences. A Lookalike of your existing customer list is often the most powerful audience you can build.
  • Message: Your ad needs to grab their attention and speak directly to their "nightmare" using the PAS or BAB frameworks we discussed.
• Middle of Funnel (MoFu): Nurturing Warm Audiences. These are people who have shown some interest but haven't taken a key action yet. They've visited your website, watched a video, or engaged with a post.
  • Audiences: You'll retarget Website Visitors (e.g., in the last 30 days), people who watched 50% of your video ad, or people who engaged with your Instagram profile. Crucially, you should *exclude* people who have already converted or reached the BoFu stage.
  • Message: Your message here can be about overcoming objections, showing social proof (testimonials, case studies), or highlighting a specific feature they might have missed.
• Bottom of Funnel (BoFu): Closing the Deal with Hot Audiences. These are people who were on the very brink of converting but got distracted. They are your hottest leads.
  • Audiences: People who added a product to their cart but didn't purchase, or initiated checkout but abandoned it. For a SaaS business, this could be people who visited the pricing page.
  • Message: The message here should be direct and create urgency. A special offer, a reminder of the value, or a testimonial from a similar customer can be very effective.

By structuring your campaigns this way, you create a cohesive journey for your potential customers, showing them the right message at the right time. You're not just shouting into the void; you're having a structured conversation that guides people towards becoming a customer. I've audited so many accounts where they just have one campaign with a messy pile of ad sets targeting everyone. Separating it into a logical funnel structure almost always brings immediate clarity and performance improvements.

This is the main advice I have for you:

So, to bring this all back to your original question, the time it takes for your ads to get impressions is a tiny, insignificant detail. The real work happens before you ever click "publish." If you focus on getting these fundamentals right, you'll build a system that can predictably and profitably grow your business. Here’s a summary of the steps you should be focusing on right now.

I know this is a lot to take in, and it's a very different answer to the simple question you asked. But my goal is to give you the advice that will actually help you succeed. Getting these pieces right is the difference between an ad account that bleeds money and one that becomes a reliable, scalable source of growth for your business.

It's not easy, and it takes experience to get all these moving parts working together seamlessly. This is where expert help can make a massive difference, helping you avoid costly mistakes and accelerate your path to profitability. We do this day in, day out for our clients, from B2B SaaS companies to eCommerce stores.

If you'd like to chat through your specific situation in more detail, we offer a completely free, no-obligation initial consultation. We can take a look at your business, your goals, and give you a tailored strategy to get you started on the right foot.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh