set up meta business suite.
most ad headaches start with a messy setup. here is how to get meta business suite right from day one.
a clean business suite setup prevents most future headaches. own your assets, install the pixel, and set permissions properly.
boring, but foundational: a messy meta setup causes losing access to your own page, broken tracking, and ad accounts you cannot control. ten minutes of proper setup saves months of pain.
— 01own your assets.
create a business portfolio and make sure your business — not an employee or an old agency — owns the page, ad account and pixel. assets you do not own can vanish when people leave.
if it is already wrong, fix it before anything else. transferring assets while everyone is still on good terms takes an afternoon; recovering them afterwards can take months.
claim the page, the instagram account, the ad account, the pixel and the domain inside that portfolio. each one claimed separately, each one owned by the business.
and verify the domain. it is ten minutes of work and it is what gives you control over how your own links are treated — without it, you are dependent on whoever set things up first.
— 02install the pixel.
the pixel (now the dataset) is what makes ads measurable and retargeting possible. install it before you spend a dirham, or you are flying blind.
then set up the conversions api as well as the browser pixel. browser-only tracking loses a meaningful share of events, and the gap widens every year as privacy controls tighten.
and define the conversion events deliberately — purchase, lead, whatever the real outcome is. an account optimising toward a page view is being trained to find people who look at things.
— 03set permissions, not passwords.
grant access by role through business suite — never by sharing logins. it is safer, cleaner, and means you can remove access instantly when someone leaves.
never share a login. add people as users with defined roles, so access can be removed the day someone leaves without changing a password everyone knows.
give agencies partner access rather than adding them as staff. that keeps their access separate, auditable and reversible, and it means their departure does not take anything with it.
and review the user list quarterly. most accounts accumulate former employees, ex-agencies and one consultant nobody remembers hiring, all with standing access to the ad account.
— 04the checks worth doing once a quarter.
who has access, whether the pixel is still firing, whether the conversion events match what the business actually cares about, and whether payment details are current. all four fail silently.
and confirm the ownership chain is still the business rather than an individual. this is the check that saves an account when someone resigns, and almost nobody runs it until it is too late.
related on the dispatch: meta ads vs boosting posts.