The first week after launch

Launch week generates the numbers everyone will reason from for months. Contaminated numbers there cost the whole quarter.

6 August 2026 · PAD team

Day one: mechanics only

• Tap every live placement from inside Instagram and Facebook on a real iPhone
• Confirm the store opens rather than a blank page
• Check that campaign tokens are on the final store URL
• Verify Android and desktop go somewhere sensible

Nothing interpretive on day one. You are checking whether the plumbing works, not whether the marketing does.

Day three: first comparisons

Now there is enough volume for internal comparisons. Install objectives against traffic objectives, iOS against Android, arrival rate against billed clicks. Any large gap here is mechanical and fixable this week.

Day seven: interpretation

Only now do creative and store page hypotheses make sense, because only now are the numbers about people who actually arrived.

Teams that skip to this step on day one spend the following month optimising against traffic that never reached the store.

What to write down

Record the arrival rate per source during launch week. It becomes the baseline for everything afterwards, and without it you cannot tell a platform change from a performance change three months later.

The placements you cannot fix later

Printed material, creator posts, press coverage. Those go out during launch and keep sending traffic for months, so they need to point at an address you control before anything is published.