How-to

Draft, paused, in review: what each Meta ad status means when an agent or a tool builds the ad

Since October 6, 2026 Meta's ads MCP stages agent work as a draft in Ads Manager. A draft is not an ad yet, a paused ad exists at Meta and cannot spend, and in review is Meta checking a published ad. They look similar in the table and behave differently for everything you want to verify. Here is the difference, in Meta's words where it has them.

Adlio team4 min read

The short answer

Three states, three different things:

  • Draft: not an ad yet. Meta: "before you publish your ad it's considered a draft." It lives in Ads Manager, highlighted in green, "In draft" in the Delivery column. Nothing exists at Meta's API yet.
  • Paused: an ad that exists. It has an id, a creative with a stored enhancement state, a name, a destination. Its status is PAUSED, so it cannot spend. You can read everything about it through the API and change it before activating.
  • In review: a published ad that Meta is checking against its advertising policies, shown in the Delivery column.

Since October 6, 2026, Meta's ads MCP puts agent work in the first state: "Agent-staged work now lands as a draft in Ads Manager, so people and agents can co-author the same campaign and publish from either surface." That is a sensible safety choice for a general agent. For a bulk launch, the state you want to end in is the second one, because it is the only one you can verify from outside Ads Manager and that still cannot spend.

Draft, in Meta's words

Meta's help page on ad drafts, fetched October 24, 2026:

  • "When you click Create in Ads Manager we create an empty draft of your future campaign. As you choose your settings we automatically save those selections for you as a draft."
  • "When you edit active campaigns, you can also click Close to save your draft but you must click Publish to apply those changes."
  • "Drafts will be highlighted in green, listed at the top and will show In draft in the Delivery column."
  • "Before your ads run on Facebook or Instagram, we review them against our advertising policies."

A draft is a convenience of the interface. It is the right place to park half a campaign you will finish next week. It is not an ad, which has two consequences for anyone verifying a batch: it has no API object, so nothing about it (enhancements, destination, naming) can be read back by a script, and it is not visible to anyone who audits the account through the API rather than the interface.

Why Meta's MCP stages drafts

Meta's announcement of October 6, 2026 frames it as control: "Every action is gated behind advertiser-set permissions and explicit approval before anything goes live." A draft that a person reviews in Ads Manager and then publishes is a reasonable gate for an assistant that can also change budgets and targeting. The same page says the MCP now supports uploading creative and previewing ads as they will appear on Facebook and Instagram.

What the draft gate does not give you is a machine-readable record before the approval. The person approves what they see on screen. If the question is "did this creative get every enhancement opted out", the answer only becomes checkable after publish, when the creative exists; and publish, for Meta's MCP, is the step that can make objects active. What an agent-built ad launches with lists the defaults an agent leaves in place.

Paused: the state you can verify

A paused ad is a created ad whose status is PAUSED. The Marketing API gives you everything about it:

  • GET /<ad_id>?fields=name,status,effective_status,creative for the ad,
  • GET /<creative_id>?fields=degrees_of_freedom_spec,asset_feed_spec for the enhancement state and the music opt-out,
  • the ad set's targeting, DSA fields and placements.

A batch of sixty paused ads is sixty objects you can audit with one script, rename, or delete, without a single impression bought. It is also the state Ads Manager's bulk actions work best on: select all, set live, once. The pre-launch QA checklist is built on that state, and rolling back a launch explains why pausing ads, not ad sets, is the reversible move.

In review

Review is Meta's policy check on a published ad. Meta's drafts page says it happens "automatically before ads begin running", and the status appears in the Delivery column. What we observe on our own paused launches, and how long it takes, is in ad review for bulk launches; we keep observations and Meta's statements apart there.

For a batch, review is a reason to launch paused and early: a rejected ad in a paused batch costs nothing and can be fixed before the activation day. A rejected ad discovered after activation has cost the other 59 a start they did not share.

Which one a bulk launch should end in

DraftPausedActive or in review
Exists at Meta's APINoYesYes
Can spendNoNoYes, once approved
Enhancement state readable by scriptNoYesYes
Bulk activation in one actionAfter publishYesn/a
Who created it, in Meta's historyAfter publishYesYes

Paused wins on every row that matters for verification. That is not an argument against drafts in general; it is an argument about what state a tool or an agent should hand over when sixty ads are involved.

How Adlio handles it

Adlio creates every ad paused, whether the batch started as a folder on /upload or as a draft an assistant filled through Adlio's MCP. Before anything is created, the person sees a preview that names the account, campaign, ad set, sender, URLs, CTA, copy and the enhancement state, and confirms it; through the MCP that is a previewToken plus confirmed: true, and the server has no tool that activates ads. After creation, every creative can be read back with all 69 keys OPT_OUT and an empty audios list. You set the batch live in Ads Manager. The batch flow is on bulk upload Facebook ads.

Frequently asked questions

Is a draft the same as a paused ad?+

No. Meta's help (fetched October 24, 2026): "before you publish your ad it's considered a draft", drafts are "highlighted in green, listed at the top" and show "In draft" in the Delivery column. A draft exists only in Ads Manager. A paused ad is a real ad object at Meta with status PAUSED: it has an id, a creative, and a stored enhancement state, and it does not spend.

Can I check Advantage+ settings on a draft through the API?+

Not that we have found. The Marketing API returns ads and creatives that exist; a draft is unpublished Ads Manager state. A paused ad's creative can be read with fields=degrees_of_freedom_spec, which is how you verify that every enhancement is OPT_OUT before spend.

Does a paused ad go through ad review?+

Meta ties review to running: "before your ads run on Facebook or Instagram, we review them against our advertising policies", with the status in the Delivery column. What we see on our own launches is in the ad review article; we do not make a general claim about when review starts for a paused ad.

Which state should a bulk launch end in?+

Paused. It is the only one of the three that is a real object you can verify through the API, that cannot spend, and that a person activates in one bulk action after checking. A draft cannot be verified from outside Ads Manager; an active ad is already spending. Adlio has no code path that ends anywhere else.

Sources

Adlio team

Built by media buyers who launch Meta ads in volume. Questions or corrections: support@adlio.ai.

Topic cluster

Agentic ads, safely

Launching Meta ads from Claude or ChatGPT: what an agent leaves switched on, and how to keep control.

Start here

Meta's ads MCP vs a bulk uploader: what each one leaves switched on

Related guides