Start trafficking

Set up a campaign

This article covers how to create a campaign and set campaign properties. These are the properties of the campaign itself—you see them when you open a campaign in Campaign Manager 360 and click Properties. To learn how to navigate all the rows and columns in your campaign, see the Trafficking workflow.

Get started

What is a campaign?

Each advertiser in your account has different campaigns with their own ads and placements. Your campaign properties help set when your ads run, what landing pages you use by default, and how reports reflect different groups of creatives or different kinds of ad performance.

Create a campaign

You can either create a totally new campaign or just copy one that is already in your advertiser.

Create: Navigate to the advertiser level and select Campaigns in the left menu, then click New. Your next step is to edit the campaign properties.

Copy: Navigate to the advertiser level and select Campaigns in the left menu. Open a campaign in your list, click the Properties button, and then click Copy button. This creates a new campaign with the same properties of the original campaign. Once you save, you'll have two campaigns, the original and the copy. When you create a copy, you still need to add creatives, ads, and placements. Only the properties are copied. The name is the same, only with "(Copy 1)" appended.

Campaigns must start on the current date or later. If the start date for the copied campaign is in the past, the new campaign uses today's date. If the end date is also in the past, the new campaign sets the end date to 30 days from today.
Find existing campaigns in Campaign Manager 360

Click Campaigns on the navigation bar in Campaign Manager 360 Trafficking to view your campaign list.

  • Click the search bar to filter your campaigns. For example, you might add an advertiser filter to view campaigns in a specific advertiser. Or you might look for campaigns that begin after a particular start date.

  • Star campaigns to keep them above your campaign list: click the star icon . This way you can easily find your most commonly used campaigns. Learn more

Set campaign properties

Campaign properties determine basic information about your campaign, including things like scheduling and default landing pages.

To edit campaign properties, click Campaigns on the navigation bar in Campaign Manager 360 and select your campaign from the campaign list.

Identification

Advertiser: When you create a new campaign, select the advertiser you wish to use here. The advertiser must already be created in Campaign Manager 360.

Campaign name: Name your campaign. This identifies your campaign in Campaign Manager 360 and in reports. We recommend not using semicolons in the name of your campaign. 

Billing invoice code: Enter a value that will be included on your Campaign Manager 360 billing invoices in association with this campaign, along with the advertiser and campaign names. The billing invoice code makes it easier for you to associate Campaign Manager 360 billing with data in your own billing or tracking system. For example, if you use a code to identify your campaigns in a third-party billing system, you can enter that value here. There's a 64-character limit. You can include numbers, letters in all languages, and special characters, but not angle brackets (< and >).

Billing invoice codes are processed on the first day of each month. The code is then added to the invoice for the previous month. For example, for your January invoice (which is sent out in February), the billing invoice code is processed on February 1. To ensure that the correct code is applied to your invoice for a given month, enter the code before the end of the month.

External ID: An external ID is any ID that you might use outside Campaign Manager 360 to identify items in internal reports (this ID is not generated by Campaign Manager 360).

    Naming rules for external IDs:

  • Maximum length: 50 characters
  • Encoding: UTF-8
  • Allowed characters:
    • numbers from 0–9
    • letters from a–z, A–Z
    • dashes ("-")
    • underscores ("_")
  • Never use:
    • commas (",")
    • semicolons (";")
    • pipes ("|")
  • You can apply the same external ID to any combination of campaigns or placements, or use a unique ID for every campaign and every placement.

  • To find all campaigns and placements associated with an external ID, enter it into the Campaign Manager 360 search box.

  • Not all accounts are enabled to use external IDs. If you do not see the external ID field in this section, talk to your account manager about enabling this feature.

 

Comments: Add your own comments here.

Schedule

Set your campaign's start and end dates in the Schedule section. Campaign dates determine the period of time reflected in your campaign report: campaign reports only show how your campaign’s ads perform during the span of time set by the campaign dates.

How campaign dates affect ad serving

Campaign start and end dates do not automatically affect when your ads serve. Ads within the campaign can serve before or after the campaign dates.

How campaign dates affect placement dates

You can't set placement dates that fall outside your campaign dates. You still need to make sure that when you change your campaign dates, your placement dates still fall within the new campaign dates. An easy way to do this is to apply your campaign date changes to placements. Otherwise, changing campaign dates won't affect your placement dates.

Note that you can’t save new changes to your placement dates unless they fall within the campaign dates. For example, if you change your campaign dates to April 5th - May 5th, then the following applies:

  • Any new placements you create must fall within April 5th - May 5th.

  • Any changes to your old placement dates must fall within April 5th - May 5th.

  • Placements that end after May 5th do not automatically change. Your ads will still serve after May 5th, though the campaign report won’t follow their performance after May 5th. Placement dates only have to conform to campaign dates if you want to save changes.

Landing pages

A landing page is the final page to direct people to when they click or tap your ad. In Campaign Manager 360, you can manage landing pages across your advertiser from the Landing pages tab. After you create a landing page in your advertiser, you can reuse it in all of that advertiser's campaigns, ads, and creatives. 

From your campaign properties, you can:

  • Pick from a list of advertiser landing pages.
  • Create a new landing page and edit existing landing pages. This landing page will be saved in your advertiser landing page list. 
  • Bulk upload URL landing pages. These landing pages will be saved in your advertiser landing page list.
  • Set a custom landing page to use just within that campaign. Custom landing pages will not be saved in your advertiser landing page list. 

You must add at least one landing page so that your campaign has a default to use in case there is no other landing page specified in your ad or creative.

Billing

The default billing profile for a new campaign is set to the advertiser’s selected billing profile. To assign a different billing profile to your advertiser, click Change billing profile and select one from the list of available profiles. If you are unsure which profile to choose, you can download an SDF to share the information with your company's billing contact (accounts payable, media buyer, etc.).

Once you’ve selected a billing profile, click Reassign, then click Save. To see a full list of advertisers assigned to the selected billing profile, click +_more… in the preview card.

Note that only "Account management: full access" and "Campaign: full access" user roles can select and edit billing profiles. A user without these permissions can view a billing profile but not select or edit it.

Choosing an incorrect billing profile can cause significant delays in billing. If you’re unsure of the correct profile, please check with your company's billing contact before proceeding.
Landing page URL suffix

Here you can enter a suffix to be appended to the landing page URL of ads in this campaign. You can change this suffix for particular ads in this campaign in the ad properties. Leave the suffix locked to use whatever suffix is set at the advertiser level. Learn more

Event tags

Event tags allow parties outside Campaign Manager 360 to log information about impressions and clicks on your ads. You can create event tags in your advertiser or campaign and choose whether to apply them automatically to your ads or require they be added manually. Learn more

Verification settings

Use the checkbox here to turn ad blocking settings on or off for a campaign. You can find detailed instructions about setting up ad blocking here.

Ad blocking prevents your ads from serving to inventory where you do not want them to appear. This way you can make sure your advertiser's brand does not appear in the wrong context. If you enable ad blocking, Campaign Manager 360 will send either transparent pixels or your own unbranded creatives to inventory that matches your ad blocking criteria.

Your overall ad blocking criteria is managed in Verification. In Trafficking, you enable ad blocking for specific campaigns, sites, or placements.

Creative groups

Creative groups are a way to label your creatives in reports. This allows you to generate reports that show performance data by creative group.

  1. Add creative groups in your advertiser properties and choose which campaigns you want to share them across.

    To create new creative groups, click Manage creative groups. This takes you to your advertiser page, as you must add creative groups at the advertiser level. Click New creative group in the "Creative groups" section.

  2. In your campaign, select creative groups to use for creatives in your ads. The groups you choose here will be available as labeling options in your ads. Any creative can belong to a maximum of two groups.

    Campaign Manager 360 divides your creative groups into separate categories (group 1 and group 2).This can help you compare the performance of different groups of creatives.

Note: Creative groups are different from creative fields. Both are ways to label groups of creatives, but creative fields also have values (subcategories within each label).

Creative optimization

Creative optimization is a way to rotate creatives in your ads based on performance. The metric you choose here becomes available in all your ads as an optimization metric. You can only choose one metric at any given time in a campaign. Learn more

Warning: If you change your optimization metric, it will affect every ad in your campaign that is set to the optimized rotation. Every ad using optimization will switch to that metric.

Floodlight conversion windows

By default, campaigns use the conversion windows set at the advertiser level. You can override those values for new placements created after you set campaign-level windows.

Changes at the campaign level don't affect existing placements. Learn more about conversion windows

To override the conversion window for clicks or impressions, select the corresponding Override checkbox and enter the updated number of days. The number can be equal to or less than the value set for that conversion window on the Floodlight Configuration tab for the advertiser.

Audience segmentation

Audience segmentation divides your campaign’s audience into different groups of users. These groups are called segments. You can target different ads to each segment and then compare the results. Learn to set up audience segmentation

Third-party measurement

Enable third-party verification for your campaign. Learn more

Was this helpful?

How can we improve it?

Need more help?

Try these next steps:

true
2024 Privacy Readiness guide

Prepare for a world without third-party cookies and unlock the AI
opportunity by adopting a durable measurement setup.
Start Today

Search
Clear search
Close search
Google apps
Main menu
1624491362648375641
true
Search Help Center
true
true
true
true
true
69192
false
false