Campaigns
Learn how to plan a launch with campaigns and track the revenue it earned.
A campaign is one launch, held as a single record: its dates, its goal, its budget, and everything you attached to it.
The point of gathering all of that in one place is measurement. Orders attributed to the campaign raise its own conversion and revenue counters, and spend is accumulated from the ad cost and the commission the campaign actually paid for, so at any moment you can read what the launch cost against what it earned.
Nothing here duplicates your catalogue or your discounts. A campaign points at records that already exist, and it keeps its own counters alongside them.
Where it lives
Marketing → CampaignsTwo records sit behind that screen: the campaign itself, and one application for each collab who asks to join a public campaign.
What a campaign holds
A campaign carries:
- A name, a goal and a description
- A start date and an end date
- A status
- A total budget, split across channels
The status is one of:
draft
active
paused
completedThe moves between them are fixed:
draft → active
active → paused or completed
paused → active or completed
completed → nothing; it is finalCompleted is the end of the line. There is no route back out of it, so move a launch there only when you are finished reading its numbers.
Splitting the budget
Set one total budget, then allocate it across the channels you will actually use:
- Ads
- Social
- Collabs
- Influencers
Reallocating is refused with a message when the parts add up to more than the total. The split cannot quietly exceed the budget it came out of.
What you attach to a campaign
From the campaign's detail page you can attach:
- Products
- Collabs
- Ads
- Social posts
- Media
- Coupons
- Tracked links
Each of those stays a record of its own. A campaign coupon is still a coupon, editable from Discounts, and it does not disappear when the campaign is over.
Attaching is a link, not a copy. That is what lets one coupon or one product belong to a launch without being trapped inside it.
Public campaigns take applications
A campaign is either private, where you add the collabs yourself, or public, where collabs come to you.
A public campaign is browsable by collabs while it is live, showing the commission rate and the requirements you wrote for them.
The application flow is:
- The collab finds the live public campaign and applies with a message.
- You approve or decline, with a note back to them.
One collab can apply to a campaign once. There is no second attempt on the same campaign.
How the numbers are earned
A campaign link sets the campaign cookie when it is clicked, and that cookie is carried onto the order. That is the attribution path — the campaign's counters move because an order arrived carrying its mark.
Return on investment and return on ad spend are not stored. They are worked out from spend and revenue each time you read the page, so they cannot disagree with the figures they came from.
Ad spend is treated the same way. After every ad sync the campaign's ad spend is recalculated from the ads it currently owns, and the difference is carried into total spend, so it cannot drift away from what the platform reports.
Only a live campaign takes credit
A payment that settles after the campaign has ended, been completed or been deleted raises no counters at all — not conversions, not revenue, not spend.
The collaborator's commission is earned either way. The campaign's report closing does not affect what a person is owed.
Going over the collab budget does not cap commission
When commission earned against a campaign passes its collab budget, the commission is still paid in full — what a collaborator is owed is a contract, not a setting. The overspend is recorded so you can pause the campaign; nothing stops it automatically.
Running one
- Create the campaign with its dates, goal and total budget, then split that budget across the channels you will actually use.
- Attach the products, collabs, ads, social posts and coupons that carry it. Set it public if you want collabs to apply, and review the applications that arrive.
- Move it to active. Attributed orders raise its conversions and revenue while it runs, and the detail page shows return on investment and return on ad spend against the spend recorded so far.
Deciding how to set one up
Keep it private when you already know who is promoting it. Make it public when you want collabs to find it themselves and are willing to read applications.
Leave it active for as long as you still want its counters to move. Completing it early stops crediting payments that settle afterwards, and completed cannot be undone.
Watch the collab budget rather than trusting it. It records overspend; it does not prevent it.
The question worth asking before you create one is:
What is this launch supposed to prove, and will the campaign still be live when the money lands?
Related
Collabs
Learn how to run affiliate partnerships with commissions, payouts, and tracked short links.
Discounts
Learn how to create code, automatic, and gift card discounts, set their limits, and see every redemption recorded.
Analytics
Learn about the Analytics dashboard, the ledger reconciliation card, event forwarding to PostHog, GA4 and Meta, and the store-wide activity log.