Campaigns

A campaign groups everything that belongs to one launch: its dates, its goal, its budget and the things you promote with it. Use one when you want to know whether a launch paid for itself.

Litestore counts the orders that come in through the campaign and adds up what you spent on it. You can open the campaign at any time and compare the cost with the revenue.

A campaign doesn't copy your products or your discounts. It points at records you already have and keeps its own counters next to them.

Where to find it

Marketing → Campaigns

This screen shows your campaigns. When a collab asks to join a public campaign, Litestore also stores their application here.

What a campaign holds

Each campaign has a name, a goal and a description. It also has a start date, an end date and a status. You give it a total budget and then split that budget across channels.

The status is one of these:

draft
active
paused
completed

A campaign can only move between statuses along these paths:

draft      → active
active     → paused or completed
paused     → active or completed
completed  → nothing; it is final

Completed is final. You can't move a campaign out of it, so only complete a launch once you have finished reading its numbers.

Splitting the budget

You set one total budget first. Then you share it out across the channels you plan to use:

• Ads
• Social
• Collabs
• Email
• Influencers

If the channel amounts add up to more than the total, Litestore refuses the change and shows a message. The split can never go over the budget you set.

What you attach to a campaign

On the campaign's detail page, you can attach any of these:

• Products
• Collabs
• Ads
• Social posts
• Media
• Coupons
• Tracked links

Attaching creates a link, not a copy. Each item stays its own record. A campaign coupon is still an ordinary coupon. You edit it from Discounts, and it stays there after the campaign ends.

Because it's only a link, one coupon or product can belong to a launch without being locked inside it.

Public campaigns take applications

You can make a campaign private or public. In a private campaign, you add the collabs yourself. In a public campaign, collabs find it and apply.

While a public campaign is live, collabs can browse it. They see the commission rate and the requirements you wrote for them.

Applications work like this:

1. The collab applies. They find the live public campaign and send an application with a message.
2. You decide. You approve or decline the application and can add a note for them.

Each collab can apply to a campaign only once. They can't try again on the same campaign.

How the numbers are counted

When someone clicks a campaign link, Litestore sets a campaign cookie in their browser. The cookie is copied onto their order. When that order arrives, Litestore raises the campaign's conversion and revenue counters.

Litestore doesn't store return on investment (ROI) or return on ad spend (ROAS). It calculates both from spend and revenue each time you open the page. That way they always match the figures they come from.

Ad spend is handled the same way. After every ad sync, Litestore recalculates the campaign's ad spend from the ads attached to it. It then adds the difference to total spend. This keeps the campaign in line with what the ad platform reports.

Only a live campaign gets credit

Sometimes a payment settles after the campaign has ended, been completed or been deleted. In that case Litestore doesn't raise any of the campaign's counters. Conversions, revenue and spend all stay the same.

The collab still earns their commission. Closing the campaign's report doesn't change what a person is owed.

Running a campaign

1. Create the campaign. Give it dates, a goal and a total budget. Then split the budget across the channels you plan to use.
2. Attach what you promote. Add the products, collabs, ads, social posts and coupons for the launch. If you want collabs to apply, make it public and review the applications as they arrive.
3. Set it to active. While it runs, attributed orders raise its conversions and revenue. The detail page shows ROI and ROAS against the spend recorded so far.

Choosing how to set it up

Keep the campaign private if you already know who will promote it. Make it public if you want collabs to find it and you're happy to read applications.

Leave it active for as long as you want its counters to keep moving. If you complete it early, payments that settle later won't be credited to it, and you can't undo the completion.

Keep an eye on the collab budget yourself. Litestore records overspend but doesn't prevent it.

Before you create a campaign, ask yourself one question:

What should this launch prove, and will the campaign still be live when the money comes in?

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