Build an Advertising Campaign

Context

The self-serve Campaign Builder of the Advertising Cloud guides you through the full marketing -> sales -> post-sales journey of account-based advertising programs. The Campaign Builder wizard enables easy setup, launch, and management of campaigns. The wizard also helps ensure that your campaigns are properly scoped for success. You can optimize campaigns in real time to drive increased performance—adjust creative, landing pages, and other advertising parameters.

Tip: See Building an Advertising Campaign (Video) for a more visual overview of the Campaign Builder steps documented below.

If your company has Advertising Campaign Strategist (ACS) support, you may also work with your ACS to create, publish, and launch an ad campaign.

Prerequisites/Preparation

You must have access to the Advertising Cloud, with the self-serve Campaign Builder enabled.

Be prepared to provide the following assets:

• Ad Creative Sets. See Upload Display Creatives for more information about how to go about formulating and submitting your display ads.
• Landing Page URL. See Landing Page URL and UTM Parameters for guidance about how to construct your landing page URL. 

The Demandbase Tag must be deployed on the landing page for your ad.

Steps

From the left navigation bar, click the Advertising icon   and then the +New campaign button to start the Campaign Builder wizard. (If the +New campaign button isn’t enabled on your screen, self-serve Advertising isn't enabled. Contact your Demandbase Customer Success Manager to explore possible options.)

After the Campaign Builder wizard is launched, you'll follow the wizard as it guides you through these steps:

• Step 1.  Identify the Campaign
• Step 2. Select a Budget and Schedule
• Step 3. Select a Location
• Step 4: Create a Targeting Strategy
• Step 5: Select Creatives and Publish Campaign

Tip: After you click +New campaign, the Campaign Builder wizard diagrams your step-by-step progress as you enter your campaign settings on top of the screen.

If you need to go back to a previous step of the Campaign Builder wizard, click the step in the top navigation bar. The navigation bar also alerts you if a previous step requires attention by highlighting it with an exclamation point and red text.

1. Identify the Campaign

a. Enter a name for your campaign.

Tip: Follow a naming convention that makes sense for your long-term usage of Demandbase. Considerations include the purpose of the campaign, your business unit, product, flight dates, and geographic location. These are all important considerations, especially if you have multiple marketers in your organization who are building campaigns with Demandbase.

b. (Optional) Select the names of other relevant stakeholders in the Add watchers drop-down list. Watchers receive Campaign Insights (emails) on a weekly basis after the campaign launches. You can also add and remove watchers at any time after you publish the campaign. For more information, see FAQs: Campaign Insights.

Tip: You can also type the email address of the person you want to add as a watcher and press Enter to add them to the list.

c. Click Continue.

2. Select a Budget and Schedule

Additional information about this step is in the Budget and Schedule an Advertising Campaign article.

a. Select a Purchase Order/Order number to associate with your campaign to understand your available budget and what has been allocated.

• If your company doesn’t require a PO number for billing, you’ll only see your Demandbase order numbers. The Campaign Builder wizard displays a PO number only for customers who require it.
• Select your PO/order number. Associating a campaign with a PO/order number ensures you select the correct media order and that you do not overspend and/or leave any unallocated budget remaining. 
• You can change the PO or order number for a draft campaign that isn’t published. After you publish a campaign, the PO/order number is locked and can’t be changed.

Tip: The order number is at the top of the first page of your company’s contract with Demandbase.

b. Enter your budget: Enter the total budget for the whole campaign.

c. Select flight dates: Enter the flight dates of the campaign.

d. Click Continue.

3. Select a Location

a. Geotargeting Type: Select geographic targeting parameters for the campaign by entering selections in the drop-down menus. See Configure Campaign Geotargeting for more information about location-based targeting.

b. Click Continue.

4. Create a Targeting Strategy

a. Select an existing account list or create a new account list for this campaign. For more information, see Building an Account List for an Advertising Campaign.

b. Select an existing keyword set or create a new keyword set that reflects Demandbase Intent of your targeted audience. See Set Up Demandbase Intent: Create Keyword Sets if you need guidance for this. Here are some recommendations for your keyword set entries:

• Include granular keywords
• List your competitors
• Minimum of 25 keywords 
• Leverage your SEO keywords
• Add keywords related to key personas

Examples of how you can apply Intent to keyword sets include creating these types of sets:

• A keyword set surrounding Product A or Product B.
• A keyword set surrounding all competitors.
• A keyword set surrounding business unit A or B.

c. (Optional) Expand the nodes in the People based advertising (optional) section to activate this type of targeting. With people-based advertising, you can target your campaign to accounts based on any of these attributes for the Lead or Contact in the accounts:

• Selected Known Contacts (you create a list of people in accounts based on their identity in an integrated CRM or MAS solution)
• Job level
• Job function
• Persona (combination of matched job level and job function)

See Enable Ad Targeting to Known Contacts and Enable Ad Targeting by Job or Persona Attributes to learn more about how to enable these features.

After you select an account list and a keyword set, the Campaign Builder wizard automatically assesses whether the current campaign configuration has sufficient budget, reach, and run time. See the Campaign checker messages on the right side of the window. If you don’t see a checkmark watermark, the Campaign checker displays recommendations and links to fix the campaign. If the Campaign checker displays a message like the one below, you’re in good shape to proceed with picking creatives for the campaign

Tips:

• If you want to view the full reach report, click the Download link at the bottom of the Campaign forecasting message. 
• Once you publish a campaign, you can't go back and change the account list.

d. Click Continue.

5. Select Creatives and Publish Campaign

The following information is a streamlined set of substeps for completing Step 5 of the Campaign Builder. See Select Creatives and Launch the Ad Campaign if you need further guidance.

a. Decide if you need to upload new creatives, use an Ad Group, or use ungrouped creatives for your campaign. See The Creative Library for how to work with Ad Groups and ungrouped creatives.

b. Click the checkboxes by the Ad Group or ungrouped creatives that you want to run in the campaign.

c. (Optional): For a selected Ad Group or creative, choose a setting in the Targeting type drop-down menu:

• All (default setting): The creative is leveraged to proactively target the accounts of the campaign and and then later to retarget them. (If the accounts come to the website, Demandbase retargets them.)
• Standard: The creative is displayed and proactively targeted to accounts that haven't yet visited your website.
• User retargeting: If you have different creatives for retargeting, select this option next to each creative. The creatives alternate with each ad impression to the user, rotating evenly among the images that are set to All and User retargeting.

d. Click the Publish button. Demandbase automatically assesses all of the inputted information. If the Campaign Builder recognizes any concerns, a Heads up! pop-up appears giving you recommendations.

e. Review the One last check before you launch window, which summarizes everything entered in steps 1 through 5 of the Campaign Builder. If everything looks correct, you can select the Publish button to officially schedule the campaign to launch on the first date of the campaign. An email confirming publication and summarizing the campaign configuration settings is sent to your inbox.

Caution: Once you publish a campaign, you can't go back and change the account list. You're also responsible for all campaign spend associated with self-serve advertising campaigns. If you’re not fully committed to launching this campaign, hold off on publishing the campaign.

Outcome

After you publish a campaign, there are two ways to know if a campaign is live:

• Email: Shortly after a campaign has been launched, an email is sent to the campaign creator. 
• Advertising reporting: When you review a campaign in Demandbase, there is a green dot next to the campaign name. A grey dot means that the campaign is inactive. 

You and anyone else who you added as a watcher starts receiving Campaign Insight emails after the campaign has been live for one week.