Basics · also called ad campaign
Campaign
A campaign is an organised set of ads with a shared goal, budget, audience and time period, run across one or more channels and measured against defined KPIs.
A campaign is the container for an advertising effort. It has an objective (awareness, consideration, sales, app installs), a budget, flight dates, target audiences, one or more creatives, and KPIs that define success.
In buying platforms, campaigns are usually structured in layers. A Google Ads or Meta campaign contains ad groups or ad sets (each with its own targeting and bids), which contain the individual ads. In a DSP, campaigns contain line items or ad groups that set bids, frequency capping, pacing, deals and brand-safety settings.
Running a campaign well involves planning, trafficking (by ad operations), optimisation during the flight, and measurement afterwards through attribution, lift studies or marketing mix modeling. The "campaign" label also matters for billing and reporting, because impressions, spend and invalid-traffic refunds are tallied per campaign.
Think of it like this
A campaign is like a school fair: one event with a date, a budget, several stalls (ads), a target crowd and a clear idea of what counts as success.
An example
A Diwali campaign for an Indian jewellery brand: ₹2 crore budget, 4 weeks, video and display across CTV and mobile, goal of 10% lift in store visits.
Related terms
Creative
A creative is the actual ad content a person sees or hears, such as an image, video, audio spot, HTML5 animation or native text, delivered into an ad slot.
KPI
A KPI (key performance indicator) is the specific, measurable metric an advertiser or publisher chooses in advance to judge whether a campaign or business is succeeding.
Targeting
Targeting is choosing which people, contexts, places, devices or times should see an ad, so that the budget is spent on the audiences most likely to respond.
Pacing
Pacing is how evenly (or deliberately unevenly) a campaign spends its budget or delivers its impressions across its flight dates, so it neither runs out early nor under-delivers.
Insertion order (IO)
An insertion order (IO) is the signed contract between an advertiser or agency and a publisher or vendor, specifying what ads run, where, when, in what volume and at what price.