Campaign Launch

It includes all activities involved in launching the campaign which is also known as campaign go-live:

1. Campaign go-live activities: Once all the elements of campaign set-up have been put in place and necessary approvals have been obtained, campaigns which have been queued with the vendors (campaign management tools) go live on specified dates and times. The go-live process could vary for each specific campaign and the channel on which it is being run. In cases of smaller campaigns (managed in-house by client), an automatic trigger on a campaign management tool can make the campaign go live across multiple sites and networks, while for larger and more complex campaigns, a series of pre-live activities are run by larger teams across multiple channels to ensure that the campaign is live and running.Examples indicative of campaigns going live on different channels include:
   • Search campaign go-live: Upon searching particular keyword terms (in specific geographies and for specific target audience), visitors would start witnessing the brand’s search advertisement and message on the top or right side of search results listings.
   • Display campaign go-live: For negotiated sites, visitors would start seeing display advertisements on specific inventories in which brands have invested.
2. Campaign trafficking: It is a terminology often used to describe the process of going live (more common for display campaigns). It includes all activities which a trafficker (team member who runs the campaign) needs to execute from the time the campaign goes live till the time it is over. Traffickers also need to share overall campaign performance reports with the marketer and manage analytics throughout the whole period of campaign run (which includes monitoring and fine-tuning stages as well).

Campaign Monitoring to Reconciliation

Once the campaign has been initiated in the chosen platform/tool, from the first hour itself (depending upon type and automation), it needs to be continuously monitored to make sure that all the campaign elements are in place and are run to achieve the set objectives in a controlled manner. All the activities towards ensuring this effective and efficient running of the campaign include what we call as the campaign monitoring stage.

In this section, we have divided campaign monitoring into three sub-stages to help segregate and understand the concept better. These include campaign monitor, fine-tune, and reconciliation (which can also be termed as post-campaign activities).