Campaigns and ads
A campaign is the budget and schedule; an ad is one approved image and its page. Your assistant can change which ads run, pause and resume, and copy a campaign to test something new.
On this page
The pieces
- Campaign
- The budget and schedule: a daily budget, an optional lifetime budget, optional start and end times, the targeting it uses, and the ads it may show.
- Ad
- One approved image with the page it sends people to. Inside the API and the tools it is called a creative.
- Rotation
- The set of approved ads a campaign may show. You change the set without rebuilding the campaign.
- Targeting
- A saved, reusable set of rules: countries, states or provinces, audience segments, and inventory rules. A campaign points at one.
Launching
Activating a campaign starts bidding and spends the prepaid balance, up to its daily budget. It is refused, with a list of what is missing, until the ad is approved, its landing page is approved, and the account has balance. Review explains the two approvals.
A future start time is honoured: the campaign is set up at once and serves from that time.
Rotating ads
On a live campaign you can:
- Add another approved ad as a variant.
- Replace the main ad with another approved one.
- Pause or resume one ad while another keeps running.
- Remove an ad that is not the last active one.
The tools are list_campaign_creatives, add_campaign_creative, replace_campaign_creative, pause_campaign_creative, resume_campaign_creative, and remove_campaign_creative. Every ad you add or resume still needs its approvals and the account still needs balance.
Pausing and resuming
Pausing stops the campaign and its ads at the exchange right away, though spend from the last couple of hours can still appear because reporting runs about two hours behind. Resuming runs the same checks as launching.
A campaign that spent its daily budget pauses itself (auto_paused_daily_cap) and resumes after midnight UTC when there is balance. That is a healthy wait, not a broken campaign. Pause and resume a campaign has more.
Copy instead of edit
There is no way to change a running campaign's budget or targeting in place. copy_campaign makes a changed copy instead, with the same ads or replacements and, if you pass one, a different targeting set. That keeps the original as a control, so a new page, audience, or promise is a clean test rather than an edit mixed into an old one.