Campaign management

A campaign is a time-bound piece of marketing activity that you plan in Contensis and then measure. You give it a name, a date range, and a goal, and you tell Contensis which forms and pages you want to watch. As people arrive and respond, Contensis counts what happens against the targets you set.

Campaigns need a campaign licence. If your subscription does not include one, you will not see campaigns in the sidebar. Campaigns belong to a project, so each project has its own set of them.

Four things work together, and it helps to see them in order.

1. The campaign holds the plan: a name, a date range, a primary goal, and an owner.
2. The UTM tracking ID is the campaign's label. Contensis creates one for you from the campaign name, and it is the value that connects incoming traffic back to the campaign.
3. Tracked items are the forms and pages you want to measure. Each one carries a target, and you can narrow it to a particular UTM source and medium if you only care about traffic from one channel.
4. Responses and visits are what actually arrives. Contensis matches them to your campaign and counts them against your targets.

Forms need one extra step. A form can only be added to a campaign if it has Capture form submission context switched on, because that setting is what stores the attribution data a campaign reads. New forms have it on already. Forms created before the setting existed do not, so you may need to switch it on before an older form appears in the list. See Capture form submission context.

Every campaign is in one of three states, and Contensis works it out from your dates rather than asking you to set it.

The state controls what you can change. You can edit a campaign's dates freely while it is upcoming. Once it becomes active the start date is fixed, and once it has ended both dates are fixed. Tracking cannot be added, edited, or removed on a campaign that has ended. It is worth getting the date range right before a campaign goes live, because afterwards your options narrow.

This is the one thing about campaigns that surprises people, so it is worth saying plainly.

The numbers on a campaign are worked out from the form responses that exist right now. They are not a snapshot taken while the campaign ran. If responses are deleted, whether by someone deleting them by hand or by a form's automatic deletion schedule, the campaign's figures go down to match. That happens on campaigns that ended months ago just as readily as on live ones.

So a campaign that showed 400 responses in March can show 380 in June. Nothing has gone wrong, and there is no way to recover the earlier figure from Contensis. If you need a permanent record of how a campaign performed, take it at the time, either by exporting the responses or by recording the figures elsewhere.

• Create a campaign
• View and filter campaigns
• The campaign detail page
• Update a campaign
• Delete a campaign
• Track a form in a campaign
• Track a page in a campaign (coming soon)
• Choose UTM sources and mediums
• Edit a tracked item
• Remove a tracked item
• View form responses for a campaign
• Understanding campaign performance
• View tracking performance details
• Campaign permissions