If you set up research for a client, you need the reports to reflect that client’s buyers and buying requirements. A campaign defines the market OppAlerts researches. You write it once, and every report afterward selects results against that definition rather than being configured separately.
What a campaign has to contain
A campaign will not lock until it holds all of this:
- A business description of 10 to 50 words.
- Three buyer personas besides the neutral one, each described in 10 to 50 words. The neutral persona is not counted and its description is not measured.
- At least one owned brand with one website.
The page lists whatever is missing until the requirements are met. This is a deliberate barrier: a campaign without a described market would produce research about nothing in particular, and every report downstream would inherit that.
Write descriptions that change the research
Both descriptions are used in the research, so they are doing work rather than filling fields.
A description that would fit a thousand companies produces research about a thousand companies. Compare these two.
We provide innovative marketing solutions for growing businesses.
We sell scheduling software to independent restaurants with 10 to 60 staff, replacing paper rotas and group chats. Sold direct, month to month, no contract.
The second names a market that can be researched. Every clause narrows it.
The same applies to personas, which are written in the first person and used as the perspective for answers. A useful persona names the constraints that would change a recommendation, not a job title:
I run marketing alone at a 40-person accounting firm. I have no developer, our website is on WordPress, and I have to justify any subscription over $200 a month to a partner who does not follow marketing.
Every clause there is a condition a research question can respond to. Spend the three persona slots on buyers you would give different advice to; if two would get the same recommendation for the same reasons, they are one persona.
Locking is permanent
Finalizing starts the campaign research. It also fixes the campaign label, segment and description, and every persona label and description, permanently. A campaign that needs different core text is copied rather than edited.
Organizations stay editable, so brands and competitors can be added or changed afterward. A campaign holds up to 100 organizations in total; there is no separate competitor limit.
Write the descriptions as though they were permanent, because they are. This is the one part of setup worth an hour rather than five minutes.
How reports use the campaign definition
Organization names and hosts determine how every report identifies your brand and your competitors. Taxonomy presets supply the Content Optimizer's default categories. Opportunity searches define which pages the dashboard counts each day.
Because labels are applied when a report is drawn rather than when data was collected, adding a competitor later changes how existing history reads without any new collection. You can add a competitor you overlooked and immediately see where they have been appearing.
Tracking is account-level, not campaign-level
Tracked prompts and keywords are account objects. They are not owned by a campaign, and a single item can be associated with several campaigns or none.
Two consequences follow. The weekly tracking allowance pools across all your campaigns, so a demanding client can be given more collection while a quiet one uses less. And where two campaigns cover the same market, one tracked prompt can serve both while being collected once.
Archiving a campaign frees its active slot immediately and retains its history. To prevent rapid slot cycling, no more than three campaigns can be activated in any seven-day period.
Assign items to a campaign so its reports apply the correct brand and competitor labels.
The limit worth knowing
The quality of everything downstream is set by the description you write. A vague campaign does not fail visibly; it returns plausible results about a market slightly different from yours, across every report at once.
If the research comes back feeling generic, the description is the first thing to re-read, and the only fix is a new campaign.
Before finalizing the campaign, check the business and buyer descriptions against what the client has told you. The reports can then draw on a definition you have confirmed.
See what to prepare before writing one, the campaign dashboard, or researching a new client market.