This guide is for Premium and Enterprise accounts. Core, Pro, and Pro+ come with one default campaign and one pipeline, so there's nothing to build. On those plans, follow Set Up Your Pipeline and Activities instead.

On Premium, your account starts with a default campaign too. For your first offer, use it and adjust its stages and activities in Settings. Build a new campaign when you add a second offer.

In this guide

A campaign is how Ellipsend follows a contact from their first message to a sale, and how it credits that sale to the post, story, or ad they came from. Without a campaign, nothing is tracked and your team has no stages to sort the inbox by.

A campaign is built from three parts.

Each campaign has one pipeline. A contact can be in more than one campaign at a time, with their own stage in each.

Premium and Enterprise run as many campaigns as you want. The limits for each plan are in Plans and Limits.

Five minutes of planning saves a rebuild later. Write down the steps a contact takes from first message to sale, then decide which of those steps you want to count. Set Up Your Pipeline and Activities explains stages and activities, and has the pipeline and activities we recommend for a business that sells on a call.

Build it so contacts move forward. A pipeline works best when a contact only ever moves toward Won or Lost and doesn't bounce back to an earlier stage.

Click Campaigns in the sidebar, then the purple + next to the Campaigns heading. The Campaign Wizard opens with seven steps across the top.

Give the campaign a Name your team will recognize at a glance and a Goal that says what success looks like, like "Qualify contacts and guide them to book a call." Start is the date the campaign begins. Click Continue.

Choose Create New and name the pipeline after its goal, or Choose Existing to reuse one you already have.

A pipeline can be shared by more than one campaign. If you choose an existing one and then change its stages, every campaign that uses it changes too.

Type a name into Add a Stage, pick Active, Won, or Lost from the dropdown, and click the purple + or press Enter. Start with New Lead, then add the rest in order. If you chose an existing pipeline and its stages are ready, skip this step.

Type a name into Add an Activity Type and click the purple + or press Enter. A window opens where you add the fields your team fills in when the activity is logged, like a call date or a note. Reuse activities you already have wherever you can, so the same result is counted the same way everywhere. Changing an existing activity changes it everywhere it's used.

Any activity that brings in money needs two Money fields, one with Received on for cash collected and one with Expected on for the total. Money on a Purchase explains both.

Click Link Activities on a stage and choose the activities that belong to it.

Once an activity is mapped, moving a contact into that stage in the inbox logs the activity. An activity can be mapped to one stage only. A stage can hold more than one activity, and some stages don't need any. Map Each Activity to Its Stage explains why it matters.

Build a new automation here, or edit one you already have so it brings contacts into this campaign. Automations are how most contacts enter a campaign. Automation Best Practices has the recipe we recommend, and Automations covers the builder.

Every automation needs its Set Campaign Stage action ahead of any message with a link. That's what puts the contact in this campaign and lets the link be tracked.

Under Set your Campaign Goal, choose the Goal Stage. It's the stage that counts as reaching the campaign's goal, usually your Won stage.

Then click Save and choose Save as Active if the campaign is ready, or Save as Draft if it still needs work. A campaign has to be Active or Paused to show up in the automation builder and the inbox.

Your campaign shows as a card on the Campaigns page. The three dots on the card let you Edit, Pause, or Delete it.

To change stages, activities, or mapping later without the wizard, go to Settings → Campaigns. The Activities and Pipelines sections of the Settings guide cover every option.

The Pipelines page in the sidebar shows the contacts in a campaign as columns, one for each stage.

When you first connect your accounts, the conversations that get pulled in are placed in New Lead so they can be tracked from there on.

Reports count activities, and a stage is only where a contact is right now. If a contact was moved into a stage without its activity being logged, they're in the stage but not in the report. This happens when the activity isn't mapped to the stage, or when an automation made the move. See Stages and Activities Are What the Reports Count.

The campaign probably isn't active. Contacts stay in a campaign that's no longer active, but their stage is locked.

You've reached the limit for your plan. See Plans and Limits.

No. One campaign covers every post, story, and ad that feeds the same offer. A new campaign makes sense when you launch a different offer, like a monthly webinar next to your evergreen book-a-call funnel.