Creating your first campaign

Before you start

• A funded wallet — minimum spend to launch is $10
• Ad creative — a headline, body text, and an image, or a YouTube video URL instead of an image
• A pricing model and bid — CPC from $0.40/click, CPA from $3.50/action, or CPM from $1.50 per 1,000 impressions
• Your target countries, cities, and device types

The 5-step campaign wizard

Go to Campaigns in your dashboard and click Create Campaign. The builder is a 5-step wizard — Objective, Audience, Budget, Bid, then Creative — and autosaves a draft as you go, so closing the tab partway through doesn't lose your work; reopening the builder offers to restore the last saved draft.

Step 1: objective

• Campaign name — internal only, never shown to viewers
• Goal — Brand awareness, Website traffic, or Conversions
• Category — optional, improves matching against publisher site categories and creator content niches

Step 2: audience

Devices first, then markets, then an optional city drill-down inside each market you picked — plus keywords, ad slot types, dayparting, and frequency capping under Advanced targeting. See Targeting — Country, City and Device for the full breakdown of this step.

Step 3: budget

• Pricing model — CPC, CPA, or CPM. This is the choice that decides what you're billed for, and it locks permanently once the campaign has spend
• Total budget — a slider or exact figure, with a live delivery estimate (est. clicks, conversions, or impressions) that updates as you adjust it
• Optional daily spend cap — separate from total budget; the campaign pauses for the day once the daily cap is hit and resumes the next day
• Optional start and end date, if you want the campaign to run for a fixed window

Step 4: bid

• Your bid for the model you chose — the builder shows the suggested bid for your category and the enforced floor, and a bid below the floor is rejected
• CPC — the maximum you pay per verified click; a higher bid competes for better placement in your category
• CPA only — an action type (Install, Signup, Purchase, Lead, or Custom), a conversion value for ROAS tracking, and a postback URL

Step 5: creative

• Headline and body text
• An image upload, or a YouTube video URL used in place of an image
• CTA button label
• Destination type — a website URL, a WhatsApp link with a pre-filled message, or a tap-to-call phone number
• Optional price and compare-at price (shown struck-through) — filling these in also qualifies the campaign for a free extra placement on the public Adscod Offers page
• Optional shopping feed URL — pulls in a product carousel from your own product feed (e.g. a Shopify /products.json export), refreshable on demand from the campaign's settings after launch

Reporting CPA conversions

There are two ways a CPA campaign's postback works, and they're opposite directions. The postback URL you set in Step 4 is a URL on your own server — Adscod calls it with a click_id when a conversion is verified. Separately, your server can instead report a conversion directly to Adscod by calling POST /api/v1/conversion with your API key and the adscod_click token captured from the click URL — the exact request format is in the campaign's own "Postback" guide (··· menu on any CPA campaign), with copy-paste Node and cURL examples.

Saving and publishing

A new campaign saves as a Draft — it does not go live on its own. From the Campaigns list, a Draft's primary action is Publish; nothing serves to viewers until you click it. Every campaign also passes an automated content-moderation check — a campaign flagged by that check shows "Blocked by content review" and needs its creative edited before it can publish. Once published, Argus automatically matches the campaign to creator bio pages and publisher placements that fit your targeting — there's no separate creator-application step to wait on beyond that.

Funding a campaign

Wallet balance and campaign budget are tracked separately. Funding your wallet doesn't automatically fund a campaign — each campaign has its own deposited amount, topped up via the Fund button on that campaign in your Campaigns list, drawn from your wallet balance. A campaign can't serve past what's been deposited into it specifically.

Managing a live campaign

• Edit name, headline, body, CTA label, destination URL, budget, bid, or daily cap at any time from the Campaigns list
• The pricing model (CPC, CPA, or CPM) locks permanently once a campaign has any spend — plan your model before you launch
• Pause or resume the campaign from the dashboard
• Campaigns auto-pause if their deposited balance runs out — fund the campaign to resume
• Delete (archive) is only available for Draft, Paused, or Completed campaigns — pause an Active campaign first if you want to delete it