Overview

Campaigns are created in a vendors name to promote products or banners. If the self-service option is enabled, vendors can create such campaigns themselves.

The Topsort platform supports three kinds of campaigns, we briefly discuss them below.

Listing campaigns

A campaign that promotes products is called a “listing” campaign, as it lists products.

Only products that belong to a vendor can be included in that vendor’s campaigns.

Banner campaigns

Banner campaigns are campaigns that promote banners. Banners consist of one or more images.

If the banner-approval platform option is enabled, each banner needs to be explicitly approved by the marketplace owner. This is to prevent banners from breaking the design of a marketplace.

Brand campaigns

Brand campaigns are campaigns that promote brands.

They are a hybrid of listing and banner campaigns. Brand campaigns combine a single product with a logo and creative images.

Important properties

All three kinds of campaigns share the same basic structure:

• A list of bids for specific targets.
• A budget.

While a campaign is active and has available budget, bids will be placed during relevant auctions.

Many options influence the exact way this works. Below you can find the most important campaign properties, but more can be found in the API reference.

Campaign type

The campaign type determines the way bids are priced. There are two types available:

• Autobidding: Uses the Topsort BIDLESS™️ strategy to automatically set bid prices.
• Manual: Allows for manual specification of prices per bid via the UI or API.

Some changes can not be reverted

Once a campaign has been created you can change the campaign type from autobidding to manual, but not from manual to autobidding.

If you want to change to a campaign from manual to autobidding, you will have to recreate that campaign.

Bids

A bid describes the maximum amount of money that will be spent to promote a product or banner in an auction.

Depending on the campaign type, this amount is either set automatically or manually.

Whether a bid will be considered in an auction depends on the bid’s triggers. These triggers can modified via the UI or API.

Budget

Campaigns have a budget. Every time a bid wins an auction it consumes part of the budget.

If the budget of a campaign gets exhausted that campaign’s bids will no longer take part in auctions.

Target ROAS

The target ROAS (Return on advertising spend) of the campaign. Used in autobidding campaigns, where the algorithm will aim to hit the target ROAS.

When an autobidding campaign is created via the UI, a bidding strategy must be chosen which determines how the campaigns budget will be spend in order to reach the target ROAS.

Balance

For a campaign to run and be executed as planned, the vendor responsible for the campaign must have positive balance. This requirement ensures there are sufficient funds available to cover the ongoing costs associated with running the campaign. If the vendor’s balance is insufficient, the campaign will be paused or stopped until the balance is replenished. The balance can be adjusted using the billing-service API or within the Auction Manager.