Campaigns

1. Open your business and choose New campaign.
2. Goal & budget: name it, pick one objective, set a daily budget and dates.
3. Your plan: review who your ads reach and where they run, and answer the category question. Open Customize only if you want to change something.
4. Your ads: optional. Preview a few free ads, or skip and launch. Ads keep building in the background. Switch off any you don't want with Don't serve.
5. Launch: review the summary and launch. Day one is charged from your wallet.

You can Save & exit at any step and resume the draft later.

1. Open the campaign page. The Channels & delivery card shows each channel moving from Preparing, to Starting, to Live.
2. Within a day, the Summary tab shows spend and early results, and your wallet shows the daily charge.

If no channel goes live at all, the full day's charge is refunded to your wallet automatically.

Every campaign has one objective. Pick it while the campaign is a draft; after launch it stays locked (start a new campaign to change it). The objective shapes creative, landing, bidding, and the headline result you see:

• Get known (Awareness): put your name in front of as many of the right people as possible.
• Get visitors (Traffic): send interested people to your website.
• Get leads (Leads): collect sign-ups and inquiries you can follow up on.
• Get calls (Calls): make the phone ring from people ready to talk.
• Get foot traffic (Foot traffic): bring people to your location. Success is Visit intent from Get directions clicks, not website Ad visits.
• Get bookings (Bookings): fill appointment and reservation slots.
• Get sales (Sales): drive purchases and revenue directly.

• Daily budget: $30 to $10,000 per day, whole dollars.
• Flight length: up to 365 days, or open-ended until you end it.
• Mobile web and TV, plus the channels you select (Google, Meta, and more as available). Each channel moves from Preparing, to Starting, to Live. The daily budget is split for you across journey stages (personas across channels, Audience boost, and win-back when active). Autopilot rebalances those stages daily and runs a larger weekly mix pass from longer evidence.

The daily budget is the whole media bill: attribution included. Campaign ads for businesses are included. Extra ads and agency generation use published unit prices.

Campaigns default to Autopilot. Switch to Guided when you want Autopilot to suggest optimizations for your approval instead of applying them (this is not the same as org ad approval Manual, which only gates new creatives). Google Search keywords and ad text stay visible; edit them when Search is Guided. Unlocking ads to pause or resume them does not change Guided vs Autopilot.

Choose where ads run during Campaign setup: entire US, states, a radius around your business locations, zip codes, metro areas (DMA), or cities. Autopilot recommends a starting area from your service area and locations. The same targeting applies across the channels in the campaign.

Each campaign chooses which personas to target for that flight. Every persona carries a Reach plan: Autopilot's suggested interest and demographic buy plan. On a draft, Audience targeting for this campaign sums that plan up in one line. Expand it to see who will see your ads, persona by persona, with readable segment labels, Your pick only on guides you always included, and tap-for-detail on path / reach / fee. You can also Add buyer type from the campaign: that creates a business persona and attaches it here in one step. At launch, the campaign copies each buyer type's reach into its own targeting; Autopilot then optimizes that flight. Soft details on the Ad style guide ad writing; they are not the live channel targeting.

After launch, the campaign page Ads and Audience tabs show the campaign's ads and who is seeing them. Audience starts with the buyers who are winning budget; Audiences (how each group is doing) and Where it runs each have their own section, and you can add a customer list from the Buyers view. The business Overview lists campaigns and overall performance for the site. Open Buyers or Profile when you want to edit who you sell to or the site read-back.

1. Draft: open Set up your campaign and walk through four short steps: Goal & budget (name, objective, budget, dates), Your plan (who your ads reach, where they run, and a required category question that changes which channels can run, with Customize doors for buyers, areas, and channels), Your ads (optional: a preview of a few ads, with optional feedback, or Create everything now for a quoted full set; you can skip this and launch), and Launch. Save & exit keeps the draft so you can resume anytime. Use the step list to reopen any completed step, or Change on Review & launch to edit one section and return to the summary. For businesses, campaign ads are included by default; only the optional upfront full set charges the wallet (starter credit applies). Agencies pay published unit prices for generations we run, including the first sample. Media spend is not charged until launch.
2. Launch: freezes targeting, charges the first day from your wallet, and distributes ads to the channels. If the wallet can't cover day one, the launch is rejected.
3. Live: the daily budget is charged once per active day, in US Eastern time. Interest and demographic Customize guides you edit later apply to future launches only. Autopilot still manages live targeting: it retires weak interest segments, promotes and refills reserves, and can swap demographic filters when delivery stalls (see Profile reach). On each channel, status moves from Preparing (gathering early results), to Starting (setting up or beginning to serve), to Live (steady serving). The campaign Channels & delivery card lists Mobile web and TV as separate rows (plus Google, Meta, and Reddit when selected). When Google is selected, YouTube, Display & Discover, and Search appear nested under Google as delivery status (not separate channels to buy). When Meta is selected, Facebook and Instagram appear nested under Meta as delivery status (not separate channels to buy). Before launch, selected channels show Starts at launch. Platform performance shows the same selected follow channels as status placeholders until they have delivery to report (Not started yet on a live campaign; Starts at launch on a draft), never as fake zero Ad views. TV shows Pending activation until video delivery is actually live: a ready TV spot alone is not enough while the campaign is still concentrating spend on mobile web. Mobile web shows Needs attention (not Preparing) when it is fully paused on a live campaign. After launch, a selected channel that is still finishing setup shows Starting, not Preparing.
4. Paused / ended: stops all future daily charges immediately. Pausing keeps the campaign resumable; ending is final.
5. Archived / deleted: from the campaign page menu. A draft that never ran can be deleted permanently (ads already generated stay in your Ad Library). Anything that has run is a permanent record: archive it instead to hide it from your lists while keeping its ads, spend, and results. Archived campaigns cannot launch or resume until restored, and restoring is one click.

Your ads is optional. Launch starts Autopilot ads in the background if you skip it. If you open the step, businesses get a preview included with the campaign; agencies pay published unit prices for that sample. You can optionally pick a different person or tone for ads we make next. Create everything now quotes a full set and charges only when you accept. Or choose Upload your ads to attach finished creatives and fill only the formats you still need. Filling starts generation; launch waits until those picture and video ads are ready. Google Search copy on this step is headlines and descriptions, not a substitute for mobile, TV, or follow creatives. You do not have to wait for Autopilot sample renders before launch. Delivery and the first-day charge wait until image ads are ready. Switch off any ad you don't want with Don't serve. Google Search headlines and keywords are edited on Your ads, not on Launch. See Creating ads for formats and pricing.

The daily budget is editable at any time, whether draft, live, or paused. Today’s charge stands; the new amount applies from the next daily charge. There is no proration, and the change propagates to the channels for you.

You can rename a campaign at any time (before launch, while it’s live or paused, even after it has ended) using the pencil next to the title on the campaign page. The name is just a label: reports, history, and delivery follow the campaign itself, so renaming never affects serving or billing. The only moment a rename waits is the Campaign setup launch step itself.

Draft campaigns surface a measurement checklist: the site tag should have recorded a visit, and something should count as a conversion (Form conversions and/or a thank-you URL rule). Cost per conversion works from there. To unlock return on spend, set what a win is worth on Tracking. Until then Autopilot still optimizes for cost per conversion.

You can pause or end a campaign anytime. Pausing stops future daily charges; today's charge stands. If the wallet cannot cover a day, the campaign pauses automatically — top up and it starts back up on its own within the hour, or press Resume to restart it right away.

If interest audiences are missing so nothing can serve, the campaign pauses with a Rebuild reach action. Press it to replan audiences; ads turn back on automatically when rebuild finishes. You are not charged while paused.

On a live campaign, the Performance tab shows last-touch results (spend, conversions, CPA, ROAS) plus assisted conversions when another channel on the same campaign touched someone earlier. Use the period control (All time, Last 30 days, Last 7 days, Yesterday, or Today) to filter those results; days follow the US Eastern billing calendar and Last 7 / Last 30 include today. Assists are reporting-only and do not change wallet charges. When enough of the budget sits in a holdback, the Lift scorecard compares treated vs holdout outcomes. Autopilot may soft-credit recent assists when shifting journey-stage mix; that never restamps billed attribution. Full methodology: Assisted conversions and Lift.