Sprout Campaigns

You can project manage your social campaigns in Sprout by creating, planning and managing strategic projects across your social platforms. From notes to scheduling to assets and briefs, everything you need to run a successful campaign is visible for your team in Sprout.

Note: This feature is only available on Professional and Advanced Plans.

This article contains the following sections:

• Building a new campaign
• Creating a campaign using tags
• Applying campaigns
• Viewing campaigns
• Enhancing campaign reporting
• Tracking links in your campaigns
• Campaign Planner FAQs

Building a new campaign

When you’re ready, you can build a social campaign from start to finish using the Campaign Planner. To build your campaign:

1. Navigate to Publishing > Campaigns > Active Campaigns.
2. Click Create Campaign in the upper right corner. The Create new campaign popup opens.
3. Provide the general information for your campaign: 
• Enter a Campaign Name.
• Select a Display color. This way, you can easily identify which posts are related to your campaign in the Publishing Calendar.
• Select a start and end date for your campaign.
• Choose the Groups where you want the campaign to be visible.
  
  
4. Copy and paste or type out your Campaign Brief, which provides strategic or creative direction for your team. The brief is visible in Compose when new posts are created.
5. Click Save.

Creating a campaign using tags

If you’re already using Tags to track campaign performance, you can convert your existing tags into a Campaign and incorporate your Campaign Brief as well as tie in assets and get real-time reporting. To convert an existing tag into a campaign:

1. Navigate to Publishing > Campaigns > Active Campaigns.
2. Click Create Campaign in the upper right corner.
3. Click Convert an existing tag to a campaign. The convert popup appears.
4. Select the tag you want to convert from the dropdown. 
5. Click Convert to Campaign. 

Your tag is now a Campaign and you see a snapshot into all of the collateral and performance of your converted tag so far. 

Applying campaigns

You can apply campaigns to your outgoing posts and assets to ensure maximum visibility in your Publishing Calendar, Asset Library and Reports. By applying campaigns to posts and assets, you ensure that everything is related throughout the Sprout app and that your reporting is as accurate as possible. 

Tags vs. campaigns vs. labels

Before you start applying campaign tags to your content it's important to understand the difference in tag types.

• Sprout Tags include Labels and Campaigns. 
  • Labels - universal tags to organize, filter and report on your content. Tag posts and Inbox messages for more in-depth content analysis.
  • Campaigns - a specialized tag to monitor and report on your social marketing campaigns. Tag posts, Calendar notes, Inbox messages and track activity in the Campaign Planner.

Applying campaigns to posts

After you create a campaign, you’re ready to apply the campaign to your individual posts. It’s important to attach a campaign tag to each post that’s a part of the campaign for accurate reporting. 

The Groups you selected when building the campaign have access to apply a campaign tag to a post. This means your team can collaborate and create posts that relate to the campaign, while using your established workflows like Drafts and Approvals.

To apply a campaign tag to a post:

1. Open Compose.
2. Select the profiles you want to post to.
3. Create your post.
4. Select a campaign from the Sprout Tags dropdown. You can also create a campaign directly from the dropdown as well. When you select a campaign, the Campaign Brief appears as a new tab in the preview window. This way, you can ensure your posts are relevant to the strategy used for the campaign.
5. Add scheduled post times.
6. Click Schedule or Post.

Any posts created in Compose that have a campaign tag attached to them appear with the color coding in the Publishing Calendar and start providing metrics in the Campaigns tab and Tag Performance Report.

Applying campaigns to assets

After you create a campaign, you can apply campaign tags to your media assets in the Asset Library so your team knows exactly what assets they should be using.

To apply a campaign tag to an existing asset:

1. Navigate to Publishing > Asset Library.
2. Click the asset you want to apply a campaign to.
3. Select the appropriate campaign from the Campaign dropdown in the Edit Asset view.
4. Click Save Asset. The campaign is now associated with the asset.

To apply a campaign to a new asset:

1. Navigate to Publishing > Asset Library.
2. Click Add New.
3. Select the type of asset you want to add.
4. Select the appropriate campaign from the Campaign dropdown in the Add Asset view.
5. Click Add Asset. The campaign is now associated with the new asset.

You can view all the assets associated with a campaign using the Campaign Filters in the Asset Library. To learn more, see Asset Library later in this article. 

Viewing campaigns

After you create a campaign and apply the campaign to your posts, you can start diving into performance updates from the Campaign tab.

Active and Archived tabs

You can get a snapshot into all of the collateral and performance of both active and archived campaigns. 

Click Active Campaigns to see a high-level overview of all your active campaigns, including metrics like:

• Scheduled/Queued Posts
• Post needing approval
• Sent Posts
• Overall Impressions

You can also take actions like:

• Editing
• Duplicating
• Archiving
• Deleting

Click See campaign planner to view publishing status and performance. 

Overview tab

In the Publishing Status section of the Overview tab, at a high-level you can view the volume of:

• Scheduled or Queued posts
• Posts needing approval
• Drafts of posts
• Sent posts

You also see the 7-day outlook and the next five posts scheduled to appear in your Campaign. 

 

 

You can also view any Calendar notes about particular days. 

In the Campaign Performance section of the Overview tab, at a high level you can see the:

• Rate of impressions
• Rate of engagements
• Engagement rate per Impression
• Post Clicks

You also get a breakdown of the top performing posts for the campaign, including their total engagements, reactions, comments and shares. You can also view the Post Performance Report directly from the Top Performing Posts to uncover more data insights. 

Use your Archived Campaigns to evaluate performance and publishing history to inform future strategic decisions about your campaigns. You can take the following actions on Archived Campaigns:

• Edit
• Duplicate
• Unarchive
• Delete

Plan tab

The Plan tab houses all of your Calendar Notes and your Campaign brief for quick reference. Create new Calendar Notes to help keep track of important dates and milestones for your campaign and update your brief as needed.

Publishing Calendar

You can quickly view your posts at a glance in the Publishing Calendar.

From the Filter Menu, select the Profiles you want to view and then from the Tags dropdown, select the campaigns you want to view posts for. Your Publishing Calendar updates to only show posts for your selected campaigns.

A filter set for both Active and Archived Campaigns is available in the filter menu. Select the campaigns you want view posts for from the filter menu and your calendar view updates to show only the posts belonging to the selected campaign. 

Asset Library

You can view which assets are associated with each of your active and archived campaigns in the Asset Library.

Navigate to the Asset Library and select the active and/or archived campaigns you want to view assets for from the filter menu. 

Enhancing campaign reporting

While the Campaign Planner is a great resource to evaluate publishing behavior and high-level performance, pairing internal tags with your campaigns provides even richer analysis, especially when using the Tag Performance and Post Performance Report. 

You can also apply Campaign Tags to incoming messages in the Smart Inbox and include Campaign Tags in your Inbox Rules. This way you get the full picture of the impact of your campaign from an outgoing post and incoming message standpoint. 

Sprout recommends attaching campaigns to your posts, but also applying internal tags to uncover rich data around performance, trends and even to evaluate how your campaigns stack up against your competitors. 

To learn more about applying Tags and use cases, see this help article. 

Campaign reporting with the Tag Performance Report

The Tag Performance Report provides easy-to-follow visualizations to help your team and stakeholders quickly recognize where to invest in your social strategy based on your campaign performance. Campaign tags are a great way to track performance of your campaigns and content types to gather insight on how your audience receives your content.

Use the Filter Menu across the top of the report to select the Profiles and Campaign tags you want to view. You can also hone in on particular message types. 

Adjust your date range using the date picker at the top to focus on the length of a specific campaign.

The report provides in-depth analysis on the overall performance of your campaign, as well as the individual posts that drove that performance. The report includes the following features:

• An Overview tab that provides volume summaries, breakdowns by inbound and outbound content and top tagged posts
• A Trends tab that provides volume breakdowns of your inbound and outbound content, along with impressions, engagements and video views
• A Tags tab that shows all aggregate tag metrics from a selected publishing period
  

 

Tracking your campaign links

You can use Campaign tag link tracking by using custom values using dynamic syntax if you're on the Professional or Advanced Plan. This way, you can monitor the web traffic you receive based on your Campaign. To add URL tracking to the links in your campaign specific posts:

1. Navigate to Account and settings > Settings > Publishing Settings.
2. Click Add URL in the URL Tracking box.
   
3. Enter the URL you want to track.
4. Enter {CAMPAIGN_TAGS} as the Custom Value for the Campaign Name parameter to track only your Campaign tags.
5. Click Save.

Campaign Planner FAQs

How many active campaigns can I have?

As many as you want, but Sprout recommends archiving a campaign when you’re done reporting on it. This way it won’t take up space in the Tag filter drop down, so you can easily find and select current campaigns. 

Why am I not seeing campaigns anywhere on my account?

You need to create a campaign before you see Campaigns as an option on the Tag filter. 

Can I filter the Post Performance Report by campaign on the Professional plan? 

Tag filtering in the Post Performance Report is only available for the Advanced plan. 

I forgot to add a post to my campaign and it already was published! What can I do?

Navigate to the Calendar tab in publishing and find your published post. Click the tag icon to retroactively add the post to your campaign.

 

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