Basics
Campaign
A campaign is one organised advertising effort on a platform, with its own budget, targeting, bids and set of ads.
A campaign is the basic container for buying ads. On Meta, Taboola, Google and every other traffic source, an advertiser creates a campaign, gives it a daily budget, picks who should see it (Geo-targeting, audiences, devices), chooses a bid strategy and attaches one or more ads, each called a creative.
In search arbitrage a campaign usually maps to one topic and one landing page. A buyer might run "roof repair, United States, mobile" as a single campaign pointing to a single article. Keeping them separate makes the arithmetic clear: this campaign spent $300 and earned $360.
Matching spend to revenue requires a label that travels with each visitor. Buyers pass a campaign identifier through the page into the feed's Channel ID or a Sub ID, and a tracker joins the two reports together.
Campaigns have a life cycle. New ones go through a learning phase while the platform works out who responds. Winners are scaled. Most are switched off within days because the spread never appears, which is a normal part of testing and not a sign of failure.
An example
For example, a buyer creates a campaign called "Roofing, US, mobile" with a $100 daily budget and three ads. After two days it has spent $200 and the matching feed channel shows $236, so it stays on.
Related terms
Creative
A creative is the actual advertisement a person sees: its image or video, headline, text and button.
Media buyer
A media buyer is the person who purchases advertising to bring visitors to a page, deciding what to bid, whom to target and which ads to run.
Bid strategy
A bid strategy is the rule an advertiser gives an ad platform for how much to pay in each auction, from a fixed manual bid to fully automated goals.
Learning phase
The learning phase is the early period after launching or significantly editing a campaign, when the platform's algorithm is still testing who to show the ad to.
Channel ID (custom channel)
A channel ID is a label attached to search ad requests so that revenue and clicks can be reported separately for each page, campaign or traffic source.
Tracker (campaign tracking platform)
A tracker is software that records every click an arbitrageur buys, matches it to the revenue it later earns, and reports profit by campaign, ad and keyword.