Advertisements in CampusESP allow you to easily run automated, targeted ads to different groups of parents and family members to drive specific actions throughout the year. Learn to navigate the Advertisements page, create a campaign, and run advertisements directly on the portal or within users' automated newsletters.

Understanding campaigns and advertisements

The Advertisements feature in CampusESP is made up of both campaigns and advertisements. Campaigns are the container for advertisements; at the campaign level you’ll choose a timeline, audience, and the link those users will be directed to. Advertisements are individual ads within a campaign; at the advertisement level you’ll define what users will see and where. A campaign can be made up of multiple advertisements, and you can run multiple campaigns at once.

Navigate to the Advertisements page

From the admin area, navigate to the Advertisements page by clicking into the Content area. Click Advertisements in the left sub-menu. You can also navigate directly to the Advertisements page by visiting https://[your-portal-url].campusesp.com/admin/advertisements.

The Advertisements page displays all active campaigns. You can see information about each campaign including the number of advertisements that make up the campaign, total impressions and clicks, and unique clicks.

Create a new campaign

From the Advertisements page, click the + Add New Campaign button in the upper-right corner to open the New Campaign page.

Enter your campaign details

On the New Campaign page, you’ll enter the details of your campaign, such as its name, date, and audience.

Here’s a breakdown of the information you’ll enter:

Field	Description	Required?
Campaign Name	Give your campaign a name that will help you and your team recognize it later. This name is internal only; no parent/family users will see it.	✅
Description	Describe the purpose of this campaign. This will not be displayed to users.	❌
Target URL	The URL of the page where this campaign should direct users. Use Click to test your target link to ensure you put in the correct link!	✅
Active From	Add a date/time to start running your campaign. You can leave this blank to run the campaign immediately.	❌
Active Until	Add an end date/time for your campaign to stop running. You can leave this blank to run the campaign indefinitely.	❌
Is this campaign enabled?	Choose to enable your campaign now (if no start date exists), or disable it (regardless of end date).	❌

Choose your audience

After entering your campaign details, choose who will see the advertisements in this campaign. You can target your campaign to all users, or use advanced user targeting to select specific groups of users.

Here’s a breakdown of your targeting options:

Option	Description
All users	All users in the portal will see the ads in this campaign.
Target Users by Status	Target by users’ account status to see the ads in this campaign. This can include account registration status (whether they’ve set a password), if they're logged in, or if they haven't specified their text opt-in status.
Target Users by Community	Target by users’ community membership to see the ads in this campaign. You can choose ANY targeting (users in any of the communities listed will see the campaign) or ALL targeting (a user has to be a member of every community listed in order to see the campaign).

Create the campaign

Once all of the information for your campaign looks correct, click the Create Campaign button to move onto adding advertisements within your campaign.

Create portal and newsletter advertisements

Within your campaign, you can create advertisements that will appear in users’ automated newsletters, or directly on the portal. You can create multiple newsletter or portal advertisements within the same campaign.

Create a new advertisement

From the campaign page, click the + Advertisements button in the upper-right corner. Choose Add Newsletter Advertisement or Add Portal Advertisement. You’ll be brought to the New Advertisement page, where you’ll enter the details of your advertisement.

If no advertisements have been created within this campaign yet, you’ll also see those options in the center of the page.

Choose the style of advertisement

On the New Advertisement page, you’ll first choose the style of your advertisement in the Ad Template dropdown.

As you select different ad templates, you’ll see a rendering of what that style of advertisement looks like.

Choose your advertisement location

Use the Content Zone dropdown to choose where your advertisement will be displayed. Based on whether you’re creating a newsletter or portal advertisement, you’ll see different content zone options.

As you select different content zones, you’ll see a rendering of where that zone is located.

Enter your advertisement details

After selecting your advertisement’s type and location, you can add the creative elements of your advertisement. Elements of your advertisement can include an image, a title, descriptive text, a button label, and optional colors.

Based on the style of advertisement you selected, you'll see the following fields:

	Post style	Icon, Text, and CTA button	Text with CTA button	Image
Image	✅	✅	❌	✅
Photo Description	✅	✅	❌	✅
Ad Title	✅	✅	✅	❌
Call to Action Label	✅	✅	✅	❌
Button Color	✅	✅	✅	❌
Button Text Color	✅	✅	✅	❌
Ad Text	✅	✅	✅	❌
Background Color	✅	✅	✅	❌

Choose your advertisement priority

Finally, choose a priority for your advertisement. Because users can match multiple campaigns at once, you’ll want to select which advertisement in a zone should take priority.

Choose a number from 1 (highest) to 100 (lowest) to rank which advertisement should display to a user when they match multiple campaigns and multiple advertisements are targeted to the same content zone.

Publish your advertisement

If everything looks good, you can click the Create Advert button to create your advertisement. If your campaign is set as active, you can return to the portal or send yourself a newsletter to see how it looks.