What is CampaignChain?

CampaignChain is open-source campaign management software to plan, execute and monitor digital marketing campaigns across multiple online communication channels, such as Twitter, Facebook, Google Analytics or third-party CMS, e-commerce and CRM tools.

For marketers, CampaignChain enables marketing managers to have a complete overview of digital campaigns and provides one entry point to multiple communication channels for those who implement campaigns.

Key Features

CampaignChain covers three main areas of outbound and inbound campaign management:

Planning

  • Define campaign goals and milestones.
  • Create and schedule campaign activities and operations on multiple online channels.
  • View and modify campaign activities and operations using an interactive timeline.

Execution

  • Automatically execute scheduled activities and operations.
  • Collect data for monitoring during campaign duration.
  • Automatically notify responsible persons if errors occur during campaign execution.

Monitoring

  • Analytics reports: Channel-specific reporting and analytics (number of Facebook views and comments, number of Twitter retweets, and so on) for accurate campaign ROI measurement.
  • Budget reports: Defining budgets and spend per channel.
  • Sales reports: Integrate with CRM and other tools to view and analyze leads generated by each campaign.

Basic Concepts

CampaignChain’s software architecture has been designed along digital marketing terms and concepts in a specialized way, so this section gets you up to speed on CampaignChain’s terminology and explains the main entities to you.

CampaignChain knows two types of entities, a Medium and an Action, which are:

Medium Action
  • Channel
  • Location
  • Campaign
  • Milestone
  • Activity
  • Operation

Campaigns

Campaigns are at the core of CampaignChain, and are the “DNA of modern digital marketing”[1]. In CampaignChain, every campaign uses one or more communication channels. Campaigns also have milestones and activities.

Campaigns usually come in two variants: manually scheduled campaigns, which have a defined start and end date, and triggered campaigns (also called nurtured campaigns), which occur in response to user events. A campaign focused on a new product launch is an example of the former, whereas a drip email campaign that begins when a user fills up a registration form is an example of the latter.

Channels & Locations

Campaigns use online channels, which are the pathways by which campaign content reaches its audience. Common examples of channels include websites, blogs and social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn. For monitoring purposes, CampaignChain also allows connections to channels to retrieve traffic statistics (e.g. Google or YouTube Analytics) and lead generation data maintained in a CRM.

Every channel includes one or more locations, which allow granular publishing of campaign content. For example, a Twitter channel has only one location: the Twitter stream. However, a website channel might have various locations: a landing page, a banner on the home page, a “Contact Us” page with a form, and so on. Similarly, a LinkedIn channel might consist of two locations: a company profile page and a news stream. Locations are being created when connecting to a new Channel.

Furthermore, Locations can be created by an Operation. For example, an Operation that posts a Tweet on a Twitter stream is essentially creating a new Location (i.e. that Tweet) within a Location (i.e. a Twitter user’s stream). Learn more about Operations below.

Milestones

Milestones are key events or reference points during a campaign. For example, the campaign go-live date could be a milestone, and a press tour could be a second milestone. When you set up campaign milestones, related actions can be defined. For example, you could compare analytics data between two milestones. Or you could notify a member of your marketing team to start working on the next set of tasks once a milestone has been reached.

Activities and Operations

Every location allows one or more activities which can be undertaken. For example, creating a new post is an example of an activity for a blog channel.

Every activity must always have at least one operation. For example, posting on Twitter is one activity which equals the operation.

In other cases, a single activity may encompass multiple operations. For example, defining and creating a Google AdWords campaign that runs for 3 months is a possible activity for the Google AdWords channel. However, this activity could consist of two operations: the first operation might be a Google Ad that runs for the first 2 months of the campaign, and the second operation would be a second, different Google Ad that runs for the remaining 4 weeks.

User Interface

CampaignChain’s Web-based user interface is responsive and works on Desktop computers as well as mobile devices such as Tablets and Smartphones.

Footnotes

[1]This terminology was used by Lars Trieloff in his Feb 2014 presentation, which also inspires CampaignChain’s architecture.