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How to Create a Programmatic Ads Campaign

A step-by-step walkthrough for building, reviewing, and launching your campaign.

Overview

This guide walks you through building a campaign from start to finish. Setup has six steps: Basics, Targeting, Schedule & Budget, Creative, Review, and Checkout & Launch. You'll move through them in order, and you can always step back to make changes before you launch.

One helpful thing to know before you start: your progress saves automatically every 30 seconds. If you navigate away or get interrupted, your work will be waiting for you when you come back.

New to programmatic advertising? The Programmatic Ads Overview explains how it all works before you dive in.

Step 1: Basics

This step sets up the core identity of your campaign.

Ad type

Choose one of four ad formats, depending on where you want your ads to appear:

  • Display: banner or image ads served across the open web.
  • Video: video ads served across websites and apps.
  • Streaming: video ads inserted into streaming content.
  • Out of Home: digital billboards and public-screen placements.

Campaign name

Give your campaign a clear, descriptive name that tells you who it's for and what it's about. This is just for your own reference and won't be shown to anyone who sees your ads.

Step 2: Targeting

This step defines who will see your ads. Not every option appears for every ad type. Out of Home campaigns, for instance, have a smaller set of choices.

Site categories

Available for Display and Video. Choose the kinds of content where you'd like your ads to appear, such as Arts & Entertainment, Finance, Sports, or Travel. You can pick as many as you like, or leave it blank to run across all categories.

Streaming channels

Available for Streaming campaigns. Select the streaming networks you want to target, or leave it blank to run across all available channels.

Block list

If there are specific websites where you'd rather your ads not appear, add them here, one domain at a time. This is optional, but it's a handy way to keep your brand away from places that aren't a good fit. (Not available for Out of Home.)

Device targeting

Choose which devices your campaign should reach: Desktop, Mobile, Tablet, and CTV (Connected TV). All four are selected by default, and you'll need at least one. (Not available for Out of Home.)

Location targeting

Decide how wide your campaign's reach should be. Choose All to run nationwide across the United States, or Custom to narrow things down to specific states or zip codes.

Audience attributes

You can refine your audience further using optional attributes like age range, household income, occupation, and interests. Each section is collapsible, so you can open just the ones you want to use. Remember that the more you narrow, the more relevant your audience becomes, but the smaller the pool of people you can reach. (Not available for Out of Home.)

For a fuller explanation of these options and how to balance them, see Targeting Your Audience.

Step 3: Schedule & Budget

This step sets when your campaign runs and how much it spends.

Start and end dates

Pick the date your campaign should begin (it can't be in the past) and the date it should end (at least one day after the start).

Daily budget

Enter the most you want to spend per day. The minimum is $15.00 per day. As you set this, you'll see a calculated total budget based on your daily amount times the number of days your campaign runs. If that total comes in under $200, you'll see a gentle heads-up, since smaller budgets have less room to deliver results.

Advanced options

If you want finer control over how your campaign delivers, you can expand the advanced options. These are optional and collapsed by default. They include:

  • Bid strategy: let the system optimize your bids automatically (the default), or set your own maximum cost per 1,000 impressions with Manual CPM.
  • Frequency capping: limit how many times the same person sees your ad, per day or over the whole campaign. For example, a cap of 3 per day means no one sees your ad more than three times in a single day.
  • Session depth: control whether your ad can appear at any point in someone's browsing session, or only on the first or second page.
  • Dayparting: choose the specific days and times your campaign serves ads, using a simple day-and-hour grid. By default, all days and hours are active.

Step 4: Creative

This step is where you choose the actual ad people will see.

You'll see a grid of your available creatives, each showing a thumbnail, the ad name, and its destination URL. Click one to select it. You can assign one creative per campaign.

If nothing in the grid fits, you can create a new one. A window will open where you can add an optional name and destination URL, then select an image or video from your marketing asset library. Supported image formats are JPG, JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP, and SVG. Once you've created it, your new creative appears in the grid, ready to select.

Step 5: Review

This step gives you a chance to look over everything before you launch. Nothing new is entered here. You'll see summary cards covering your basics, targeting, schedule and budget, and creative, and each card has an Edit button that takes you back to that step if you'd like to make a change.

You'll also see a note letting you know that, once you launch, your campaign is submitted for processing and typically goes live within a few minutes. You can pause or stop it at any time from Programmatic Ads > Ad Campaigns.

Step 6: Checkout & Launch

This last step confirms your campaign and collects payment.

You'll see a final order summary with your campaign name, ad type, dates, duration, daily budget, and total. Then you'll enter your payment details, or use a card you've already saved. You can choose to save a card for future campaigns if you'd like. For your security, card details are never stored on Ambassador's servers.

When everything looks right, click the button to pay and launch. Your campaign is submitted right away. Keep in mind that once a campaign has launched and passed its end date, it can't be restarted, though you can pause it any time before then.

After you launch

Once your campaign is live, you can monitor and manage it from Programmatic Ads > Ad Campaigns. From there you can pause, edit, duplicate, and archive your campaigns.

To make sense of the performance numbers you'll start to see, head to Understanding Your Metrics.