> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.switchbord.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Campaigns

> Broadcast campaigns overview — audience selection, scheduling, and delivery tracking for bulk WhatsApp sends.

Campaigns are how Switchbord sends an approved WhatsApp template to many contacts at once — a seasonal offer, a winback message, a weekly digest. Every campaign pairs one approved [template](/features/templates) with an audience and a send schedule, then hands delivery off to the fan-out engine.

This page is the overview. For the full audience-building, scheduling, and safety-mechanism deep-dive, see [Broadcast Engine](/operations/broadcasts).

## Building a campaign

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="Pick an audience" icon="users">
    Select recipients by tag, by a recent CSV import, or by combining filters (e.g. tag = `vip` AND region = `IT`).
  </Card>

  <Card title="Choose a template" icon="file-lines">
    Only approved templates are selectable. Map each template variable to a contact field so the message personalizes per recipient.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Preview the audience" icon="eye">
    Before sending, review a sample of actual recipients to confirm variable mapping is pulling the right data.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Schedule the send" icon="clock">
    Send immediately or schedule for a future date/time, in UTC or the recipient's local time zone (requires contact time-zone data).
  </Card>
</CardGroup>

## Delivery and safety

Once launched, a campaign's messages are queued and delivered through the same fan-out engine used by journeys and the transactional API. It respects your WhatsApp Business Account's current messaging-tier rate limits automatically, so a large campaign won't get your number throttled or flagged.

Two safety mechanisms apply automatically to every campaign:

* **Deduplication** — the same broadcast will not be sent to a contact twice within a 12-hour window, even if you accidentally launch it more than once.
* **Opt-out enforcement** — contacts who've replied `STOP` (or a localized equivalent) to a previous marketing message are excluded from the audience automatically.

## Category and cost

Because campaigns almost always use `MARKETING`-category templates, they're billed at Meta's highest per-conversation rate. Getting the category right — and understanding when Meta might silently re-categorize a template — directly affects what a campaign costs. See [Marketing templates](/whatsapp/marketing-templates#billing-differences) for the rate ordering across categories.

## Monitoring a live campaign

Once a campaign is sending, the dashboard tracks delivery rate, read rate, click-through on buttons/links, and conversion against a goal you define. **Settings → Usage** rolls delivered-template spend and free service-window traffic up into per-campaign cost attribution across 7-day, 30-day, and month-to-date windows — see [Meta Usage & Cost Monitor](/operations/meta-usage-cost-monitor) for how those estimates are built.

## Campaigns vs. Journeys

Campaigns are a one-shot, audience-wide send with a single template. If you need multi-step logic — wait, branch, react to a button click — that's a [Journey](/features/journeys) instead. Both draw from the same contact and template data, so segmenting an audience once with tags works for either.

## See also

* [Broadcast Engine](/operations/broadcasts) — the full campaign-creation and fan-out reference.
* [Templates](/features/templates) — approval and category rules for the message a campaign sends.
* [Meta Usage & Cost Monitor](/operations/meta-usage-cost-monitor) — spend estimation model.
* [Contacts](/features/contacts) — tags and segmentation used to build an audience.