Campaigns and setup
What a campaign is, how setup works, and what has to be true before it can go live.
Last reviewed November 7, 2026
What a campaign does
A campaign decides who to contact, when, how to reach them and what to offer. What starts it depends on its objective. For checkout recovery, ACR saves a shopper as a lead when a checkout with an email or phone number comes in. Once that checkout has had no activity for 30 minutes (you can change the wait), it counts as abandoned and the lead is offered to your campaigns.
Campaigns that share an event and a lead source are tried from top to bottom. The first one whose trigger, limits, cooldown, start conditions, consent check, suppression list and country rules all accept the lead starts a campaign run, unless a campaign override gives it to another campaign that also qualified. A lead already in a run is not offered to anything else.
Setting one up
Setup is a sidebar of steps, grouped as Lead source, Brand, Campaign, AI agent, Finish and Advanced. New campaigns start with recommended values on the Advanced steps, so most of those can wait. Set up your first campaign goes through every step.
- On Campaigns, choose Create new. Name the campaign, then pick its objective and where shoppers come from.
- Under Brand, pick the brand profile the agent speaks for. On Offer, add the discount codes it may give, or choose not to offer one. Some objectives have no Offer step.
- On Outreach channels, choose how the agent reaches shoppers. On Configuration, set its name, voice and languages.
- Open General settings under Advanced and give the address hand-off emails go to, or switch email hand-offs off. A new campaign cannot publish until you do one of the two.
- On Review & launch, fix anything the checklist flags. Run a test holds a practice conversation, or calls your own confirmed phone; no shopper is called or texted. Then choose Review and publish.
- Go back to the lead source step and switch the campaign's start trigger on (Checkout abandoned for recovery). Publishing alone starts nothing. A Shopify store also needs an admin to choose Start reading checkouts under Integrations.
Statuses
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Setup not finished | The campaign has never been published. |
| Running | It is published and at least one of its start triggers is on. |
| Paused | It is published, but someone paused it or every start trigger is off. New shoppers stop entering. Shoppers already in it finish their current sequence. |
| Archived | It stopped at once and outreach to shoppers still in it was cancelled. It sits on the Archived tab, where its history stays. |
When an edit takes effect
Changes on most steps stay in a draft until you publish again. After you publish, shoppers already in a run keep the steps and written messages they started with, but each next step uses the newly published brief, discount codes and channels.
Trigger changes on the lead source step, everything on Start conditions, and Campaign overrides apply as soon as you save, with no publish.