A campaign starts with an outcome — what you're trying to achieve — and everything inside it works toward that result. In the Appcues App, you create one through a conversation with Appcues AI: it asks a few grounding questions before building anything, so the campaign stays tied to a specific behavior and outcome. For how campaigns are structured, see Campaigns overview.

The Appcues App is in beta and rolling out gradually. Campaign creation through Appcues AI may not be enabled for every account yet. If you don't see it at app.appcues.com, it hasn't been turned on for your account. See Introducing the Appcues App for more.

Prerequisites

• An editor role to create campaigns, tactics, and experiences.
• A publisher or admin role to publish experiences (see Publish your experiences).

Steps

1. Start a campaign. On the Campaigns page, click Create campaign in the top-right, or just ask Appcues AI in any chat — for example, "Create a new campaign to drive activation in sign ups." This opens a conversation with Appcues AI.

Answer the discovery questions. Appcues AI won't build from a one-line request alone — expect a short back-and-forth first. It typically asks about:

• The objective — the specific Key Action that tells you a user is meaningfully engaged, not "more engagement" in general. For example: completing setup, inviting a teammate, or clicking a specific button.
• The product moment — where that action happens, and what happens right after the user takes it.
• The business context — why the action matters and what follow-up it triggers, like a sales outreach, an onboarding email, or a support workflow.

Want to skip the back-and-forth? If your scope is already clear, fill in the brief template from Plan a campaign brief and objective and paste it into the chat — or upload it as a file — when you start. Appcues AI reads it up front and can move straight to proposing a campaign structure instead of walking you through these discovery questions.

2. Confirm the understanding. Before moving on, Appcues AI summarizes what it heard — for example, "You want a campaign for new signups that drives activation by encouraging them to click the 'Get Started' button, which triggers your onboarding follow-up" — and asks if that's right. Correct anything that's off here chatting with Appcues AI.
3. Confirm how success will be measured. Appcues AI checks whether an existing event — something your product already sends — matches the behavior you described, and creates a Key Action from it (a named, tracked event, managed in Settings > Key Actions). It uses that Key Action to build the campaign's objective — the measurable goal, with a direction and target (for example, "Achieve at least 40% weekly"). If no matching event exists, Appcues AI leaves the metric blank and gives you links to go create the event first, which you can then turn into a Key Action.
4. Review the proposed structure. Appcues AI lays out the campaign name, objective, and the tactic and experiences it's about to build — for example, a sequence of a discovery beat, a follow-up reminder, and a confirmation message. Nothing is created until you approve this structure.
5. Let Appcues AI build it. Once you confirm, it creates the campaign, its tactic, the objective (measured by the Key Action), and a starter version of each experience — building some directly and opening the builder for you to finish others. See Create an experience with Appcues AI for more on creating experiences.
6. Open your campaign. Find it on the Campaigns page (sorted by most recently updated). The brief you built through the conversation is already filled in on the Settings tab — edit any field and click Save if you want to adjust it later.
7. Review or adjust the objective. On the Settings tab, click the objective under Objective to see how it's measured — its Key Action, direction, and target. Edit a field directly, or ask Appcues AI in the objective's chat to change it ("raise the target to 50%"). See Plan a campaign brief and objective for what each field means.
8. Set up targeting. Appcues AI will typically offer this as the next step — ask it to configure the audience and triggering rules (for example, "only show this to new signups who haven't clicked Get Started yet") so the experiences reach the right users at the right moment.
9. Add more tactics as the campaign grows. Click Create tactic on the Tactics tab — this adds an empty tactic — then ask Appcues AI to help plan it, for example "Help me plan New tactic for Hello Button Activation." Appcues AI checks the campaign's existing tactics first and asks a discovery question to make sure this one targets a genuinely different audience or lifecycle moment, not a duplicate — for example, if you already have a tactic for new signups on the homepage, it might ask whether the new one should target users who skip that prompt, users returning a few days later, or a different signup source. Answer the same way you did during the original campaign discovery, and Appcues AI builds out the tactic's experiences from there. You can also add experiences to any tactic yourself with the New Experience dialog — give it a Name, choose a Type, and set a Build URL when prompted.

Publish your experiences

Campaigns themselves don't have a publish step — you publish the experiences inside them. Ask Appcues AI to publish an experience when it's ready; it shows the experience's targeting (domain, page, audience, and frequency) and asks you to confirm first. Publishing requires a publisher or admin role.

A tactic shows a Live badge once at least one of its experiences is published.

Confirm it worked

• Your campaign appears on the Campaigns page, with its tactics on the Tactics tab.
• Each tactic shows how many experiences it contains and whether it's Live or Draft.

If it doesn't work

• Appcues AI keeps asking questions instead of building right away — this is expected. It's grounding the campaign in a specific behavior, product context, and business reason before creating anything; answer its questions rather than repeating your original request.
• The campaign isn't in the list — open the Campaigns page directly; Appcues AI doesn't jump you to a new campaign automatically.
• You can't publish — publishing needs a publisher or admin role.

Notes

• Campaign analytics (the campaign Dashboard tab) is coming soon and not yet available.
• Grouping experiences into a campaign doesn't change how they're targeted or shown to users — campaigns are for planning and organization.
• A Key Action created during campaign setup isn't campaign-specific — it's saved in Settings > Key Actions and can be reused by other campaigns.