A strong campaign runs on two things you define up front: a brief that gives Appcues AI the context to build the right experiences, and an objective that defines how you'll know it worked. This guide covers both. For what a campaign is and how it's structured, see Campaigns overview.

When you create a campaign, give the context — upload a brief to the chat, or just describe your objective and constraints in plain language — and the Appcues AI populates the campaign brief for you. Once it's populated, open the campaign's Settings tab to review and edit it yourself, or ask the Appcues AI to refine it. The AI reads the brief whenever you @-mention the campaign, so a strong brief means better recommendations and better-drafted experiences.

Write a useful brief

You don't have to write a brief before starting a campaign, you can just describe your goal to Appcues AI and let the conversation shape it. Writing a brief first (or using the template below) is simply the quicker path: it grounds Appcues AI from your first message, so you get quicker results with less back-and-forth.

Each brief has three fields. Here's what to put in each one:

• Objective — the user behavior or outcome you want to change measured by a Key Action. Be specific: "Increase 7-day activation rate for new trial users" is actionable; "improve onboarding" is not. If you're not sure yet, describe the problem: "New trial users drop off before completing setup."
• Product context — how the relevant part of your product works. What does the user need to do, where in the product does it happen, and are there prerequisites (like setup steps or permissions)? This grounds the Appcues AI recommendations in your actual product instead of generic advice.
• Business context — why this matters now. Tie the campaign to a business metric, a timeline, or a strategic priority. For example: "Activation drives trial-to-paid conversion, which is our top growth metric this quarter."

Define how you'll measure it

Every campaign is grounded in an objective: the measurable outcome you're driving toward. You don't build it by hand — when you create a campaign through Appcues AI, it creates the objective for you from your conversation and shows it in the campaign brief under Objective (for example, an objective named "First Project Activation").

An objective is measured by a Key Action — a real, tracked event that signals the behavior you care about, like Project Created. Open the objective from the brief to see how it's defined. It opens with a plain-language summary of the goal ("At least 40% of new trial users create their first project each week") above these fields:

• Direction — Achieve a goal (drive a metric up to a value) or Maintain it (hold steady at a threshold).
• Action — the Key Action the objective is measured by.
• Measure — how that action is counted: User conversion rate, Unique users, Event count, or Events per session.
• Audience — who the measure runs against: all users, a segment, or per session.
• Target — the threshold that counts as a hit (at least or at most a value).
• Period — the window it's measured over: daily, weekly, monthly, or none.

Some choices set others automatically. Choosing Events per session as the measure sets the audience and period to per-session, since that's the only way the metric makes sense.

Edit or refine it anytime. Open the objective and either edit a field directly, or ask Appcues AI in the objective's chat to adjust it — for example, "change the target to 50%."

Objectives need a real event to track. An objective only measures once its Key Action points to an event Appcues actually receives. If the behavior you describe isn't sent to Appcues yet — say a plan-selection or upgrade event you haven't instrumented — Appcues AI keeps the objective but pauses structured tracking until that event exists. You'll see a note in the objective like "Structured tracking is paused until a real … event is available in Appcues." Create the event and the Key Action, and tracking picks up.

A good objective ties to the outcome, not experience completion. Completion rate tells you whether users clicked through; it doesn't tell you whether they took the downstream action you actually care about. If you're running an A/B test, make sure both variants track the same Key Action so you're comparing outcomes.

Brief Template

Use this template. Paste it into the Appcues AI chat when you start a campaign, or fill each part into the matching field on the campaign's Settings tab. Replace the prompts in brackets.

Objective: [The behavior or outcome you want to change, and by how much. Name the specific action, and a target if you have one.]

Product context: [How this part of the product works — what the user does, where it happens, any prerequisites, and the exact event that signals success.]

Business context: [Why this matters now — the business metric it drives, the timeline, and any follow-up the action triggers.]

Filled in for a trial-activation campaign, it might look like this:

Objective: Increase the share of new trial users who create their first project to at least 40% in their first week.
Product context: New users land on an empty dashboard; creating a project is their first real action and fires a Project Created event. Users must verify their email before they can create one.
Business context: First-project creation is our leading indicator for trial-to-paid conversion — our top growth metric this quarter. Users who create a project in their first week convert at roughly 3x the rate of those who don't.

Tips for better briefs:

• Attach supporting material. Use the + in the chat to upload a PRD, launch brief, spec, or screenshot. Appcues AI reads what you attach and pulls it into the brief — usually faster than writing it all out. For file types and limits, see Write prompts for Appcues AI.
• @-mention related work. fType @ in the chat to reference related items — such as a campaign, experience, or segment — so Appcues AI grounds its recommendations in the right context.
• Name the real event. Call out the actual event that signals success (like Project Created) — it's what Appcues AI uses to ground the objective's Key Action.
• Start rough, then refine. You don't need a finished brief. Give Appcues AI what you have and prompt-edit later — for example, “add that mobile users are out of scope.”