Campaigns, tactics, and the experiences inside them each carry a brief: the context Appcues AI reads when it builds and refines your work. Campaigns and tactics also carry an objective, the measurable outcome that tells you whether it worked. This guide covers both. For what a campaign is and how it's structured, see Campaigns overview.

You don't have to write any of it from scratch. Give the context when you create a campaign, either by uploading a brief to the chat or by describing your objective and constraints in plain language, and Appcues AI fills in the briefs and the objective for you. Open a Settings tab afterward to review and edit, or ask Appcues AI to refine it. The AI reads a brief whenever you @-mention what it belongs to, so a strong brief means better recommendations and better-drafted experiences.

How briefs and objectives fit together

Briefs nest the same way your work does, and each level answers a narrower question than the one above it.

All three work the same way. Click a field to start editing, then click Save. Save stays greyed out until you change something, and Esc discards changes to a field before you save.

Write a campaign 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.

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

• Objective — the outcome you want, with a number attached. Name the moment you want users to take and how far you want it to move: "Get 40% of new trial users to create a project in their first week" is actionable; "improve onboarding" is not. If you're not sure yet, describe the problem: "New trial users drop off before completing setup.". See Set an objective below.
• 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."

Campaign 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 moment, 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 moment 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.

Write a tactic brief

Every tactic inside a campaign has its own brief. The campaign brief holds the strategy for the whole campaign; a tactic brief covers one approach within it.

You don't have to write it yourself. Describe the tactic to Appcues AI and it fills the brief in, and the tactic's Settings tab updates as it writes.

A tactic brief has three fields, with a slot for the tactic's own objective under the first one:

• Purpose — what this tactic is meant to do. Keep it to the one behavior you want to change: "remove the prerequisite blocker before first-project creation by making email verification feel like the next required step."
• Add a measurement — the slot under Purpose where you give the tactic its own objective, so you can measure this tactic separately from the campaign. It's optional. Once an objective is linked, this row shows its name instead; click it to open the editor. See Give a tactic its own objective below.
• Audience & moment — who it reaches and when. Name the segment and the point in the product where its experiences appear, like "first-session users on the dashboard, before they've created anything."
• Fit in campaign — what this tactic covers that the others don't. This is what stops Appcues AI proposing a duplicate: "covers the first session; the re-engagement tactic picks up users who leave without creating a project."

To edit the brief yourself, open the tactic and click Settings at the top of the canvas. Click a field to start editing, then click Save. Save stays greyed out until you change something, and Esc discards changes to a field before you save.

If you don't see the Preview and Settings pills, you have an experience open rather than the tactic. Go back to the tactic to see them.

Write an experience brief

An experience inside a tactic has the shortest brief of the three. It records why this one experience exists and what it does that the others in the tactic don't.

• Purpose — what this experience is for: "show first-session users where to start."
• Fit in tactic — what it covers that the tactic's other experiences don't: "opens the sequence; the checklist follows it."

To edit it, open the experience from the tactic and click Settings. The brief sits above the experience's targeting and tags. An experience brief has no objective slot, because a tactic's objective already covers the experiences inside it.

Only experiences inside a tactic have a brief. One you open on its own from the Experiences library doesn't have one. If you leave Settings with unsaved changes, Appcues asks you to confirm before discarding them.

Tips for better briefs

These apply to any brief, at any level.

• 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. Type @ 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 moment. Call out the actual moment that signals success (like Project Created) — it's what Appcues AI uses to ground the objective's Key Moment. See Create a Key Moment.
• 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.”

Set an objective

Every campaign is grounded in an objective: the measurable outcome you're driving toward. A campaign has exactly one, measured by exactly one Key Moment. For where one campaign ends and the next begins, see Campaigns overview. Individual tactics can carry their own objectives too. 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"). See Create a Key Moment for more details.

A Key Moment isn't an objective

A Key Moment is a single point in time: the thing you want the user to do, like Project Created. It carries no target and no time window, so on its own it can't tell you whether the campaign worked. The objective is the measurable outcome you wrap around that moment: how many users, at what rate, over what period.

Choose what to measure

The Measure decides what you're counting, and it's what gives an objective its shape:

• Unique users — a headcount of people. "5,000 users create a project."
• Event count — a total volume that counts repeats. "Projects created reaches 20,000."
• User conversion rate against all users — a rate across your user base. "40% of new trial users create a project in their first week."
• User conversion rate against another Key Moment — a rate between two of them. "25% of the users who create a project go on to invite a teammate."
• Events per session — how often it happens within a session. "Users create an average of 1.5 projects per session."

A Key Moment can be built from several events at once, and it fires once for every matching event. The same user doing two of those events counts once under Unique users and twice under Event count. See Create a Key Moment.

Either conversion rate adds a Rate denominator choice in the Measure panel. All users divides by everyone. The Key moment option divides by the users who did a second Key Moment, which you pick there. So for a rate between two, the objective's Key Moment is the one you're driving toward and the denominator is the one that qualifies the audience — Teammate Invited over Project Created.

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

Set the target and the window

Open the objective from the brief to see how it's defined. It leads with a plain-language summary of the goal, above the fields that produce it.

Direction either drives the measure toward a number (Achieve) or holds it at one (Maintain). Target is the threshold that counts as a hit, and setting it to at most rather than at least turns the objective into a reduction: "at most 10% of new users open a support ticket in their first week." Period decides whether that target is a cumulative total or one the campaign has to clear every day, week, or month.

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

Give a tactic its own objective

A tactic can have its own objective, separate from the campaign's. The campaign objective is the umbrella: the outcome the whole campaign drives toward. A tactic objective measures what this one tactic is meant to do, which can be a different moment entirely. A tactic that clears a blocker might measure email verifications while the campaign measures projects created. It's optional, but set one when you want to see how much a single tactic is contributing.

A tactic objective uses the same editor and the same fields as a campaign objective. Describe what the tactic should achieve while Appcues AI is creating the campaign and its tactics, or add one later from the tactic brief. See Write a tactic brief for where it sits and how to edit it.

Coming soon: a dashboard inside each tactic, showing its progress against the tactic's objective.

If the event doesn't exist yet

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