Campaign Management
This domain tests delivery discipline from approval to post-campaign review: scope, roles, timelines, dependencies, quality assurance, pacing, change control, and close-out.
Core rules
- Name one accountable owner. A RACI matrix clarifies who decides, who does the work, and who is consulted.
- Manage the critical path. Legal, medical, or regulatory review and asset lock are dependencies, not administrative afterthoughts.
- Run a launch-readiness check: tracking tags tested, landing pages live, creative specs met, approvals documented, budgets and pacing loaded, and a rollback plan agreed.
- Set optimization decision rules before launch, for example pause any ad set above the CPA ceiling after seven days and at least 50 conversions. Do not judge creative during the platform learning phase.
- Log scope changes with their cost and timing impact, and reforecast when they are approved.
Worked example
A retail launch has a fixed date. Media is booked, but legal review of product claims is scheduled after final asset delivery. Legal review is a predecessor to asset lock, which precedes trafficking and QA. If review slips three days, the float is gone. The correct response is to move review earlier or use pre-approved claim variants, not to compress QA. The post-mortem records the dependency failure so the next launch schedules review before the shoot.
Traps that cost marks
- Treating the media plan as the project plan.
- Trafficking without a tracking QA pass.
- Optimizing on too little data and calling noise a trend.
- Accepting scope creep without a revised budget or date.
- Launching with no way to pause or roll back.