Introduction to Web Campaigns

Anna Forlenza

Updated July 28, 2026 16:00

New Campaign Creation Flow

Beginning July 2025, AdRoll has started to slowly roll out a new campaign creation process for a better user experience and added features. Some customers may not yet see this experience, therefore may have fewer settings available than described here. To get expedited access, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager. Learn more.

What is a Web Campaign

A Web Campaign is a targeted advertising strategy designed to reach your audience across the web on desktop and mobile devices. Different types of campaigns aim to achieve specific goals such as brand awareness or increased engagement.

Key features of web campaigns:

High quality Supply and Inventory: Our technology is layered over the leading exchanges and publishers, providing you access to the high-quality display, native, video, at a global scale in real-time.
Powered by BidIQ®: Our proprietary AI-powered bidding system helps optimize ad delivery by finding the right visitor, at the right time and place, at the optimal price. BidIQ® is enabled by default and continuously learns to improve future campaigns.
Ad Campaign Review Process: All campaigns undergo review to ensure compliance with our Advertising Policies and Guidelines. Reviews typically complete within one business day.
Multi-Creative Formats: Web campaigns can serve display ads across desktop, mobile, native supporting multiple creative ad types Static Image, Native, Video, and HTML-5.
Advanced Campaign Settings: Web campaigns give you control on advanced web settings, such as environments, placement exclusions, day partying, frequency capping, etc.

For a simpler plug-and-play approach, we offer Advertising Playbooks, a pre-packaged campaign sequence easy to launch and manage with default settings based on our best practices.

Web Campaign Objectives Available

Objectives are part of the New Campaign Creation Flow

Campaign objectives replace campaign tactics as the starting point for creating a campaign. If you are not yet on the new campaign creation flow, you will still create campaigns by tactic. See Where the Old Campaign Tactics Went below to find the equivalent setup, or learn more about the rollout.

Campaigns now start with an Objective instead of a targeting type. When you create a campaign, you first choose one of three objectives, and AdRoll sets the optimization goal, bid strategy, and audience defaults to match. Depending on your package, you may have access to the following objectives:

Objective	When to use this	Audience targeting strategies	Optimized to drive
Build Awareness Reach new accounts and increase traffic	Grow awareness from unaware accounts Increase reach with your brand Target early journey stage accounts	Target accounts, contacts, or reach accounts similar to your existing visitors with a lookalike audience.	Reach, Impressions, Traffic
Drive Engagement Retarget audiences who showed interest	Re-engage dormant and mid-journey accounts Nurture leads and customers through the funnel Support sales by identifying target accounts	Target accounts, contacts, or website visitors.	Clicks, Visits
Accelerate Pipeline Retarget high-intent audiences	Move mid- to late-stage buyers toward conversion Increase sales velocity and deal progression Support active opportunities with sales-aligned engagement	Target accounts, contacts, or website visitors.	Conversions

Each objective is available for Web and CTV campaigns. Advertising Playbooks, Facebook, and LinkedIn campaigns are still created from their own options in the Create menu.

Where the Old Campaign Tactics Went

The four campaign tactics you used before have not gone away. They are now audience options you choose inside an objective, on the Audience card of your ad group. Use this table to find the equivalent setup:

If you used to create…	Choose this objective	Then select this audience
Website Retargeting Campaign	Drive Engagement, or Accelerate Pipeline	Choose or create your own audience of site visitors. Re-engage users who visited or bounced from your site, keeping your brand visible and aiming for form-fill Conversions.
Account Targeting Campaigns	Build Awareness, Drive Engagement or Accelerate Pipeline	Select Accounts to target the buying committee within your target Account Lists. Advanced audience building and advanced settings are still available.
Contact Targeting Campaign	Build Awareness, Drive Engagement or Accelerate Pipeline	Select Contacts to target known contacts from your own e-mail lists and CRM. You can use basic imported Contact lists or Enhanced Contact Lists.
Lookalike Targeting Campaign	Build Awareness	Select Lookalike to target unknown users that have not visited your website and that are exhibiting similar behaviors to the users who are visiting and engaging with your website. Powered by IntentMap.

Selecting Your Objective

From the Campaigns dashboard, click Create.
On the What's your campaign objective? screen, select an objective. The panel on the right shows when to use it, which audience targeting strategies it supports, what it is optimized to drive, and which channels it is available on.
Click Next to continue to campaign settings, where your objective pre-sets the optimization goal and bid strategy. You can still change these under Bid Settings and Advanced Options.

Web Campaign Settings

Some settings are only available for the New Campaign Creation Flow

As of July 2025, the campaign creation process for creating Web and CTV campaigns has been updated for a better user experience, along with some new capabilities. Some of the settings below are only available for campaigns created with the new campaign creation flow. Learn more.

The following table includes the different settings available for Web Campaigns.

Setting	Description	Recommendations
Campaign Budget	You can set up your campaign budget as Daily or Monthly based on your preferences. The monthly budget can be prorated (based on the number of days left in the month) or you can use the entire monthly budget for the amount of days remaining in the month. Learn more about budget settings here.	Don't worry about overspending. As long as your budget remains unchanged for an entire month, you won't be charged more than your set daily budget multiplied by the average number of days in a month (30.4) Be aware that if you change your daily budget before the end of the month, it will restart your 30.4-day budget cap.
Bid Strategy	Setting a Campaign goal helps AdRoll prioritize bids: Conversions: Focus on those most likely to convert with your Conversion Audiences. Clicks: Enhance traffic by maximizing clicks. Impressions: Boost the number of ad displays. Learn more about here.	Avoid restrictive CPA, CPC, or CPM targets that can limit ad delivery. We recommend that you gradually reduce your target by no more than 20% per edit. For example, if your campaign is currently achieving a $10 CPA and your goal is a $5 CPA, we recommend setting an $8 CPA target (80% of $10) and scaling down from there gradually rather than jumping directly to $5.
Audience Target Options	Under Targeting, open the Audience: Who do you want to target? section and choose one of the following based on the Campaign Objective selected: Accounts - Target your ideal persona from a list of accounts. Use this when you want to reach companies (and the right people within them) rather than specific individuals. Contacts - Target known email addresses sourced from a CRM, a marketing automation tool, or a static list. Lookalike - Reach new people who resemble your existing customers, based on a source audience you provide. Website Audiences: Choose or create your own audience of site visitors. Re-engage users who visited or bounced from your site, keeping your brand visible and aiming for form-fill Conversions.	Start with the audience your objective is built for. Build Awareness reaches accounts that have not engaged with you yet, so Accounts, Contacts, and Lookalike all work here. Lookalike is only available for this objective. Drive Engagement and Accelerate Pipeline re-engage people who already know you, so Website Audiences is usually the strongest choice, but you get the option to choose Accounts and Contacts as well. Use the Include / Exclude controls to stop your ad groups from overlapping. If two ad groups target the same accounts, they compete with each other in the auction and your frequency becomes harder to control. Keep your audience as broad as your targeting allows. Narrow audiences limit delivery and slow down how quickly BidIQ® can learn and optimize. For Lookalike, your source audience drives the result. A source built from users who converted usually performs better than one built from all site visitors.
Day Parting	Select specific days of the week and specific times of the day for your ads to serve. Day Parting is useful when you know that your ads will have a greater impact on certain days of the week or times of the day. Learn more about Day Parting here.	By default, Day Parting is set as automatically run 24/7. We recommend that you use the default Day Parting Campaign settings to let BidIQ® dynamically optimize how many times your ads appear to the same person.
Frequency Capping	The number of times your ads are displayed to the same person in one day. By default, your Frequency Caps are automatically optimized by BidIQ®, which processes hundreds of variables for each and every user to determine whether or not to bid, and how much, at the time of each potential impression. Learn more about Frequency Capping here.	By default, your Frequency Caps are automatically optimized by BidIQ®, AdRoll's proprietary real-time bidding algorithm. We strongly recommend that you use the default Frequency Capping Campaign settings to let BidIQ® dynamically optimize how many times your ads appear to the same person.
Campaign-specific placement Exclusions	If you don't want your ads to appear on certain websites you have the option to configure App and Domain exclusions at the campaign level to control the placements where your ads served. Campaign-specific exclusions are applied in addition to any configured General Exclusions. Learn more about campaign-specific placement exclusions here.	By default, the campaigns will target all placements. If you wish to restrict the ads on certain placements, you can exclude them by Domain or App. We do not recommend exceeding 1000 exclusions to ensure campaign scale and reach.
Environment Exclusions	This setting can be applied at the AdGroup level. You can select which targeting environments to include or exclude: Desktop: Larger screen real estate for more detailed ad content and different user behavior and intent compared to mobile platforms. Mobile Web: Broader reach across various websites and lower barrier to entry and often more budget-friendly. Excellent for brand awareness campaigns and contextual targeting. Mobile Apps: Immersive ad formats like interstitials. Learn more about Environments here.	By default, we will serve ads on all environments. If you restrict the environments where we serve ads this will impact your campaign reach, costs and performance.

Setting

Description

Recommendations

Campaign Budget

You can set up your campaign budget as Daily or Monthly based on your preferences. The monthly budget can be prorated (based on the number of days left in the month) or you can use the entire monthly budget for the amount of days remaining in the month.

Learn more about budget settings here.

Don't worry about overspending. As long as your budget remains unchanged for an entire month, you won't be charged more than your set daily budget multiplied by the average number of days in a month (30.4)

Be aware that if you change your daily budget before the end of the month, it will restart your 30.4-day budget cap.

Bid Strategy

Setting a Campaign goal helps AdRoll prioritize bids:

Conversions: Focus on those most likely to convert with your Conversion Audiences.
Clicks: Enhance traffic by maximizing clicks.
Impressions: Boost the number of ad displays.

Learn more about here.

Avoid restrictive CPA, CPC, or CPM targets that can limit ad delivery. We recommend that you gradually reduce your target by no more than 20% per edit. For example, if your campaign is currently achieving a $10 CPA and your goal is a $5 CPA, we recommend setting an $8 CPA target (80% of $10) and scaling down from there gradually rather than jumping directly to $5.

Audience Target Options

Under Targeting, open the Audience: Who do you want to target? section and choose one of the following based on the Campaign Objective selected:

Accounts - Target your ideal persona from a list of accounts. Use this when you want to reach companies (and the right people within them) rather than specific individuals.
Contacts - Target known email addresses sourced from a CRM, a marketing automation tool, or a static list.
Lookalike - Reach new people who resemble your existing customers, based on a source audience you provide.
Website Audiences: Choose or create your own audience of site visitors. Re-engage users who visited or bounced from your site, keeping your brand visible and aiming for form-fill Conversions.

Start with the audience your objective is built for. Build Awareness reaches accounts that have not engaged with you yet, so Accounts, Contacts, and Lookalike all work here. Lookalike is only available for this objective. Drive Engagement and Accelerate Pipeline re-engage people who already know you, so Website Audiences is usually the strongest choice, but you get the option to choose Accounts and Contacts as well.

Use the Include / Exclude controls to stop your ad groups from overlapping. If two ad groups target the same accounts, they compete with each other in the auction and your frequency becomes harder to control.

Keep your audience as broad as your targeting allows. Narrow audiences limit delivery and slow down how quickly BidIQ® can learn and optimize.

For Lookalike, your source audience drives the result. A source built from users who converted usually performs better than one built from all site visitors.

Day Parting

Select specific days of the week and specific times of the day for your ads to serve.

Day Parting is useful when you know that your ads will have a greater impact on certain days of the week or times of the day.

Learn more about Day Parting here.

By default, Day Parting is set as automatically run 24/7.

We recommend that you use the default Day Parting Campaign settings to let BidIQ® dynamically optimize how many times your ads appear to the same person.

Frequency Capping

The number of times your ads are displayed to the same person in one day. By default, your Frequency Caps are automatically optimized by BidIQ®, which processes hundreds of variables for each and every user to determine whether or not to bid, and how much, at the time of each potential impression.

Learn more about Frequency Capping here.

By default, your Frequency Caps are automatically optimized by BidIQ®, AdRoll's proprietary real-time bidding algorithm.

We strongly recommend that you use the default Frequency Capping Campaign settings to let BidIQ® dynamically optimize how many times your ads appear to the same person.

Campaign-specific placement Exclusions

If you don't want your ads to appear on certain websites you have the option to configure App and Domain exclusions at the campaign level to control the placements where your ads served.

Campaign-specific exclusions are applied in addition to any configured General Exclusions.

Learn more about campaign-specific placement exclusions here.

By default, the campaigns will target all placements. If you wish to restrict the ads on certain placements, you can exclude them by Domain or App.

We do not recommend exceeding 1000 exclusions to ensure campaign scale and reach.

Environment Exclusions

This setting can be applied at the AdGroup level. You can select which targeting environments to include or exclude:

Desktop: Larger screen real estate for more detailed ad content and different user behavior and intent compared to mobile platforms.
Mobile Web: Broader reach across various websites and lower barrier to entry and often more budget-friendly. Excellent for brand awareness campaigns and contextual targeting.
Mobile Apps: Immersive ad formats like interstitials.

Learn more about Environments here.

By default, we will serve ads on all environments. If you restrict the environments where we serve ads this will impact your campaign reach, costs and performance.