Most in-app work starts with the deliverable. There’s a tour to build for new features, a banner for your latest webinar, and when a new account signs on they of course will need to see a checklist.

With the release of Campaigns, we want to flip the order of operations. Why start with the message when you should work backwards from the outcome itself? You define the moment your customers need to reach, and Appcues AI recommends the tactics and experiences most likely to get people there. Then, all those smaller pieces under the Campaign get measured against the one set goal from the moment they go live.

Four ways Campaigns change how you work

1. Start with “what needs to happen” vs “what should I build?”

A Campaign is a goal that starts with a Key Moment: the real, measurable action you want your customers to do. 

A Key Moment pairs events with conditions, which can be built by hand in Settings or through Appcues AI. In the Campaign we ran to move customers into the new Appcues, we defined our Key Moment as ‘account is activated’.  This requires two events at the account level, so even if two different teammates take separate actions, both together still count as the account meeting our criteria. 

Next, you set your objective: 

• Whether you want to reach a number or hold at one
• What you’re measuring
• An optional target
• Your measurement window

Ours was 75% of eligible accounts activated, measured monthly.

Then, you work through the change with Appcues AI. After some tweaking and a few rounds of back and forth, Berni had a full Campaign built. Appcues AI acted as a strategist that asked her questions she might have missed on her own. And since it already knows your product, users, and your business, it can help with the thinking and do the building from one place.

2. Your reporting shows impact, not just activity

Every Campaign comes with an auto-generated dashboard. It reads your objective and shows you:

• Objective success: users who saw your experiences vs. users who didn't, so you can tell whether the work is actually making a difference
• Reach and conversion: whether people are seeing it, and whether the ones who see it convert
• Conversion by tactic: my personal favorite chart, full stop

Let me explain why conversion by tactic is my favorite. In our activation Campaign, the dashboards tactic was converting better than the rest. Combined with other signals, that told me customers are really excited about analytics, which changed where I'm pointing my marketing next. It also showed me which tactics need some love.

Instead of "we shipped twelve experiences and people clicked on them," you can say "here's how far we've moved activation, and here's the approach that's moving it most." As Berni put it during the session, impact is what our CEO asks about.

3. Marketing and Product finally work from the same numbers

Marketing and Product have always wanted different things from the same customers, and usually from different data. Campaigns put us on one dataset with one definition of success.

Berni described it from the product side:

"I've now given Elana the keys to do the things she needs to do without needing to ask for data access or wait for Engineering."

Product gets the confidence that Marketing is driving toward the outcomes that matter. I get the access to do it, plus enough shared evidence to bring real recommendations back to the Product team. Because we're both looking at the same numbers, we skip the argument about whose numbers are right and go straight to what to do next.

4. Every Campaign makes the next one smarter

Campaigns carry context forward, so you aren't starting from zero each time.

• Every Campaign, tactic and experience has a brief: the objective, product context and business context you agreed on with Appcues AI, and you can edit it any time. I check mine constantly. It keeps me honest about what a tactic is supposed to do, so I don't wander off building things that belong somewhere else.
• AI context lives in Settings. Things that rarely change (who you are, your business, your common goals) go in once. The + button in any chat adds brand guidelines, tone docs or an existing brief on top of that.
• Key Moments aren't tied to a single campaign. I reuse the same ones to build Segments and Dashboards, which makes it much easier to see how a Tactic is landing with a specific group of users.

It also extends past Appcues. My Campaign brief skill in Claude drafts the full program brief, with Appcues as a primary channel, and writes the prompt I paste into Appcues AI to build the Campaign. Because our MCP server can now write as well as read, I can have Claude create the recommended experiences, and they land in the Tactic as drafts I review before anything goes live. And webinar follow-up, my ProCues newsletter and a customer’s third login all end up sounding like they came from the same brain (aka mine), because they're working from the same context.

How a Campaign is built

There are three layers:

• The Campaign: the outcome, measured by a key moment
• The Tactics: the approaches that get users there. A simple Campaign might have one. Our activation Campaign has several, from welcome and orientation to publishing Dashboards.
• The Experiences: the flows, banners, checklists and other experiences that work toward each tactic's milestone

One thing I love: Key Moments live outside any single Campaign. I use the same ones to build Segments and Dashboards, which makes it way easier to dig into how a Tactic is landing with a specific group of users.

Tactics show how groups of experiences are pulling their weight toward the big goal, so you're no longer stuck choosing between the 30,000-foot view and the single-tooltip view.

Click into a Tactic and you get a visual canvas of every experience in it, each with its status. My welcome and orientation Tactic has nine Experiences. I can see at a glance which ones are live, then jump straight into the editor to change one.

Get started

Already an Appcues customer? Your account isn't empty. Before launch, our support team looked at the experiences live in each account, made their best guess at what you were trying to achieve, and built starter Campaigns and dashboards for you. You don't have to rebuild anything to get Campaign-level reporting. You can tie existing experiences to a Campaign, build new ones, or do both.

Go to app.appcues.com (or use the menu in the legacy Studio), open the Campaign our team built for you, and try one of these:

• "Tie my existing experiences to a goal that unifies them, so I can see how they're working together."
• "Help me build out a campaign for [use case]."
• "Audit my always-on experiences (onboarding, maintenance banners, outage notices) and organize them under the goals they serve."
• "Start a new campaign from the key moment [X]. Here's the context: …"

Send me what you build. I'd love to see it.

Not an Appcues customer yet? Watch the full Cued In recording to see a live Campaign end to end, or book a demo and we'll build one around your own goal.

Also new since the last Cued In

The team's been cooking. A few things shipped since our analytics session:

• User journeys: the Sankey pathing Berni teased last time is here. Pick a starting, ending or included page and see the paths people actually take, drop-offs and all. Pages and page groups come pre-built, so no tagging required. You can hide the noise and save views.
• Explain this chart: one click and Appcues AI tells you what a chart means, which trends are worth noticing, and whether the chart itself needs tweaking. Great for team dashboards your CEO is going to look at.
• Downloads: export any chart as a CSV or PNG for your reporting decks.
• View users or accounts: see exactly who's behind the numbers in a chart, plus their top events. 

Next up: agentic creation

Our next Cued In is Wednesday, October 21. We're going deep on agentic creation: the routine work the agents can take off your plate, and the bigger things they can do in Appcues AI and through our MCP server in Claude. Send us your questions ahead of time. Register →