When you work with Outbound.com to manage your marketing efforts, you’ll encounter two types of “campaigns”:
These two concepts work together but are not the same. Below, we’ll explore how they differ, why they exist separately, and what it means to publish your Outbound Campaign so it becomes a campaign on the ad channel.
An Outbound Campaign is best understood as the blueprint for your advertising efforts. It contains everything you need to run ads—creative assets, targeting parameters, budgets, and landing page details—without immediately pushing anything live. Think of it as a central workspace where you can:
Because the campaign in Outbound is not directly connected to any specific ad platform while you build it, you have a safe place to ideate, revise, and prepare your advertising content without risking unintentional ad spend or compliance errors.
An Ad Channel Campaign lives on platforms such as Google Ads or Meta Ads. This is where your ads are truly served to potential customers, and where billing occurs for impressions, clicks, or conversions (depending on the ad model). Key attributes of an ad channel campaign include:
In short, the ad channel campaign is where the rubber meets the road—it’s the place from which your ads become visible to the world and begin generating real results.
Publishing is the process by which your carefully prepared Outbound Campaign is transferred or replicated into an Ad Channel Campaign—effectively turning your blueprint into a live marketing effort. Conceptually, you can think of it as: