Campaign Builder
Build your first campaign
Before you start, have these ready
The product you are advertising, your videos or images uploaded to the Library, and the texts you want to run. You can do all of it inside the wizard, but having it ready makes this a five-minute job.
Step 1 — Campaign
What you are advertising, how much a day, and when it starts.
| Field in Shopdeck | What goes in it, and where to find it |
|---|---|
| Campaign name | What it will be called in Meta or TikTok. A pattern like AURORA | GEO Test | ABO 1 keeps your account readable and makes the name searchable later. |
| Short name | A one-word tag used inside ad set and ad names, so a long campaign name does not repeat everywhere. |
| Search a product in Shopify | Type part of the product name and pick it from the list. This sets the landing page the ads point at, and it is what later links your ad spend back to that product in the dashboard. |
| Break-even per sale (€) | Optional. What one sale must bring in for this campaign to pay for itself. Shown back to you on the check screen so you can sanity-check the budget against it. |
The budget choice
Two options, and the difference matters more than the amount.
- Budget per ad set (ABO) — you set an amount and every ad set gets that amount. Four ad sets at €20 is €80 a day. Use this when you are testing: each ad set gets a fair, equal chance instead of the platform starving the ones it decides early are weaker.
- One campaign budget (CBO) — you set one amount for the whole campaign and the platform decides how to divide it. Use this when you already know what works and want the platform to push it.
The total is shown as you type, so you always see what you are actually committing per day before you get anywhere near the build button.
Start date and time
Start date and Start time (Brussels). It opens on tomorrow at 01:00, and that hour is not arbitrary: TikTok’s reporting day begins at 01:00 Brussels summer time, so starting then makes day one of the campaign the same as day one in the figures.
Whatever you choose, choose the start of a day. A campaign that starts at two in the afternoon has half a day’s spend in its first “day”, and every comparison you make afterwards is against a day that was never a full one.
Two rules the form enforces
The start has to be at least five minutes in the future, and the total daily budget has to stay under your cap. Both are refusals, not warnings — the build stops rather than going ahead with something you did not mean.
Step 2 — Ad sets
This is the part that changed, and the part that matters
An ad set is a thing you build yourself. It has its own countries, its own language, its own videos and its own texts. Shopdeck does not split or merge them for you — what you define is exactly what gets built.
At the top is a row of cards, one per ad set, plus a button to add another. Click a card to edit that ad set; everything below the row belongs to whichever one is selected. A tick on a card means it has everything it needs.
Name it
Ad set name — something that says what this one is testing. Emotion A, German-speaking, UGC. It ends up in the platform, so make it readable there.
Pick its countries
Right under the selected ad set. Tick three countries and those three are in this ad set, together. Add a second ad set with three other countries and those are separate. That is the whole model.
Pick the language of its copy
Language of the copy — one language per ad set, because the texts inside it are written in one language. If you want German copy for Germany and English for Ireland, that is two ad sets, and that is the point of them being separate.
Add the creatives
Load a folder from the Library, or pick individual videos and images. These belong to this ad set only.
Write the texts
Headlines, primary texts and a description. You can load a saved template, or type one text and apply it across the fields at once.
Never leave the description empty
Meta falls back to your page title when it is blank, which reads like nobody wrote it. The wizard says so under the field, and it is worth listening to.
Repeat for as many ad sets as you want. The usual reasons to split: a different language, a different angle, a different awareness stage, a different creative format. More on that on Ad sets, markets and copy.
Step 3 — Audience
Settings that apply to the whole campaign, not to one ad set.
| Field in Shopdeck | What goes in it, and where to find it |
|---|---|
| Call to action | One button for the entire campaign — Shop now, Learn more and so on. There is deliberately no per-country choice here; that was more confusing than useful. |
| Visibility | Where the ads may appear. |
| Shown as | Which account the ads run under. On TikTok this is the identity; on Meta it is your page and Instagram account. |
Age is set to 21 and over by default rather than 18, deliberately. Everything else follows the platform’s own defaults unless you change it.
Step 4 — Check and build
The summary. How many ad sets, how many ads, and the total daily budget with your cap beside it. Read it, because this is the last screen before anything real happens.
- Total daily spend — does it match what you intended?
- Number of ads — a surprising number here usually means an ad set has more creatives than you thought.
- The landing page — it is checked before building, but look at it anyway.
The button says what it will do, including the word paused. Press it and the build starts, showing each step as it completes.
You are done when
When it finishes, the build shows done (paused). Shopdeck has read the result back from the platform and confirmed everything exists and everything is off. Now go and look at it in Meta or TikTok before you switch it on — see After the build.