Campaign routes

This article shows how to sell different traffic differently inside one campaign, using the ordered steps on the Distribution tab. Use it when your own native traffic and a partner's traffic should not go to the same buyers in the same order.

If one strategy still covers all your traffic, you do not need this yet. Start with Choose how leads are distributed.

What a step is

The Distribution tab holds one card, How leads get sold. It is an ordered list of steps, and it reads top to bottom in exactly the order the engine evaluates.

Every lead is checked against the steps from the top. The first step that matches decides how that lead is sold. A lead that matches nothing falls through to the last step, Everything else, which is the campaign's own distribution setting and can never be deleted or reordered.

Each step owns four things independently:

Two steps can therefore run completely different programs on one campaign, on one set of fields, with one supplier API.

Prerequisites

• A campaign with buyers attached on the Buyers tab
• At least one supplier, and traffic sources if you route by channel
• A clear rule in words, for example "leads from my own landing pages go to the highest bidder, everything from the partner keeps the ladder"

Add a step

1. Go to Campaigns, open the campaign, and open the Distribution tab.
2. On the How leads get sold card, click Add a step.
3. Give the step a name. It appears on the lead timeline, in exports, and in rejection insights, so name it after the traffic rather than the strategy.
4. Under 1 · Which leads, pick the suppliers this step should catch, then narrow by traffic source and channel if you need to. Leave a level unset to mean any.
5. Under 2 · How to sell them, choose the strategy.
6. Set the buyer list for this step. Drag for try order on Waterfall, or set each buyer's share on Weighted. Remove buyers that should not compete here.
7. Set Minimum price if this step needs its own floor. Leave it empty to inherit the campaign minimum.
8. Drag the step into position. The first match wins, so the most specific step goes highest.
9. Click Save.

Simulate before you send traffic

Click Show which strategy each source gets at the bottom of the card. The simulator maps every supplier and traffic source on the campaign to the step it will take, so you can confirm the routing without sending a real lead.

Run it again after any reorder. Moving a step changes which leads reach the steps below it.

Conditions

The simple picker covers the common case: choose suppliers, then optionally traffic sources and channels. Values come from searchable lists of what the campaign actually has, so you pick real names rather than typing ids.

Switch to Advanced when the simple picker cannot express the rule, for example matching on a lead payload field. Switch back with Use simple picker.

A step with no conditions at all matches every lead. That is legal, and occasionally what you want, but everything ordered below it is then unreachable. The card marks those steps as shadowed so you can see it rather than discover it in production.

The buyer list

Until you edit it, a step's buyer list is a live view of every active buyer on the campaign, and a step you never customised behaves exactly as it did before you added it. Your first edit fixes the list. From then on, a buyer you add to the campaign later is surfaced with a prompt rather than joining that step silently.

The list header tells you what order means for the strategy you picked: tried top-down for Waterfall, share of volume by weight for Weighted, ranked by price for Highest Bidder.

Paused buyers carry the same red mask they have on the Buyers tab, so a buyer that is off reads identically in both places.

Ping/post campaigns

On a ping/post campaign the step is decided during the ping and pinned for the post. That keeps bids ranked by the strategy that produced them, rather than re-deciding the route after prices have already come back.

Expected result

The How leads get sold card shows your steps in the order you intend, the simulator maps each source to the step you expected, and a test lead's timeline carries a Routed by row naming that step.

Troubleshooting

• Every lead takes the same step. A step above it has no conditions, or its conditions are broader than you think. Check for the shadowed marker and run the simulator.
• A lead fell through to Everything else. The timeline says Campaign default, no rule matched. Nothing above it matched that lead's supplier or channel.
• A buyer never competes. Confirm it is in that step's buyer list, and that it is active, in schedule, and under cap. A step's buyer list does not override eligibility.
• The route changed after you added a buyer. A step whose list you never edited follows the campaign's active buyers. Edit the list to pin it.
• A buyer integration test ignored the route. Test runs are always waterfall, so the routed strategy does not execute. Test with a real lead when the route is what you are checking.

Tiered Bidding

Campaigns already running Tiered Bidding keep working exactly as they are. It cannot be chosen for a new campaign or a new step. Use Advanced instead, which expresses the same tiers idea with named tiers you configure individually.