This guide takes you from a completed installation to a live campaign, from asking what your users do to reading whether your campaign changed it. You work through it with Appcues AI, which helps you understand your users, plans the campaign with you, and builds the experiences in it.

Prerequisites

• Appcues installed and verified. See Set up Appcues.
• Context rules and a default theme in place, so what Appcues AI builds fits your product. See Set up Appcues AI and your theme.
• An editor role to create campaigns and experiences, and a publisher or admin role to publish them.

Step 1: Ask what your users are doing

Start on Home and ask Appcues AI about your users before you decide what to build. For example:

• "Where do trial users drop off before they create their first project?"
• "Which pages do new users visit in their first week?"
• "How many users who signed up last month came back the following week?"

Appcues AI answers from the events, properties, and page views Appcues has collected, and can build a dashboard from its answer so you can keep watching that number.

If your installation is new, Appcues may not have enough data yet. You can still ask Appcues AI about your product. Share your product's URL or attach a spec, and ask "What should a new user do in their first week?" or "Where would trial users get stuck?" Come back to your data once it's been flowing for a week or two.

See Write prompts for Appcues AI.

Step 2: Think about the outcome you want

Every campaign is measured against an objective, and every objective is built on a Key Moment. You don't need either one worked out before you start. When you plan the campaign, Appcues AI asks what you're trying to change, suggests a Key Moment and an objective from your answers, and creates them for you.

What helps is a rough idea of what success looks like, such as "more trial users get to their first project." Use what you learned in step 1. The rest of this step explains what Appcues AI will propose, so you can tell whether it fits.

Key Moments

A Key Moment is the point in your product that shows a user is getting value, such as publishing a first project or inviting a teammate. Specific behaviors work better than general activity like logging in, which doesn't tell you whether anything changed.

A Key Moment is built from events your product sends, from conditions on the user, or from both:

• Anchored to one or more events, it fires every time any of them happens. Use this to count repeat behavior, like projects published.
• Built from conditions only, it fires once per user, the first time the conditions are true. Use this for one-time milestones, like "user has sent more than 10 messages."

Once a Key Moment exists, you can reuse it in other objectives, in targeting, and on dashboards. You'll find all of them in Settings > Key Moments.

The behavior has to be something Appcues receives. If Appcues AI can't find a matching event, it tells you. Ask your developer to track it, or create a Click to Track event on web, which includes past activity so you don't have to wait for data. See Create a Key Moment.

Objectives

The objective is the measurable result around the Key Moment, such as "40% of new trial accounts publish their first project within 14 days." Appcues AI proposes each part, and you can change any of them:

• Measure: what's counted. Unique users, event count, a conversion rate against all users or against another Key Moment, or events per session.
• Direction: Achieve to move the measure toward a number, or Maintain to hold it there.
• Target: the threshold that counts as a hit. "At most" turns it into a reduction, such as fewer support tickets.
• Period: Daily, Weekly, or Monthly, for unique users and event count objectives.

Measure the outcome you care about, not whether users finished your experience. A high completion rate doesn't tell you whether users went on to reach the Key Moment.

A campaign has exactly one objective. Each tactic can also have its own, so you can see how much one approach contributes. You can adjust any objective later from the campaign's Settings tab, or by asking Appcues AI. See Write briefs and set objectives.

Step 3: Plan the campaign with Appcues AI

1. Click Campaigns, then click Create campaign. Or ask Appcues AI on Home, for example "Create a campaign to get more trial users to create their first project." A conversation with Appcues AI opens.
2. Answer the discovery questions. Appcues AI asks about the outcome, where it happens in your product, and why it matters to your business, and fills in the campaign brief from your answers. To skip the questions, paste or attach a brief when you start.
3. Review the Key Moment and objective. Appcues AI checks whether an existing Key Moment matches your outcome, creates one from a matching event if not, and proposes a measure and target. Ask it to change anything that doesn't fit.
4. Review the proposed structure. Appcues AI lays out the campaign, its tactics, and the experiences it plans to build. Nothing is created until you approve.
5. Approve the plan. Appcues AI creates the campaign, the objective, the tactics, and a first version of each experience. It builds some experiences directly and opens the builder for you to finish others.

For each step in detail, see Create a campaign.

Step 4: Review and publish the experiences

Open each experience from the campaign's Tactics tab before you publish it.

1. Click Design and check the content, copy, and buttons. Ask Appcues AI to change anything, or edit it yourself in the builder.
2. Click Settings and check the targeting:

• Audience: start narrow for a first launch, such as trial users or users in their first 14 days. Click Calculate audience size to see how many users match.
• Pages and Environment: click Test URL targeting and enter a page where the experience should appear.
• Trigger and Frequency: decide whether it shows when a user reaches the page or when an event occurs, and how often.

3. Test it on yourself. Target only yourself or an internal segment, open the page, and confirm the experience shows and the buttons work. See Preview and test experiences.
4. Set the audience back to your real users.
5. Publish. Ask Appcues AI to publish the experience. It shows the experience's targeting and asks you to confirm. The tactic shows a Live badge once one of its experiences is published.

Give each experience a name that says what it does and who it's for, such as "Trial onboarding: first project modal." Your team will look for it by name later.

Step 5: Read the results and adjust

Open the campaign and click the Dashboard tab. The top row shows how many users your campaign reached and how many of them went on to reach the objective's Key Moment. The chart named after your objective tracks its measure over time against your target, shown as a dashed line. Objective success: exposed vs. unexposed compares users who saw your experiences with users who didn't. To have a chart explained, open its ⋮ menu and click Explain this chart.

Give the campaign a few days to collect data, then check:

• Reach matches the audience you expected. Low reach usually means targeting is too narrow or the experience isn't triggering.
• Conversion rate is moving toward your target. This card divides by reach, so it can differ from your objective's own figure if the objective uses another Key Moment as its denominator.
• Drop-off shows how many users saw your content and still didn't complete the objective.

Then act on what you see. Check the Recommendations page for issues and opportunities Appcues AI found. Widen the audience once results look right. Add a tactic for users the first one doesn't reach, such as users who dismissed your first experience or came back days later, and give it its own objective to see what it adds.

See Campaign and tactic dashboards and Review and act on recommendations.

If something isn't working

Appcues AI keeps asking questions. This is expected. It grounds the campaign in a specific behavior and reason before building. Answer its questions rather than repeating your request.

The objective has no metric. No event matched the behavior you described. Track the event first, then ask Appcues AI to set the objective again.

The experience isn't showing.

• Confirm it's published, not a draft.
• Click Calculate audience size. If it's 0, your audience rules don't match anyone.
• Click Test URL targeting with the page you're on.
• In Settings > Web, check that the domain shows Installed.
• Open the Appcues debugger and check that your test user matches the targeting.

The dashboard shows placeholders instead of numbers. Most cards need an objective on the campaign. See Write briefs and set objectives. Reach stays at 0 until at least one experience is published.

Contact support

If you can't resolve the issue, collect the following and contact support@appcues.com:

• The campaign name and the experience name and ID. The experience ID is at the bottom of its Settings tab.
• A screenshot or screen recording of the issue
• The URL of the page where the experience should appear
• A screenshot of the Appcues debugger for a test user on that page