Ad campaigns
Create Google, Meta and TikTok campaigns that arrive paused, steer the controls that matter, and let external edits win.
Open Ads → Campaigns. This page manages real advertising campaigns on Google Ads, Meta and TikTok — creating them, going live, budgets and creatives — while SmileLine keeps the risky levers automated. Campaign management is part of the SEO & Ads add-on; your practice always pays the ad platforms directly.
Two tabs split the list:
- Managed — campaigns SmileLine created or has adopted.
- External — campaigns found in your ad accounts that were created directly in an Ads Manager. Each has an Adopt button.
Every campaign row links to the platform's own Ads Manager — SmileLine never locks you out of the native tools.
Who can do what
Drafting, pausing and creative work need the manage level of the Ads permission group. Anything that starts or raises spend — going live, resuming, budgets, schedules — needs Set campaigns live & change ad spend. Both belong to owners and managers; coordinators and analysts can view campaigns and results.
Campaign types
| Type | What it does |
|---|---|
| Google Search | Text ads on Google searches for your treatments near your practice. |
| Google Performance Max | Google places your images and copy across Search, Maps, YouTube and Gmail. |
| Meta — website bookings | Facebook and Instagram ads that send people to your booking page. |
| Meta — instant forms | Facebook and Instagram ads with an instant enquiry form — no website needed. |
| TikTok Smart+ lead gen | TikTok's automated campaigns with a lead form. Higher minimum budgets. |
Create a campaign
Click New campaign. The wizard walks through seven steps:
Platform — choose one of the campaign types above.
Account & locations — pick the ad account, name the campaign, and set a radius (1–100 km, 10 km by default) around each practice location the campaign should cover.
Services — list the treatments to advertise, e.g. "Dental implants". SmileLine generates the keywords, ad groups and asset structure from them.
Budget — set the daily budget. The wizard shows the resulting monthly projection and requires you to tick I understand roughly this much per month can be spent before continuing.
Audience — an optional age range and an optional target cost per lead. Everything else (placements, bids, audiences) stays automated.
Creatives — the destination URL (not needed for instant forms), plus a headline and description per service, and optionally an approved image from the Creative studio.
Review — check the summary and click Launch paused.
Budget minimums
Each platform has a floor the wizard enforces per day:
| Platform | GBP | USD | EUR |
|---|---|---|---|
| TikTok | £50 | $60 | €55 |
| Meta | £5 | $5 | €5 |
| £5 | $5 | €5 |
TikTok's floor is the platform's own minimum. Meta and Google technically allow less, but below roughly £5 a day the learning phase never completes, so SmileLine holds a practical floor. A practice-level monthly spend cap can also apply — a budget whose projection exceeds it is refused.
Launch paused, go live deliberately
Launching builds the campaign on the platform in a paused state. Nothing spends until someone with publish permission explicitly sets it live. Before launching, SmileLine checks that:
- the platform connection is healthy and carries campaign-management permission — Meta and TikTok may ask for a one-time reconnect to grant it;
- conversion tracking has finished provisioning (it usually takes a few minutes);
- Meta campaigns have a connected Facebook Page;
- every attached creative passes the ad policy check.
When you're ready, click Set live. The confirmation is explicit: "This is the moment spend starts. The campaign begins its learning phase." A previously live campaign shows Resume instead.
Day-to-day controls
The campaign page keeps the useful levers one click away — pausing is always available to managers, while anything that restarts or raises spend asks for publish permission:
- Pause — stops delivery immediately.
- Daily budget — shows the new monthly projection and requires I confirm the monthly projection above before saving.
- Schedule — start and end dates.
- Destination URL and Radius targeting (including the age range).
- Review & apply creative changes — batch your ad text and image edits, review them together, and apply them as one change. Editing live Meta creatives restarts Meta's learning phase, so that batch requires an explicit I understand this restarts Meta's learning phase.
- Optimize on leads / bookings — campaigns normally optimise towards booked consultations; if a small campaign is stuck in learning, switching temporarily to leads gives the platform more signal without raising spend.
Every change is recorded in the campaign's Change history, including changes the platform rejected.
Set in the wizard, fixed after launch: the services advertised and the target cost per lead shape the generated campaign structure, so they can only be edited while the campaign is still a draft.
Never exposed: manual bids, placements and custom audiences. These are the levers that quietly burn budget, so SmileLine leaves them automated — and leaves the door open via the Ads Manager link if you want them anyway.
Adopt an existing campaign
Campaigns you created directly on a platform appear under External after the next sync. Click Adopt to manage one from SmileLine. Adoption changes nothing on the platform — the campaign's current settings simply become the state SmileLine manages from then on.
External edits always win
SmileLine syncs campaign structure hourly. Anything changed in an Ads Manager — a budget, a name, a status — is adopted as the new intended state, never reverted, and the campaign is badged Edited externally. You can always work in both tools without them fighting.
If syncing stops
If a platform keeps rejecting the sync — an expired login, a closed ad account — SmileLine stops retrying rather than hammering the platform, and a warning appears on Campaigns and Spend & results: Data for [platform] stopped syncing. Nothing is lost; the numbers simply stop refreshing while the pause lasts.
Anyone with the manage level can click Resume to restart syncing straight away. If the underlying problem is still there — for example the connection needs a reconnect on the platform page — the retries are used up again and the warning returns.
How managed campaigns optimise
Campaigns SmileLine creates optimise towards booked consultations, powered by conversion feedback — Google gets Booking as the primary goal with Lead secondary, Meta website campaigns optimise on Schedule, and TikTok on the custom Booking event. Instant-form campaigns optimise the platform's native lead event instead.