Campaign Tracker SOP

1 · What this is

One record of every campaign the college buys, where each piece of it runs, what it cost, who approved it, when it expires, and what it produced.

Before this system, a billboard contract lived in one inbox, its proof-of-installation photograph in another, the invoice in Business Office email, and the expiry date in nobody's calendar. Boards ran past their contracts, creative stayed up after the event it advertised, and answering "what did we spend with Lamar last year" meant a week of searching.

The tracker puts all of that on one campaign record, breaks the campaign into its individual placements (each billboard face, each TV flight, each ad set), attaches the vendor, the money and the documents, and then chases the dates itself: reminders go to the owner, the assigned staff and the vendor before every install, proof deadline, expiry, removal and renewal, and keep going until someone marks them resolved.

2 · Roles

Every person signs in. A role decides what they can do; a department or a vendor narrows what they can see. The full permission matrix is on the /users screen.

3 · The campaign lifecycle

People move a campaign through the first two stages and the last one. The four in the middle move on their own, by the dates, when the nightly job runs.

Paused, Cancelled and Archived are always set by a person, from the status box on the campaign. Archived campaigns disappear from day-to-day lists but stay in every report.

4 · Plan a campaign

Campaign Manager Staff Department Requester · /campaigns/new

1. Name it the way it will be reported. "Fall 2026 Enrollment — Billboards" reads in a spending report; "Lamar stuff" does not. One campaign per objective per season; the channels go on the placements underneath it.
2. Set the objective, department and audience. These are the three ways every report groups spend. A campaign with no department is a campaign nobody will claim at budget time.
3. Choose the owner. The owner receives every reminder for this campaign. Add assigned staff further down for anyone else who should.
4. Primary channel and vendor. The channel is what the campaign is mostly; the vendor is who is invoicing. Both can differ on individual placements.
5. Dates. Start and end drive the status engine, the calendar and timeline views, the "ending soon" tile and the launch/expiry reminders. Leave them blank only while the campaign is genuinely undated.
6. Money. Budget is what was allocated. Contracted is what the vendor agreement says. Actual is what was finally invoiced. Enter the PO number as soon as Purchasing issues it.
7. Goals and KPIs. Write the goal in words, then put numbers on impressions, clicks, conversions and cost per conversion. The Results panel scores the campaign against these later; a campaign with no targets can only be described, never judged.
8. Web tracking. Paste the landing page. Fill in the UTM fields (utm_source = where the click comes from, utm_medium = the kind of ad, utm_campaign = a short slug such as fall_enrollment_2026). The tracking URL is built for you on save; that is the link that goes on every ad.
9. Save. Placements, documents, invoices and results attach once the campaign exists.

5 · Approvals

Marketing Administrator approves · /approvals and the panel on every campaign

Four kinds of approval exist, and Settings decides which are required by default:

1. The requester submits from the Approvals panel on the campaign, ticking the kinds needed and adding a note. Administrators are emailed; the campaign moves to Pending approval.
2. The approver decides from the dashboard's "Awaiting approval" tile, the /approvals queue, or the campaign itself. Approve, or reject with a reason — a rejection without a reason is refused.
3. When every open request is approved the campaign becomes Approved (or Scheduled if it already has a start date). Any rejection sends it back to Draft and emails the requester and owner.

Every request and decision is kept on the campaign with who, when and why. Re-requesting after a rejection starts a fresh request; the old one stays in the history.

6 · Placements & billboards

Campaign Manager Staff · /placements, /billboards, or Add placement on a campaign or vendor

One placement is one bought unit of media. A campaign with six Lamar boards has six placements. A TV buy with a morning flight and an evening flight has two. A Meta campaign with three ad sets has three. Each carries its own dates, cost, status, proof and reminders — that is the whole point.

1. Kind. Traditional or digital billboard, TV, radio/iHeart, Meta, Google, web, email, print, other. Billboards get the location fields.
2. Name it so a stranger could find it. For a board: the vendor's panel name or the cross streets and face — "US-77 & Boca Chica, west face". For a flight: station and daypart.
3. Billboard details: the vendor's board number, address, city, latitude and longitude (from the vendor's ride sheet — this is what puts it on the map), type, direction faced, size, illuminated, weekly impressions.
4. Dates. Installation, display start, display end, removal. For digital boards, the creative change date for the next slide. For any placement with a renewal or reservation deadline, the renewal date. Proof due defaults to three days after installation.
5. Creative currently displayed in words — "Fall registration, 'Start Here'" — so the removal reminder says what is coming down, not just where.
6. Cost and whether it is flat, per month, per week or per 4-week period. The total over the display window is calculated.
7. Status. Planned → Contracted → Installed → Live → (Proof due / Expiring) → Removed. Like campaigns, the middle ones move by the dates.

The Boards view (/billboards, the default there) is the one to keep open for digital boards: one card per physical face — Lamar → Digital billboard → board #4471 — showing what is on it now, what is next, a schedule bar of every booking and the full list underneath. Book this board starts a new placement with the face's number, location and rate already filled in, so a second campaign on the same board takes thirty seconds.

The map (/billboards?view=map) shows every board with coordinates; open a vendor and the map filters to their boards. Gold markers are traditional, blue are digital.

7 · Money & invoices

Campaign Manager Marketing Administrator · the Money panel on a campaign

Three numbers live on the campaign and every report reads them the same way:

Invoices are logged individually under the Money panel: number, PO, dates, amount, status (expected → received → approved → paid; or disputed / void) and which placement they cover. Open invoices appear on the vendor's profile and in the Invoices report, and the invoice due reminder chases them 7 days before, 1 day before and 7 days after the due date. When the last invoice is paid, put the total in Actual.

8 · Close a campaign out

Campaign owner · the Status box on the campaign

A campaign is done when its end date has passed and the paperwork is in. The wrap-up reminder (7, 14 and 30 days after the end) keeps asking until it is.

1. Final results. Pull the last numbers from Meta, Google, GA4, the station or the vendor and record them (section 12). Check the Results panel against the goals.
2. Final invoices. Every invoice logged and paid; Actual cost entered.
3. Documents. Proof photographs on every placement; final creative; the vendor's proof-of-performance report if they issue one.
4. Placements removed. Every board marked Removed with its removal date; nothing still says Live.
5. Set the status to Completed and tick final analytics, invoices and documents are in. That silences the wrap-up reminder and moves the campaign to "Recently completed" on the dashboard.

9 · Reminders

Configured once by an administrator in /settings#reminders; delivered by the nightly job to the bell icon and by email.

Twenty-two triggers, each with a schedule and a recipient list. The defaults:

What to do with one. The bell shows your open reminders. Click through to the record, do the thing, then Resolve. Resolving closes it for everyone who received it — the vendor's copy included. "Read" just marks it seen. A reminder past its date and still unresolved is an overdue action and shows red on the dashboard until someone deals with it.

Manual notifications. Any campaign or vendor screen has a Notify panel: pick owner, staff, vendor or other addresses, write the message, send. It is logged with the rest.

10 · Vendors & the portal

Marketing Administrator Campaign Manager · /vendors

1. Add the vendor with its category, primary contact, account number, payment terms and contract dates. Contract end drives the contract-expiring reminder.
2. Add every contact who should get reminders — the account executive for deadlines, the operations desk for installs — each with the gets reminders flag. Reminders to a vendor go to every flagged address at once.
3. Upload the contract, the W-9 and the rate card under Documents. They stay outside the web root and only signed-in accounts can download them.
4. Bulk-load a list from a spreadsheet with Import CSV (section 18).

The vendor profile is the place to answer "what do we have with Lamar": active, scheduled and previous campaigns; every board and its proof; outstanding invoices; spend by fiscal year; every upcoming deadline; and a performance panel — proof on file versus late, and disputed invoices.

11 · Documents

Show the artwork. Upload the creative on a placement with the type Creative file and it becomes the thumbnail on the Boards view, the placement lists and the campaign; upload it on the campaign and it becomes the campaign's cover image on the cards, the dashboard and the Creative gallery on the campaign page. A photograph of the board installed goes in as Proof of installation.

Campaigns, placements, vendors and events all take attachments — creative files, contracts, quotes, invoices, purchase orders, proof photographs, screenshots, analytics reports, tax documents. Pick the right type when uploading: proof and creative on a placement have special meaning (section 6); invoices and contracts show up in the vendor views.

• Up to 40 MB a file. PDF, images, Office files, video, audio, zip, AI/EPS/PSD.
• Files are stored under a random name outside the web root and served only to signed-in accounts that can see the record they belong to.
• Replacing a file: upload the new one, remove the old one. Both events are in the record's activity trail.

12 · Results & analytics

Campaign Manager Staff · the Results panel on a campaign, /metrics

Results are counts for a period: impressions, reach, clicks, video views, engagements, conversions, sessions, users, new users, page views, button clicks, form submissions, applications/registrations, and cost. Rates — CTR, CPC, CPM, cost per conversion, frequency, engagement rate — are never typed in; the tracker computes them from the counts so a report can never disagree with its inputs.

Three ways in:

1. By hand. Record results by hand on the campaign or page: one row per platform per period (a week, a month, the whole flight). Good for a station's affidavit or a vendor's proof-of-performance.
2. Upload a CSV or Excel export from Meta Ads Manager, Google Ads, GA4, iHeart — /metrics/import. The column matcher recognises the platforms' own headings (Link clicks, Amount spent, Results, Impr., Total users…). Choose the campaign on upload if the file does not name it.
3. Connect the platform (Settings → Integrations). Google Analytics 4 pulls sessions, users, page views, engagement and key events for every tracked page — the whole site plus sections such as /news, /alumni and /wtce — nightly and on demand. Meta pulls campaign-level results matched by name or utm_campaign. Google Ads, YouTube, SocialPilot and email follow.

/metrics charts the month-by-month trend (impressions, clicks, conversions), the breakdown by campaign, platform, placement, page, month or data source, and reported spend by platform and by month; compares up to four campaigns side by side; and each campaign's Results panel has its own trend chart. The campaign's Results panel scores it against the KPI targets from section 4.

13 · Websites & landing pages

/pages

Every page a campaign sends people to gets a record: name, URL, kind (website, landing, splash, form), the campaign it belongs to, its dates, the tracking codes installed on it (GA4 property, Meta pixel, Google Ads tag, GTM container) and the utm_campaign to match. Sessions, users, engagement, button clicks, form submissions and conversions are recorded against the page, by month, and roll up to the campaign.

Create the page record before the campaign launches, so the first week's traffic has somewhere to land.

14 · Content: articles, stories, spotlights

Staff Campaign Manager Department Requester (pitches) · /content

Campaigns are what the college buys; content is what it makes: news articles, TSC Stories, Alumni/Staff/Student Spotlights, press releases, Monthly Reels, photo stories. Each has its own workflow and its own deadlines, and once published on tsc.edu its views come back from Google Analytics.

1. Pitch it: New story — working title, kind, the angle, the subject, the department, and which campaign or event it supports.
2. Assign it — author (staff account) or an outside writer, photographer, draft due date, publish date, and where it will run (tsc.edu news, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, newsletter, press, print, digital board slide).
3. Work the board. /content opens as a board with a column per stage; late drafts show red. The calendar shows publish dates (solid) and draft deadlines (dashed).
4. Attach the photos and graphics under Documents; images show in a gallery.
5. Publish: set the status, paste the tsc.edu URL. A tsc.edu address is registered as a tracked page automatically and GA4 brings back its views, sessions and users.

15 · Partners: memberships & sponsorships

Marketing Administrator Campaign Manager Staff Department Requester (requests) · /partners

Not everything the college pays for is advertising. Chamber of Commerce dues, a table at the Harlingen chamber banquet, sponsoring a school district's college night, a donation to a nonprofit gala — these are partnerships. Each has an organization behind it, a cost, a list of what TSC gets (logo on the banner, eight seats, a half-page ad) and a list of what TSC owes (the logo file by a date, the ad artwork, the names of the guests).

Two things to know apart: the organization (the chamber itself, kept once under /partners/orgs with its contact and member number) and the membership or sponsorship (one row per term or per event, so dues and sponsorship history stack up under the organization year after year).

1. Add the organization once — /partners/orgs → New organization: name, type (chamber, school district, nonprofit, civic, government…), contact, member number. You can also type a new organization straight into the sponsorship form and it is created for you.
2. A membership: New sponsorship / membership, kind Membership / dues, term start and end, the amount, and the renewal decision by date. Reminders go to the TSC owner at 60, 30, 14 and 7 days. When the time comes, Renew for next year copies it forward a year (the year in the name is bumped) and marks the old term completed. A term that ends with no renewal goes Lapsed on its own unless you tick renews automatically.
3. A sponsorship: kind Event sponsorship (or table, ad, in-kind, donation, scholarship), the event date, the level (Presenting, Gold, Table of 8), the amount, then fill in Benefits received and What TSC must provide. Set the artwork due date — that is the one people miss — and it reminds at 7, 3 and 1 day and nags the day after.
4. Attach the paperwork — sponsorship agreement, membership certificate, invoice — under Documents. Photos from the event show in a gallery.
5. Department requests. A Department Requester sees Request a sponsorship; it lands as Requested and shows on the marketing dashboard until someone approves or declines it.

16 · Broadcasts: live games & recordings

Marketing Administrator Campaign Manager Staff · /broadcasts

A television placement is a spot the college buys. A broadcast is a whole game or show that a network carries — Scorpions baseball televised live by Televisa, streamed live by Televisa and Rio Sports Live, and posted to YouTube afterwards. Broadcasts keep the schedule of what aired, who carried it, the score, the audience, which TSC spots ran during it, and — the part that used to get lost — the links to the recordings.

1. Set the outlets up as vendors once. Televisa, Rio Sports Live, iHeart: under /vendors with category TV / radio. They then appear in every network / streamer pick-list, and each vendor's page lists everything it carried.
2. Add the game: New broadcast — title ("Scorpions vs. Coastal Bend — Men's basketball"), kind (live game, TV show, news segment, special), sport, opponent, home or away, venue, air date and time, and who is carrying it live (television, live stream, radio). Season fills itself from the date (August starts a new one). Link it to the campaign whose spots run during the game and to the event on the calendar if there is one.
3. Before it airs it sits under Coming up and reminds the campaign owner and the network 7 days, 1 day and the day of.
4. After it airs it flips to Aired on its own. Record the result, attendance, the viewers the network reported, and how many TSC spots ran.
5. Add the recording. When Televisa or Rio Sports Live posts the game, paste the YouTube link under Who carried it & where to watch it as a Full recording (or highlights, a clip, a photo gallery). The thumbnail appears on the card; ▶ Watch the recording opens it. Until a link is added the game sits under Missing a recording and nudges at 3, 7 and 14 days. Type in the view count from YouTube now and then — Save view counts — and the totals roll up to the list and the report.
6. Next game: open the last one and click Another like this — the sport, venue and outlets come pre-filled; change the opponent and the date.

17 · Events calendar

Staff Department Requester · /events

Institutional, community, recruitment, athletic and promotional events, in month, week, day and list views. Each event carries its date, time, location, organizer, contact, department, audience, the campaign promoting it, the assigned staff member, what it needs from Marketing and the deadline for that. The promotion deadline gets its own reminders.

• Adding one checks for duplicates (same name, same date ±1 day) before saving.
• The college calendar comes in with one click: /events/import → Pull from tsc.edu. It reads the public calendar at www.tsc.edu/events for a date range, sorts entries into deadlines and real events, and drops them into the normal preview so duplicates are caught. Pull it again each month; anything already in the calendar is flagged. Tick skip academic deadlines to leave out the sixty-odd "last day to withdraw" entries.
• Any other spreadsheet imports the same way — section 18.
• Export .ics to put the calendar, or one event, into Outlook or Google Calendar.
• Attach the flyer, the run-of-show or the social graphics under Documents.

18 · Spreadsheet imports

Events, vendors and results all import the same way, from .csv or .xlsx, and nothing is written until the last step:

1. Download the template from the import screen if you want the exact layout — or use your own file; headings can be in any order and any wording.
2. Upload.
3. Map columns. The tracker guesses from the headings and shows the first values under each; fix anything it missed. Required columns are marked with an asterisk.
4. Preview. Every row shows what will happen: Add, Update, Skip (with the reason), or a flagged duplicate. Unknown departments, campaigns or staff are noted and left blank rather than invented.
5. Save. A row-by-row report is kept with the import.

19 · Reports

/reports

Twenty reports, each filterable by fiscal year or date range, department, vendor and channel, each opening on screen, printing to PDF with the college letterhead, and downloading as CSV or a real Excel workbook.

Money columns are hidden from roles without financial access; the same report downloads without them.

20 · Accounts & security

System Administrator · /users

• Creating an account issues a temporary password (emailed if you tick the box); the person chooses their own on first sign-in.
• Forgotten password: Forgot your password? on the sign-in page emails a one-hour link. No administrator needed.
• Multifactor authentication is optional for everyone and recommended for administrators and approvers: Password & security in the account menu, scan the code with any authenticator app. Lost phone: an administrator clears it from the People screen.
• Eight failed sign-ins lock an account for 15 minutes.
• Leaving staff: deactivate, never delete — their name stays on everything they did. Reassign their campaigns' owner so the reminders have somewhere to go.
• Activity history (/activity, and the panel at the foot of every record) is the audit trail: every change with the old and new value, every approval, upload, reminder and sign-in with MFA. It cannot be edited.

21 · Settings

Marketing Administrator · /settings

• General: branding, fiscal year start, the ending-soon / upcoming / recent windows, which approvals are required, password and lockout rules, the map's default centre, notification addresses, report letterhead.
• Reminders: the schedule and recipients for every trigger (section 9), and Run the reminder job now for testing.
• Lists: departments, target audiences and advertising channels. Rename rather than delete — history points at them.
• Integrations: platform credentials (encrypted), test and sync.
• Updates: choose the update zip and click Install update (also at /update). Never upload files by hand; the updater puts them where they belong and keeps a copy of what it replaced.
• Backups: nightly database dumps, downloadable; Back up now before any large import.

22 · The yearly rhythm

23 · If it goes wrong