Run your first campaign

A complete walkthrough from an empty campaign to your first reviewed scores and reaching out. Plan for about 30 minutes of hands-on work spread across a couple of sessions while scoring runs in the background.

Before you start

You’ll need three things in place. If any are missing, finish the Quick start first.

A project (the one active in the project switcher).
A Product with a description, website, and at least an example or two of good-fit accounts. The product is what the campaign promotes.
A handful of accounts in your database — at minimum a few dozen, ideally a few hundred. Import them (Import accounts), build them from Google Maps lookups, or let inbound channels accumulate.

Scoring needs fit criteria for the product and the campaign’s purpose. The wizard below generates them if they don’t exist yet; you can also generate and edit them under Settings → Products (see Fit criteria and fit score).

1. Create the campaign

Campaigns → New Campaign:

Purpose — the first thing you pick, because everything else adapts to it. Defaults to Sales prospecting; pick a different purpose (partnership, press, recruiting, customer expansion, win-back, event, research, influencer, investor, renewal) when the intent isn’t a sales pitch. The wizard’s wording, the fit criteria the campaign scores against, message drafts and guardrails all follow the purpose. See Outreach reasons and targets.
Product — pick the one this campaign promotes, or + Create a new product. A campaign points to exactly one product, and switching is allowed within the same project.
Campaign name — name the audience, not the product. “Berlin bike shops Q2” tells you something; “Spring campaign” doesn’t.
Communication language — leave blank to inherit the product default. Set it explicitly when you’re running parallel campaigns of the same product in different markets (one in Spanish for Spain, one in English for the UK).

The wizard then walks three steps (Back returns to the previous one without losing what you entered):

Product — the fields above. Continue to fit criteria creates the campaign (going back and resubmitting, with Save and continue, updates it rather than creating a second one).
Fit criteria — generate the product’s fit criteria for the campaign’s purpose with AI (Generate fit criteria; every campaign of the same product and purpose shares them, and you can also edit them later under Settings → Products). Any example URLs of good-fit organizations you paste here are saved to the product’s good examples, where they calibrate scoring for every campaign of that product. Approve fit criteria approves them and moves on; Revise regenerates them with your feedback. Skip for now and add accounts leaves the wizard and opens the campaign so you can add accounts first and come back to the fit criteria later.
Audience hints — optional hints (locations, industries, company size, revenue). The step starts empty; leave it that way unless you want to steer the fit criteria, because whatever you add is passed to the AI as a hint the next time you regenerate them. It doesn’t filter or find accounts. Save and add accounts saves only what you entered and opens the campaign’s Overview at its Campaign accounts panel. Scoring works on the accounts you add to the campaign in the next step.

Every page of a campaign shares the same tabs: Overview, Review, Outreach (with an Inbox and a Follow-up view), Board and Settings & costs. The Overview is where you land. It shows the campaign’s purpose and status, six counts that each open the page where that work happens (Accounts, Not scored yet, To review, Shortlisted, Awaiting reply, Replied), a Next for this campaign list of what is waiting on you, the fit criteria, and the Campaign accounts panel.

2. Populate it with accounts

Several ways to fill the campaign — combine them freely:

From the Accounts list — best for repeatable plays. On Accounts, narrow the list (a saved view, search, the Filter panel), click Add matching accounts to campaign and pick the campaign. It adds exactly what the list shows, and counts it before you commit. To add a few picked accounts instead, tick their rows and click Add to campaign.
From the campaign’s Overview — in the Campaign accounts panel, Add all N adds every account in Available to add (narrowed by its country, region, search and Not in any campaign filters). With no filter it asks before adding the whole project.
By hand — in the same panel, search Available to add for an account and add it from its row. Add new account slots in one specific company you don’t have yet. From an account’s own page, Add to campaign does the same for that account.
From an import — the import’s result panel links View these N accounts: the Accounts list narrowed to exactly what that import created, ready for Add matching accounts to campaign.
From a ranking run — View results on a finished run opens the accounts it scored, best first; narrow with Min fit and add them the same way.

Bulk-add honours every guardrail in one pass. Two rules are universal across every campaign purpose:

do_not_contact accounts are hard-blocked (never overridable). GDPR / opt-out sticky.
Personal network accounts are hard-blocked (never overridable). Competitors are hard-blocked too, except in press, event and research campaigns.

Everything else depends on the campaign’s purpose:

Clients are blocked in sales / press / recruiting / investor / influencer / win-back campaigns unless you tick Include existing clients (for upsell) (include_customers in the API). They’re admissible by default in customer expansion / renewal / event / research / partnership campaigns — those are the purposes where reaching clients is the point.
Suppliers, investors, press, analysts, candidates are soft-blocked in purposes that don’t target them, with per-type override flags. A press campaign won’t block press accounts; a recruiting campaign won’t block candidate accounts; etc.

The UI tells you exactly which accounts were blocked, why, and which override (if any) unlocks them. Accounts that belong to another project are never added; the result says so (“N not added (not in this project)”). See Outreach reasons and targets for the full per-purpose matrix.

For attribution on inbound campaigns, also set the relevant source channel on accounts before adding them — see Track inbound accounts. It doesn’t change the campaign mechanics, but it lets you slice “Adwords accounts that replied” later.

3. Score it (see the cost first)

On the campaign’s Review tab (the Review and shortlist page), click Score N remaining. Before anything runs, a dialog shows how many accounts will be scored, in how many batches, with which AI model, and the estimated cost (or unknown when the model’s price isn’t known, with what the estimate is based on). Confirm to start; if the campaign’s accounts change while the dialog is open, you get the new estimate and confirm again.

Scoring runs in the background, and you can keep working: the Review tab shows the progress, and so does Runs → Campaign scoring (with its cost and Cancel run).

What to expect:

Per account: a few seconds for the LLM call, plus website discovery + scraping for accounts that arrived without a URL. Most batches of a few hundred finish in 5–15 minutes.
Cost: a small fraction of a cent per account on the default AI model. Auto-tracked under API costs — you don’t enter it.
Reuse: an account that already has an up-to-date fit score for this product and purpose (from a ranking run or another campaign) isn’t scored again, unless this campaign has its own scoring brief.

Each account ends with three things attached:

Fit score — a 0–10 number (ai_score in the API).
A fit band beside the score — Strong fit (8–10), Good fit (6–8), Weak fit (4–6) or Poor fit (below 4). The API keeps a three-value score_label: excellent (≥8), moderate (5–7), mismatch (<5). An account that hasn’t been scored yet shows Not scored yet, never a poor fit.
Reasons (score_reasons) — 2–4 short, typed justifications (positive / negative / neutral). Read them — they tell you why the AI picked that score, and reading a handful is the fastest way to spot fit criteria that miss the mark.

If the reasons feel off across many accounts, edit the fit criteria (Edit fit criteria on the Overview’s fit criteria card) and rescore; the Review tab offers Rescore for scores made with the older version. If only this campaign needs a different emphasis, use Give feedback & rescore to give it a scoring brief instead: the campaign then keeps its own scores.

4. Review and shortlist

Open the Review tab. Every account starts To review and gets one of three decisions: Shortlist (reach out), Defer (maybe later) or Not a fit (with an optional reason). Back to review undoes a decision.

The Fit score bands at the top split the campaign into 8–10 (Strong fit), 6–8 (Good fit), 4–6 (Weak fit), 0–4 (Poor fit) and Not scored yet, with how many accounts in each band are already decided. Click a band to work only that band.

With hundreds or thousands of accounts, decide in bulk: pick Selected, All N matching or Top N by fit score, then Shortlist, Defer or Not a fit. LeadHunter shows the count before it changes anything, and every bulk change can be undone (the banner’s Undo, the u key, or Recent bulk changes). For the rest, the table and the keyboard (j / k to move, s, d, x to decide) get you through a few hundred accounts quickly. Set score by hand (row menu) bumps one account up or down without deciding on it. Clicking a row opens that account’s panel: its conversation, next step and decision in one place. The full page: Review thousands of accounts.

If the bottom of a large campaign is just noise, Remove fits under 5 on the Overview’s Campaign accounts panel takes the accounts scored below 5 out of the campaign altogether; shortlisted and already-contacted rows are kept. Details: Campaign → Pruning the low-fit tail after scoring.

Decisions you make one account at a time aren’t just for you. Once a product and purpose have roughly ten of them across their campaigns, LeadHunter feeds your most recent ones to the scoring model as examples of “what good looks like here”, and the next scores get sharper. Bulk decisions never do: shortlisting a whole band says nothing about each account. So review a handful of accounts individually, especially on a new product.

The funnel on Insights → Funnel will attribute replies and closes to the campaign’s accounts; the more accurate your shortlist, the more honest those numbers are.

5. Reach out

Click Start outreach on the Review tab. It opens the campaign’s Outreach tab on the Outreach inbox: the accounts on the left, the selected account’s conversation and composer on the right. The inbox opens on To contact with the Shortlisted and Strong fit filters on; open Filters to widen it. (Clicking a row in Review opens the same conversation as a panel.) Five drafting modes are available:

Mode	When
AI: first message	First outbound message. Three drafts in the account’s language.
AI: continue thread	Continuation. The AI reads the prior history.
Type & translate	Write in your language, see the translated version, send the translation.
Log already sent	You already sent it elsewhere — paste the text to record it.
Log inbound reply	The account replied. Paste; AI translates into your reading language.

Each tab keeps its own text, so switching modes doesn’t lose a half-written message.

For each account: draft, edit until it’s right, send through your normal channel (email, IG, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, phone), and click Log message. LeadHunter records the message and:

Bumps the campaign-account outreach_status to sent.
Promotes the account’s status from prospect to contacted (forward-only — accounts that are already clients don’t regress).
Counts the account as initiated in the funnel.

When replies come in, paste them in Log inbound reply and click Log reply. The campaign-account flips to responded (shown as Replied); the funnel counts the account as a reply, and until you log what you sent back it shows under Replies waiting on Today.

Right under the composer, Add next step sets what happens next and when. Accounts that haven’t answered are listed in the Outreach tab’s Follow-up view, with how many attempts each has had: see Review your outreach.

6. Log spend as it accrues

A campaign is only half-tracked without the cost side. As you run paid ads, pay agencies, or spend internal hours on this campaign, log each expense to the Costs & expenses panel on the campaign’s Settings & costs tab — or use the Log expense button on the campaigns list. LeadHunter then surfaces cost per outreached account, cost per replied account, and (after a few closes) the cost per close, on the same panel and on Insights → Breakdown.

The full mechanics: Track campaign costs and CAC.

7. Watch the funnel

Open Insights in the sidebar (the Funnel tab opens first). Three numbers tell you whether the campaign is working:

Initiated — outreach started, distinct accounts.
Replied — accounts that replied (cohort-attributed, by initiation date).
Closed (won) — accounts that became clients (status customer; cohort-attributed).

Cohort attribution means the rate at the latest day is “low by design” — accounts initiated yesterday haven’t had time to reply yet. Compare windows to each other (last 30d this month vs. last 30d last month) instead of reading the right edge of the chart as gospel.

The Breakdown tab of Insights splits the same numbers per product and per campaign — handy when you’re running several campaigns of the same product and want to see which one is the most efficient.

8. Close out

When the campaign is done, open its Settings & costs tab and go to Duplicate, archive or delete:

Archive — soft-hides the campaign from the default list while keeping every conversation, score, audit-trail entry, and account link intact. Use this for “completed but still want the history.”
Delete — name-confirmed (you type the campaign name to confirm). Removes every campaign-account and conversation of this campaign (and its own scores, if it had a scoring brief); the accounts themselves and the product’s fit criteria stay. Use only when you’re sure.

do_not_contact opt-outs and the customer status on accounts stick around — those live on the account, not the campaign.

Common pitfalls

Skipping the fit criteria review. Draft fit criteria still score, but the reasons read fuzzy. Spend ten minutes editing them, and try a ranking sample of 50, before scoring a few thousand accounts.
Scoring everything before the criteria are right. Every scoring run shows its cost first, so you can stop before spending AI budget on 4,000 accounts for a test. Score a sample (or a few dozen of the strongest candidates), calibrate, then go wide.
Treating reviews as one-and-done. Single, per-account decisions feed back into scoring once you’ve passed the ten-decision threshold for the product and purpose (bulk decisions don’t). Your first campaign on a new product is the best one to be thorough on.
Forgetting the costs side. A campaign’s success isn’t reply rate alone — it’s reply rate at what cost. Logging spend as you go (or once a week) means CAC is honest when you go to compare campaigns.