A campaign in Growth Method moves through five stages:
Backlog → Planning → Live → Analysing → Complete
New ideas sit in your backlog until you start them. A campaign is considered started once it reaches Planning. By default we encourage teams to follow agile best practices and complete a campaign within about six weeks.
What moves a campaign forward
Moving a campaign from one stage to the next is a deliberate step, not something that happens on its own. The AI helps with the work inside a stage, from drafting the idea to weighing the results, but it doesn’t decide when the campaign moves on. You do, by starting a campaign, moving it Live, and marking it complete.
On the campaign page, select the next stage on the timeline at the top, or open the campaign’s menu and choose Move to Live, Move to Analysis or Mark Complete. The move saves straight away and your team is notified. Use this when your team has done the work outside the chat and you want to record it.
A campaign’s chat always leads with a button for its next step: Plan campaign while it sits in the backlog, Launch campaign once it’s planned, and Analyse campaign once results are in. Each opens a guided flow that does the work with you. The planning flow moves the campaign to Planning as it starts. The launch flow runs pre-flight checks, records your before metrics and carries out any plan steps it can through your integrations, then moves the campaign Live. If you ask the AI to move a stage directly in chat, it points you to the right flow instead.
Two moves happen on their own, even when you run a campaign by hand. Once a campaign has been Live for its set duration, it moves to Analysing automatically and your team is notified. And a backlog idea nobody has touched for 180 days is archived overnight, so the backlog stays a list of live options (see Archive a campaign). Every other move is yours to make.
If you set up a custom agent, it can make these moves for you on a schedule. A Manual agent drafts an idea and stops in your backlog; an Autonomous agent you’ve accepted responsibility for can plan a campaign and take it Live on its own. Either way it follows the same stages, in the same order, and you can reopen its conversation to see exactly what it did at each one.
Backlog
New campaigns are created with the hypothesis builder and scored automatically. Unscored and scored ideas form your backlog.
- Duration: none
- Next stage: Planning (manual)
- Archived automatically after 180 days without an edit, comment or like
Planning
Your idea becomes an actionable experiment. Most of the build work happens outside Growth Method, but record what your team did here. In line with agile best practices, this stage should take no more than seven days.
- Editable fields: Planning
- Suggested duration: 1 week
- Next stage: Move to Live (manual). Your team is notified when it goes Live.
Live
Once built, the campaign goes live. Campaigns stay live for 28 days by default, then move to Analysing automatically, and members are notified.
The 28-day default applies to every campaign and is set under Settings → General as Campaign duration. To give one campaign a different length, set its Duration on the campaign page, in days. Leave it blank to use the team default. This helps with channels that take longer to show results, such as SEO.
While a campaign is live, its page shows a Live section with when it started, when it is due to finish, and how far through its run it is. The same section appears on the campaign’s shared page, so anyone you share it with can see it is running.
If an agent launched the campaign, the Live section links to the full conversation, where you can see exactly what it did, step by step.
- Editable fields: Planning, Results
- Duration: 28 days by default, or a per-campaign value you set
- Next stage: Move to Analysing (automatic)
Analysing
Gather data and complete your analysis. This should take no more than seven days. See recording results.
- Editable fields: Planning, Results
- Suggested duration: 1 week
- Next stage: Move to Complete (manual)
If the results aren’t a clear read yet, you can extend the campaign’s duration to put it back in market.
Complete
Once analysis is done, record the result and move the campaign to Complete. A campaign can’t be saved as Complete until its Test result is filled in, so the learning is captured with it. All team members are notified.
Extend a finished campaign
Sometimes a campaign reaches Analysing without a clear read, for example when a site change landed mid-test. You can give it more time in market without starting a new version.
On the page of a campaign in Analysing or Complete, select Extend duration under the Duration field and choose how many extra days it should run. The campaign:
- moves back to Live, keeping its original live date, so the run is one continuous window rather than a restart
- moves to Analysing again automatically once the extra days have passed
- records a note of the extension in its results write-up
Your team isn’t notified again: extending continues an existing run rather than launching a new one. You can also ask the AI in chat to extend a campaign for you.
If a campaign is still Live and needs longer, set its Duration on the campaign page instead.
Archive a campaign
Archiving takes a campaign out of every list, search and AI check without destroying it. Use it for ideas you won’t pursue and for anything else you want out of the way. There is no delete: an archived campaign can always be restored.
To archive a campaign, open its menu (the three dots on its row, or the menu on the campaign page), select Archive and confirm. It keeps its likes, comments and share links. Archived by mistake? Select Undo on the confirmation that appears and the campaign goes straight back where it was.
Find and restore archived campaigns
- Go to Campaigns and select the Archived tab.
- Find the campaign. The tab lists archived campaigns newest first, with the stage each was in.
- Select Restore. The campaign returns to the stage it was in.
Automatic archiving
Backlog ideas are archived automatically once nobody has edited, commented on or liked them for 180 days. This runs every night for every team, and there is nothing to switch on.
- An edit, a comment or a like resets the clock.
- Only the backlog is swept. Campaigns in Planning or later, and completed campaigns, are never archived automatically.
- A backlog campaign within a month of being archived says so under its name, so a quick edit or comment keeps it.
- Your weekly summary reports how many campaigns were archived that week, names them, and says how many are due next week.
The AI’s duplicate check still counts campaigns archived in the last 90 days, so an agent doesn’t re-propose an idea your team let go the week before. After that, the idea is open again.