The Campaign Builder is the single most powerful marketing tool I have ever seen. For me, there’s no question about it.

It can solve so many problems, and can work for so many different businesses.  But the very nature of having a tool that is this robust, is that there is a level of complexity associated with learning it.

I want to highlight three of the most common “Gotchas” that I see with the Keap campaign builder. I chose the to use the term “Gotcha” carefully- these aren’t bugs.

They aren’t myths. They’re just intricacies for using the campaign builder, and once you understand them, things will work a lot more smoothly for you.

Gotcha #1:

Goals start and stop sequences. Most people know that, right? But their impact can extend beyond the sequences to their immediate left and right.

Let me show you what I’m talking about.

This is a pretty basic scenario here. If you have contacts in Sequence 1, and they achieve Goal A, they’ll go into Sequence 2. No brainer.

Now let’s step our game up just a little bit. Have a look at this one:

This is effectively the same scenario, with just one twist. Sequence 1 is not directly connected to Goal A.

It doesn’t matter.

If someone is in Sequence 1, and they achieve Goal A, they’ll jump over Sequence 2 entirely, and they’ll be added to Sequence 3.

This is because, by default, goals stop everything “upstream” from them. So, if the contact is in this campaign, and the sequence connects to the goal (directly or indirectly), then by achieving that goal, the contact is extracted from their current sequence and added to the appropriate new place downstream from the goal.

Let’s try this one more time. Check this one out:

So, now things have gotten a little more complex. But the logic doesn’t change one bit. If you’re in Sequence 1 (red) and you achieve Goal B (blue) you’ll be removed from Sequence 1 and added immediately to Sequence 6 (yellow).

The reason this works is because these two icons are connected. I know there isn’t a line connecting them directly, but they’re indirectly connected. Sequence 1 connects to Sequence 2, which connects to Goal A which connects to Sequence 4 which IS connected to Goal B.  Right, kind of a round-about way, isn’t it?

Think of it this way. Goals are things we want our prospect to do. And sequences are the things we do in order to encourage them to achieve those goals.  So, if someone is in Sequence 1, and they achieve Goal B, the campaign builder just says “Oh, okay, great. We don’t need sequence 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5. We can just skip all that jazz and push them into Sequence 6.”

In the above campaign, they could be in any of the first 5 sequences, and if they achieve Goal B, the outcome will be identical. It’ll stop them where they are, and will add them to sequence 6. If it helps, you could draw lines connecting Sequences 1, 2 and 3 to Goal B, but functionally the campaign won’t work any differently, and aesthetically it’ll be…um, painful.

I’ve been mentally preparing this post for a while now, but this facebook post, and an awesome conversation with Christopher Sutton this morning was just the impetus I needed to finally write it.

If you don’t educate yourself, then there’s a higher likelihood that you’ll think something is a bug, simply because you don’t understand it. Or you’ll hire someone to build something for you, but not be able to use it because you don’t understand how it was built. If you’re looking to understand the campaign builder from the very basic fundamentals, to the more advanced features and nuances, there are a number of ways to do it – start with the Advanced Automations complete collection from Keap Academy.

Dig this? I’ve got Gotcha #2 ready for ya right here. Let me know if you have any questions or thoughts on this one!