Creating a campaign

A campaign in gas brings one marketing activity together in one place: paid campaigns from Meta Ads, Google Ads, Sklik and Pinterest Ads, posts on social networks, website traffic from Google Analytics and custom measurements. The result is a single page where you can see the budget, the spend, how many people the campaign reached and how they responded to it. This article describes how to create a campaign and, above all, how to name it so that gas matches the right data to it.

Before you start

A campaign can be created by a user account with the Administrator or User role. The Viewer role can see campaigns and open them, but the button for creating a new one is not shown.

Campaigns are part of your subscription. If your plan does not include them, you will not be able to create a new campaign. You can see what your plan includes in Settings → Customer account → Subscription. To extend your plan, write through the contact form.

Your plan also has a maximum number of campaigns. Only campaigns that have not ended yet count towards the limit, that is campaigns whose end date is today or later. Finished campaigns do not take up space and you do not have to delete them because of the limit. When you have one free campaign left, a yellow warning appears above the table; once the limit is used up, the warning turns red and the New campaign button turns grey. Hovering over it shows a tooltip telling you how many campaigns out of how many you have used.

Data is counted only from profiles and ad accounts linked to your customer account. You can see the list in Settings → Customer account → Linked accounts.

Before you create the campaign, agree on a shared tag with whoever creates campaigns in the ad system and whoever writes the posts. Without a tag, gas does not know which ad and which post belongs to the campaign. What the tag looks like is described in the chapter How a campaign is matched with data.

Steps

What each field means

Campaign name

A required field. The name is only for you inside the application, it does not have to match the name the campaign has in the ad system. Write it so that you will recognise the campaign even a year later, for example "Spring collection 2026".

Campaign hash

The form does not require this field, yet it is the most important piece of information in the whole form: gas uses it to find what belongs to the campaign. On the campaign detail, the same value is called Tag.

Enter a short label without spaces, for example SPRING2026. Letters without diacritics, digits and the underscore are allowed. Do not type the hash sign # into the field, gas adds it itself, which is why you see a hash icon in front of the field. The resulting tag then looks like #SPRING2026 and you will see it in this form both in the table and on the campaign detail.

From and To

A required pair of dates. It defines the period the data is counted from. The earliest date you can choose is 1 January 2018. The To date must be at least one day later than From; if you set both to the same day, saving ends with an error message.

Choose the period so that it covers the whole run of the ads including any tail-off. Anything outside it is not counted into the campaign, even if the tag matches.

UTM campaign

An optional field. It links the campaign with website traffic from Google Analytics. Enter the value you have in your links in the utm_campaign parameter, that is the campaign name as you see it in Google Analytics reports. Letters without diacritics, digits, the hyphen and the underscore are allowed.

gas looks for a partial match, so the value spring2026 also counts traffic from a campaign named spring2026-newsletter. Watch out for one difference compared with the tag: here letter case does matter. The value Spring2026 will not find traffic from the campaign spring2026.

If you do not use utm_ parameters or do not know what they are, leave the field empty. The campaign will work without it too, it just will not contain any website figures.

Campaign budget

An optional field. The amount in Czech crowns and excluding VAT that you plan to put into the campaign. gas does not send it anywhere and does not limit spending by it, it only serves for comparison: on the campaign detail you then see how much of the budget has been used and how much is left. Without a budget filled in, a note saying that no budget is set is shown instead of the spending chart.

There is no selection of networks and profiles in the form

In the form you do not tick which networks or profiles the campaign should track, and that is correct. gas goes through all profiles and ad accounts linked to your customer account and selects on its own what carries the campaign tag and falls within its period. Networks appear in the campaign by themselves, based on where you used the tag.

How a campaign is matched with data

There is no technical connection between a campaign in gas and a campaign in the ad system. Only one thing links them: the tag written in the text. Anything without the tag is not counted into the campaign.

Where the tag belongs:

Rules you need to follow:

You can also add the tag to names retrospectively, for ads that are already running. At the next recalculation, gas will find them and also count data from previous days, if they fall within the campaign period.

What happens next

The campaign appears in the list immediately, but it will not contain any numbers at first. gas recalculates campaigns roughly once an hour and until the first recalculation the spend and all other values are zero. This is not an error: wait an hour and refresh the page with the refresh button in the page header.

In the table you will see the columns Name, Hash, Budget, Spend, Impressions, Reach, Engagement rate and To. Impressions is the number of times the ads were shown, Reach is the estimated number of people addressed. In the column menu you can add more, for example From, Duration, Clicks, UTM campaign or Last update time, which shows when the last recalculation took place.

Clicking the campaign name opens its detail. There you will find budget spending broken down into Meta Ads, Google Ads, Pinterest Ads, Sklik and custom measurements, total reach, impressions and clicks broken down by network, and at the bottom tables with the specific ad campaigns, posts and videos that were counted into the campaign. These tables are the fastest way to verify that matching works. If they are empty, the tag does not match anywhere.

On the right of each row in the list there are three icons. The pencil opens the campaign for editing, the pair of sheets duplicates it (the new campaign takes over the tag, the UTM value and the budget, "(copy)" is added to the name and the period is moved to the current year) and the bin deletes it. Deletion is irreversible, so gas asks you to confirm first.

For a campaign that has ended, gas keeps recalculating for a few more days and then leaves its numbers alone, so as not to burden the ad systems unnecessarily. Campaigns older than three years are not recalculated at all.

Common problems

The campaign is created, but all numbers are zero

Most likely the first recalculation simply has not run yet. It runs roughly once an hour, so wait an hour and refresh the page. If the values are still zero after that, read on.

There is no data in the campaign even the next day

It means that gas did not find anything by the tag. Proceed as follows:

If everything matches and there is still no data, write through the contact form and include the campaign name and its tag.

Data is missing from only one network

Most often because the tag is missing for that network or is written differently. Remember that for ad systems the tag is searched for in the campaign name, whereas for posts, videos and pins in their text or description. The second common cause is a profile of that network that is not linked.

There is also a case where a missing number is not an error: neither Sklik nor Google Ads provide the number of people addressed, so they do not contribute to reach. This is also stated in the note under the Reach card on the campaign detail.

The campaign picked up data that does not belong to it

The usual cause is a tag that is the beginning of another tag (#SPRING and #SPRING2026), or a tag so general that it accidentally appears elsewhere too (#SUMMER). Check this in the tables on the campaign detail, where the specific campaigns and posts are listed. The solution is to rename the tag to an unambiguous one and rewrite it the same way in the ad system.

The other possibility is an empty Campaign hash field. Then the campaign has nothing to select by and pulls in everything from the given period.

My tag is in capital letters, but the ad has it in lowercase

That is not a problem. When matching the tag, gas does not distinguish letter case. It only distinguishes it in the UTM campaign field, where the value must match including letter case.

Website traffic is missing from the campaign

Website traffic is counted only if the UTM campaign field is filled in, the value matches what is in your links in the utm_campaign parameter (including letter case), and the Google Analytics account is linked to the customer account. If any of these three conditions is missing, the Google Analytics rows stay at zero.

I cannot see the campaign in the list

The campaign list is limited by the period selected at the top of the page. By default, campaigns that overlap with this period in any way are shown. Next to the period selection there is also a Only campaigns in this period toggle; when it is switched on, only campaigns that lie entirely within the period stay in the list. Try switching it off and widening the period.

The campaign period does not match the period selected on the page

The period selection at the top of the page only decides which campaigns are shown in the list. The numbers in the row and on the detail are always for the whole campaign period, that is for the From and To range you entered in the form. So if you select one week at the top, the campaign row will still show the total for its whole run. If you want a different period, edit the campaign, or create a second one with a different range and the same tag.

For a campaign that is still running, gas also counts only up to today: values for days that have not happened yet are not calculated, even if the campaign has a To date in the future.

The New campaign button is not shown or is grey

If the button is missing entirely, either you have the Viewer role or your plan does not include campaigns. If it is visible but grey, you have used up the number of campaigns in your plan; hovering over it shows a tooltip with the counts. It helps to delete a campaign you no longer need, or to ask for a higher plan through the contact form.

A red "Server error" message appears after saving

The most common cause is that the To date is not later than From. A campaign must last at least one day. Click Try again, correct the dates and save again. If the message appears even with correct dates, save its text and send it through the contact form.

I cannot type a hash sign or accented letters into the Campaign hash field

That is intended. The field accepts only letters without diacritics, digits and the underscore, and gas adds the hash sign itself. If the tag contained diacritics or a space, matching against names in the ad systems would stop being reliable.

I changed the tag, but the numbers stayed the same

The change takes effect only at the next recalculation, that is within about an hour. Until then the campaign shows the values calculated according to the original tag. Do not forget to rewrite the tag in the ad system as well, otherwise the numbers will drop to zero after the recalculation.

The custom measurement was not counted into the campaign

A custom measurement is not tied to a campaign by a tag, but by selecting the campaign directly in the measurement. Open the measurement and check that a campaign is selected in it and that its period overlaps with the campaign period.

The spend in gas does not match the amount in the ad system

gas converts all spend into Czech crowns using the exchange rate valid on the day the spend relates to, so with an account kept in euros or dollars a small difference arises. Furthermore, only the part of the spend that falls within the campaign period is counted, and only from ad campaigns whose name carries the tag. The budget you entered is excluding VAT, whereas the invoice from the ad system may include VAT.