With this article, you will learn about:
- Basic rules of running multiple campaigns
- Active campaigns and campaign priorities
- How multiple campaigns work and switch between each other
Important: "Campaigns runner" is a feature that appears when the "Multi-campaigns runner" plugin is installed. You can learn more about the "Multi-campaigns runner" plugin and how to enable it here.
"Campaigns runner" allows you to manage and have multiple campaigns active at the same time. This knowledge can be helpful for sellers when creating multiple outreach campaigns.
Basic rules of running multiple campaigns
To start multiple campaigns, just go to the "Campaigns" menu, select them, and click on "Start". Campaigns that were started with the "Start" button become active campaigns:
You can also start them one by one if you mouse over the needed campaign and click on the "Start" button.
Starting the campaign with the "Multi-campaigns runner" plugin installed also starts the "Campaigns runner". In my case "Invite & Follow-up campaign" started running and "Extracting campaign" got queued.
To stop all your campaigns, you don't need to select them and click on "Stop", just click on "Stop campaigns runner" and Linked Helper will stop running all of them, their statuses will be changed to "Queued":
To start all active campaigns, i.e. those which are not stopped or completed, just click on "Start campaigns runner":
The priority is given to the campaign which has earlier "Start at" time in any of its Actions. So if you are running multiple campaigns and want to give priority to one of your campaigns to start earlier than another, just go to the workflow of that campaign and change "Start At" of any action to date in the past:
Active campaigns and their priorities
The campaign is active when you manually started it with the "Start" button from the "Campaigns" menu. "Start campaigns runner" button will run only active campaigns, i.e. those which are not stopped or completed:
Campaigns in Linked Helper may have different statuses. Those are:
- Completed - campaign, which doesn't have any profiles in it's "Queue's" so there is nothing to perform in this campaign
- Queued - active campaign which is currently queued because another campaign is running or "Campaigns runner" is not on at the moment.
- Sleeping - campaign, which is delayed because of the current "timeout" in its actions or because you scheduled it to start later. If "Campaigns runner" is on and no other campaign is running, LH will start this campaign as soon as it leaves "Sleep mode". You can read more about the reasons behind the campaign sleeping state in this article.
- Stopped - campaign, which was manually stopped with the "Stop" button. It won't be added to the "Campaigns runner" queue when you start "Campaigns runner".
- Running - campaign, which is currently running and performing actions.
As an example, if you click on "Start campaigns runner" when there are no active campaigns, Linked Helper won't run any campaign (in the screenshot below all campaigns are not active):
If you click on "Start campaigns runner" when there are one or more than one active campaigns, Linked Helper will start running a campaign which has an earlier "Start at" date and time in any of its actions and will queue another campaign:
If "Campaigns runner" is stopped and none of the campaigns are active, "Starting" one of the campaigns will start "Campaign runner" for this campaign only (will basically run one campaign only since only one is active):
The "Start" button from the "Campaigns" menu always enables "Campaigns runner" at the same time with starting the campaign, and "Campaigns runner" will always start with running the active campaign which has the earliest "Start At" date and time. So in case you already have several active campaigns, and you manually start another campaign from the "Campaigns" menu, it will still start the earliest of active campaigns, leaving the rest in the queue:
starting "Invite to follow organization campaign" from the "Campaigns" menu while there are other active campaigns
"Extracting campaign" still goes first because it has the earliest "Start At" time from all active campaigns
How multiple campaigns work and switch between each other
As mentioned previously, "Campaigns runner" won't run 2 campaigns simultaneously, it will run them one after another or switch between them.
Linked Helper switches to another active campaign, when both conditions are met:
- current active campaign is in sleeping state, for example, there is nothing to do as most of the profiles in Check for replies actions, or the actions in the campaign hit the Advanced limits;
- there is an action in another active campaign with non-empty Queue and the Start at is set to the earlier time then any action in the currently active campaign.
But as soon as the first campaign will go out of "Sleep mode", Linked Helper will finish the "bunch size" of the Action it's currently doing for another campaign and will move back to 1st campaign. Let's take a closer look at how it will work.
For e.g, you have 2 campaigns with similar workflows. Each of them has three actions:
Invite 2nd and 3rd level contacts
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Filter contacts out of my network (keep 1st level only)
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Message to 1st connections | Group members
Each action in both campaigns has default "Bunch size" and "Timeout between bunches" settings (by default "Bunch size" is 10 profiles and "Timeout between bunches" is 1 minute):
You start both of your campaigns, and one of them goes first in priority (let's call it "Campaign A"):
Here is what is going to happen:
- Linked Helper starts processing Campaign A.
- First, it sends 10 messages in a row from "Action #3", since the "Bunch size" for this action is 10 profiles, then it goes to "Timeout between bunches" for 1 minute, so Linked Helper goes to "Action #2".
- In our case "Filter contacts" won't detect any new connections to populate "Action #3" and will go to timeout for the next 60 minutes, so Linked Helper moves to "Action #1" because "Queue" of "Action #3" is empty - nothing to do there.
- After inviting 10 profiles in a row with "Action #1", this action also goes to "timeout between bunches" for 1 minute.
- Now "Action #1" and "Action #2" are both in "timeout", and "Queue" of "Action #3" is empty. Since Linked Helper has nothing to do in this campaign now, it moves to "Campaign B" with a similar workflow.
- Now it starts processing a "Bunch size" of people for action in "Campaign B", but since "timeout between bunches" for "Action #1" of "Campaign A" is only 1 minute, "Campaign A" goes out of "Sleep mode" while Linked Helper is still running a "bunch" in "Campaign B".
What will happen in this situation is that "Campaigns runner" won't allow Linked Helper to continue working with other actions of "Campaign B", because "Campaign A" is already out of "Sleep mode" and ready to go, so LH will finish the current bunch for "Campaign B" which it started recently, and will move back to "Campaign A" until it goes to "Sleep mode" again.
This is pretty good if we want Linked Helper to constantly switch between campaigns. But what if with the same default bunch settings "Queue" of "Action#3" in "Campaign A" is not 10 but 1000 profiles?
This will lead to a situation when Linked Helper will be spending all daily actions on one campaign only, even if you have another active campaign in the queue. With a huge "Queue" of profiles in "Action #3" Linked Helper will:
- Message 10 people in a row with "Action #3" and "timeout" this action for 1 minute.
- Move to "Action #2" to check for recently added and "timeout" this action for 60 minutes.
- Go back to "Action #3", because 1 minute already passed while it was checking for new connections
- Send 10 messaged with "Action #3" and "timeout" this action for 1 minute.
- Go to "Action #1", since "Action #2" is still sleeping, send 10 invitations in a row, and "timeout" this action for 1 minute.
- Go back to "Action #3" again because it required much more than 1 minute to send 10 invitations, and "Action #3" is ready again.
- Keep repeating this rotation in the same campaign until it spends all daily actions.
The problem here is that "Queues" of this campaign are too big and "Timeouts between bunches" are too small. So there is no time to switch to another campaign because this campaign still has a lot of people in it, and "Timeouts between bunches" are too small to let the whole campaign end up "Sleeping". In this scenario, Linked Helper will switch to "Campaign B" only when the message queue of "Campaign A" becomes empty, and it may take a lot of time to do that, because "Filter contacts" will keep checking for new connections and populating message queue.
What can help in this situation when you want to spend daily actions on several campaigns and not only by one, is to set a bigger "timeout between bunches". For e.g 2 hours for each of your actions:
With bigger "timeout between bunches" it's much easier not only to limit your activity for the campaign/action but also to give Linked Helper free time to work with other campaigns.
You can learn more about how to limit daily activity for action/campaign in this article.
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