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Search a niche across a whole region

One search covers one place. If you want every dentist in a state, or every locksmith in twenty cities, you would otherwise run the search again and again and then merge the files by hand. A campaign does that work for you. This article explains how to define one over a country, a region, or a list of cities, how to read the preview before you pay, how the cost is controlled, and how to export the result.

What a campaign is

A campaign is a saved, resumable search for one niche over a set of locations. You give it a keyword such as dentist and a scope. The app turns the scope into an ordered plan of individual locations and searches them one at a time, each at a depth of 100 results. Because the plan is saved, a campaign survives a closed browser tab, a pause, and an empty balance.

Choose the scope

The scope has two parts, the locations you include and the locations you exclude.

  • Included locations. Add a country, a region, a city, or any mix of them. An included country or region expands into the searchable locations inside it that have eligible results.
  • Excluded locations. Remove places you do not want, such as one region of an included country or one city of an included region.

To find the right entries, browse the location tree. It starts at the country roots and goes down through regions to cities. You can also search by name within a country. Each entry shows its type, whether it has children, and how many eligible locations it holds, so you can see how large a choice is before you make it.

Set a lead cap with max_leads

A campaign has an optional max_leads value, with a minimum of 100. Once the campaign has charged that many unique leads, it starts no further locations. The location that is running finishes, so the final count can pass the cap. Treat the cap as a spending limit, not as an exact size. If you leave it out, the campaign runs through its whole plan.

You can also give the campaign a name, which makes it easier to find in the list later. Creating a campaign spends no credits and does not start it, so you can set it up, step away, and come back.

Read the preview before you start

The preview is free. It takes the same inputs as the campaign and saves nothing. It reports four numbers:

  1. The planned location count, which is how many places the plan will search.
  2. The planned depth, which is 100 for every location.
  3. The credits that the next search needs.
  4. The maximum credits that the campaign could use if every location ran in full.

The maximum is a ceiling, and the final cost can be lower, because the app refunds unused credits and duplicates as described in the next section. Compare the maximum with your balance. If the plan is larger than you want, exclude locations or lower max_leads, and preview again.

How the cost works

A campaign runs one location search at a time. Each search reserves 100 credits, or your whole balance when fewer than 100 remain. When the search ends, the campaign keeps the charge only for businesses it has not seen before and refunds the rest at once.

A business is identified by its Google CID, and the campaign charges it once, no matter how many locations return it. A business near a city boundary can appear in the results of two neighboring locations, and the second appearance is refunded. A result that has no CID is charged as normal, because the app cannot tell whether it repeats another.

If your credits run out, the campaign pauses. Add credits and resume it, and it continues from the locations it missed, without creating a replacement campaign. A balance between 1 and 99 credits funds one more location before the pause.

Start, pause, resume, and stop

A campaign is always in one of seven states: draft, ready, running, paused, needs attention, completed, or stopped.

  • Start moves a ready campaign to running.
  • Pause stops further locations from starting. The location in progress finishes first.
  • Resume continues a paused campaign or one that needs attention.
  • Stop ends the campaign for good, and a stopped campaign cannot be started again.

If a location search fails, the app retries it after 30 seconds, then after 2.5 minutes, then after 5 minutes. When the third retry fails, the campaign moves to needs attention, so you can look at it and resume. You can edit the name, the cap, and the scope of a campaign until it is completed or stopped, except for locations that are running or done.

Export the campaign

A campaign pools its leads across every location and removes duplicates by Google CID or Place ID. Export that pool from the campaign page, or ask an assistant to do it. The formats are Simple, Advanced, GoHighLevel, Instantly, and OneClick Lead Gen, and the list-cleaning article explains how to choose between them. The file appears on the Downloads page.

You can also add a finished one-off search with the same keyword to a campaign, which brings its leads into the pool without searching again. To create, preview, and run campaigns from code, see the docs. An AI assistant can do the same through the tools described in the connector article.