Three things get called campaigns and they are not the same.
| What it is | Duration | |
|---|---|---|
| One-off | A purchase. One or several placements, no plan behind them. | Weeks |
| Campaign | A bounded push toward a defined objective, with a start and an end. | 2–6 months |
| Programme | Continuous acquisition against a gap, reviewed quarterly. | 12+ months |
Most SaaS companies need a programme and buy a campaign, or buy one-offs and call it a campaign. Getting the vocabulary right matters because it determines what you should expect and when.
The six phases
Phase 1 — Definition (week 1)
What exists on paper before anything else happens:
- The exact URL and the term it should own.
- The referring-domain gap between it and the four URLs above it.
- The monthly volume and the resulting timeline.
- The twelve-month anchor distribution being aimed at.
- The quality thresholds every placement must meet.
If a supplier starts outreach before this document exists, the volume in your proposal came from their capacity rather than your situation.
Phase 2 — Audit (weeks 1–3)
What is already in the profile. Every referring domain classified, footprints clustered, anchor distribution mapped. On roughly one engagement in five this phase produces a recommendation to clean up before acquiring — which delays the fun part by a quarter and is the correct sequence.
Phase 3 — Prospecting (weeks 2–4, then continuous)
Candidates sourced from the gap list, plus publications the competitors have not reached. Each scored on traffic, topical fit, publishing history, editorial identity and footprint. Roughly two thirds fail and are logged with reason codes.
This is the phase that separates a programme from a purchase, and it is invisible in any output. You only see it in the rejection log.
Phase 4 — Outreach and production (weeks 3+, continuous)
One editor, one angle, one email. Drafts written, approved by your side within three working days, submitted. This is where the client-side bottleneck usually appears — a slow approver turns eighteen placements a month into eleven.
Phase 5 — Verification (on publication)
Live URL, anchor, surrounding paragraph, rel attribute, referring-page traffic, index date. Recorded the day it goes live, into something you can check on any Tuesday.
Index confirmed again at day 30. Not indexed by then means not billable.
Phase 6 — Monitoring (12 months, continuous)
Weekly recrawl of everything delivered. Removals, no-follow flips, de-indexations and 404s flagged within seven days and replaced.
What should exist before the first email goes out
1. A gap list with a number on it.
2. A monthly volume derived from that number.
3. Written quality thresholds.
4. A twelve-month anchor model.
5. A named approver with a three-day commitment.
6. A reporting sheet that already has its columns.
Six documents, none of which takes more than a day. A campaign that begins without them is improvising, and improvisation is what produces a profile nobody would have chosen.
When a campaign is the right shape
Bounded pushes genuinely exist and are appropriate in three situations.
- A product launch. Two to three months of concentrated coverage around a specific event.
- A digital PR study. Data collected, published, pitched over six to eight weeks, then it accrues passively.
- A remediation push. Classification, removal outreach and a disavow file — bounded by definition.
What is not a campaign: closing a 90-domain gap. That is a programme, and selling it as a three-month campaign sets an expectation that cannot be met.
Timeline, honestly
| Month | What is visible |
|---|---|
| 1 | Gap map, audit, first pitches out. No placements yet. |
| 2 | First placements live. No ranking movement. |
| 3–4 | Referring domains climbing; impressions starting to move; referral traffic from round-ups |
| 5–8 | Position band movement on mid-competition terms |
| 9–12 | Head-term movement; organic sessions materially up |
Month one produces no links. That is not a slow start — it is the phase where the target list gets built, and skipping it is why most disappointing engagements were disappointing.
How to tell whether yours is real
Four questions to ask your supplier at month two.
- "What is our gap number and how much of it have we closed?" A real programme answers with two figures.
- "How many candidates did you reject last month, and why?" Roughly two thirds, with reason codes.
- "What does our anchor distribution look like against the model?" There should be a model to compare against.
- "Which placement last month was the weakest?" There always is one. A supplier who cannot name it has stopped assessing.
If the answers to all four are vague, you have bought placements rather than a campaign — which may be fine, provided you know that is what you bought.