Campaigns

Overview

Campaigns are WaDesk's bulk-outreach tool, reached from WA Campaigns in the top navigation. A single campaign delivers one message — free text, an approved template, an interactive message with buttons, a media message, or a whole automation flow — to an audience built from contacts, contact groups, typed-in numbers, an uploaded CSV, or any mix of these.

Every recipient is tracked individually the moment you launch, so the detail page shows who was queued, sent, delivered, read, replied, clicked, or failed — with each failure showing its own reason. Campaigns are tied to your workspace and its active engine, so teammates share one campaign history and switching engines never shows a wrong-engine sender list.

The campaign builder also includes A/B testing, per-recipient link tracking, an AI copy generator, and billing that refunds the charge automatically when a send fails.

Access: Campaigns require the Admin workspace role and a plan that includes the Campaign feature. Your plan also sets a limit on how many campaigns the workspace can create.

Engines & Templates

A campaign always sends through the workspace's active engine, chosen by the platform admin under Admin → Settings → System Message (only one engine is active platform-wide). The template requirement differs by engine:

Only the Business API enforces the approved-template requirement. The number picker in step 1 also matches the active engine: Unofficial API workspaces see their paired phones, while Cloud API / Twilio workspaces see their provider numbers — so you can never pick a wrong-engine sender that would silently fail.

Authentication (OTP) templates cannot be used in a campaign. Each recipient needs a unique verifiable code that only your own system can create and check, so the form blocks any authentication template. Send those one at a time from the transactional template send instead.

Message Types

Step 1 (Setup) sets the campaign type, which decides what the Compose step shows and how the outgoing message is built:

For approved template campaigns on the Business API, WaDesk builds the full rich message (buttons, carousel cards, media headers, even authentication-code structure) and wraps links for click tracking. Carousel cards are supported: each card's title, body, footer, and link buttons are filled in and tracked individually.

Personalization & AI Copy

Bodies, headers, footers, and button labels are personalized in two steps:

1. Workspace-wide values first. Placeholders that are the same for everyone — for example {{promo_key}}, {{order_id}}, or numbered placeholders like {{1}} — are filled in once for the whole campaign.
2. Per-contact placeholders second. Then these placeholders are filled in for each recipient:

If the message comes out empty for a recipient (a missing template, or all placeholders blank), that recipient is marked failed with "Empty message body" rather than sending a blank message.

Build with AI

The Build with AI button drafts a complete campaign from a short brief:

1. WaDesk lists the text AI models your admin has enabled (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google); voice-only providers aren't offered here.
2. You fill in a brief: business name (required), product, goal, audience, offer, preferred call-to-action label and link, tone, and any notes.
3. WaDesk generates a campaign name, a message body (with *bold* / _italic_ formatting and an optional {{name}} placeholder), an optional footer, a primary button label and link, and up to three quick replies — all pasted straight into the builder for you to edit.

The generator follows the rules by design: it avoids spammy wording, all-caps shouting, and emojis, and the lengths are capped (body up to 1024 characters; footer, button, and quick-reply labels 25–60 characters) so it never produces copy the form would reject.

Audience, CSV & Dedup

The Recipients step builds the send list from up to four sources, in any combination:

1. Contacts — pick individual contacts.
2. Contact groups — pick groups, and WaDesk pulls in each group's members for you.
3. Manual numbers — paste numbers into the box, one per line or separated by spaces, commas, or semicolons.
4. CSV upload — upload a .csv or .txt file (up to 5 MB). WaDesk detects a header row (looking for columns like name, phone, mobile, number, or contact) and reads the phone column, falling back to the first column.

Numbers from the box and the CSV are cleaned to digits only and must be at least 8 digits to count. Each number is matched to an existing contact and reused; if there's no match, WaDesk creates a contact automatically named "Recipient · <last 4 digits>" so reporting stays consistent. Finally, all four sources are merged and de-duplicated so each person appears exactly once.

Tip: Contacts already unsubscribed at the workspace level are flagged in the campaign's recipient analytics, and a reply containing a STOP or UNSUB keyword unsubscribes that contact workspace-wide, so future campaigns and broadcasts automatically skip the number.

A/B Testing

On the Review step you can enable A/B testing to compare two templates against one audience:

1. Toggle A/B testing on.
2. Pick template A and template B.
3. Set the split percentage with the slider (10–90, default 50) — the share of the audience that receives variant A.

WaDesk records which variant each recipient received, so the detail page can compare delivery and engagement between A and B.

Scheduling

The Schedule step offers three send modes:

The time zone you pick defaults to your workspace time zone, so a campaign set for "9:00 AM Asia/Kolkata" fires at that local moment no matter where the server is. Recurring runs use that same local time, so the clock time stays the same across daylight-saving changes — "9 AM every week" stays 9 AM.

How scheduled campaigns fire. The background service that powers WhatsApp checks every 30 seconds for any campaign whose time has come and sends it — using the same path as Send now, with safeguards so it never sends twice. A scheduled campaign therefore goes out within about half a minute of its scheduled time, as long as the connection is up.

Campaign & Recipient Statuses

A campaign carries an overall status, while every recipient tracks its own delivery state. The detail page updates live (about every 15 seconds), so the tiles and the status pill update while a send is in progress.

Campaign status

Per-recipient status

Common failure reasons include "No mobile number on contact", "Out of credits", "Empty message body", a Meta/provider error message, or (for flow campaigns) "Sending service unreachable". Late or out-of-order updates only ever move a recipient forward (queued → sent → delivered → read), never backward. The detail tiles add Delivered, Read, Replies, and Clicks as those signals arrive, and the headline counts are recalculated on every update so repeated reports never double-count.

Wallet Charge & Refund-on-Fail

Campaign sends are billed against your wallet, one credit per recipient. The accounting is built to never overcharge:

1. Before each send, WaDesk checks the wallet. If it can't cover the message, the recipient is marked failed with "Out of credits" and no charge is taken.
2. The credit is charged just before the message is sent.
3. If WhatsApp accepts the message, the recipient is marked sent.
4. If the send fails for any reason, the recipient is marked failed and the charge is refunded automatically, with the failure reason attached.

On the Business API, if a template send fails, WaDesk refunds and marks it failed rather than quietly re-sending it as plain text — which would both double-charge and send a worse message.

Send, Pause, Resume, Cancel & Retry

From the campaigns list and the detail page you can act on a campaign throughout its life:

To recover from failures, fix the cause first (reconnect the number, top up credits, correct a media link), then re-run the campaign. Each failed recipient shows its own error, and the retry backlog tile on the list page shows the total number of failed recipients across the workspace so you can spot a systemic problem at a glance.

Tip: The list filters (status, message type, date range) and live search update without a full page reload. Sidebar counts always reflect the whole workspace, not the current filter.

Ban-Safety & Pacing

Sending at scale on WhatsApp carries a real risk of a number being rate-limited or banned — especially on the Unofficial API. WaDesk paces every bulk send using safety controls your admin sets under Admin → Settings → System Message → Sender pacing:

WaDesk also guards against sending into a dropped Unofficial API connection: if the connection drops mid-run, the job is paused (instead of marking every remaining recipient as failed) and the paused state is shown in the dashboard.

Protect your number. Only message people who opted in. Warm up new numbers with small audiences before large blasts, keep copy personalized and relevant, stay well under the daily cap, and prefer approved templates and the official Business API for cold outreach. Sending unsolicited bulk messages, reusing one message to thousands of strangers, or turning off pacing is the fastest way to get a WhatsApp number banned. On the Business API, mind template quality too: WaDesk refuses to launch a campaign on a template Meta has paused or whose quality score is below your minimum — pushing volume through a struggling template makes it worse and risks a block, so wait for the score to recover instead of forcing the send.