Campaigns: choosing a collaboration type

"Campaign" and "collaboration" mean the same thing in Socialscale — the create flow is literally titled Create new collaboration. The choice that shapes everything else about it is step 2: Collaboration type. Get this wrong and you'll be tracking the wrong metric for the whole campaign.

The three-step setup

1. Platform selection — activate your own creator network, tap into Socialscale's broader network, or hand it to Managed Services
2. Collaboration type — what you're paying creators to do (covered below)
3. Compensation structure — how they're paid for it

The four collaboration types

• UGC — creators produce content for you to use (in ads, on your storefront, wherever), independent of where or whether they post it themselves
• Social Media — creators post to their own channels; success is judged by what happens on their post
• Product Clicks — the collaboration is scoped around driving clicks to a specific product; useful when the goal is traffic, not just content
• Storefront Impressions — scoped around visibility on the creator's storefront specifically, rather than their organic posts

Each collaboration in Campaigns shows its type in the list, along with spend against budget, an active date range, and impressions — so you can see at a glance what kind of work each one is actually buying.

Matching type to goal

Budget and period

Every collaboration gets a budget cap and a date range (Period), and optionally a target age range. Spend is tracked live against the cap on the Campaigns list, so a collaboration that's hit its budget stops accruing further spend rather than silently overrunning it.

That spend is exactly what feeds Collaboration Cost — one of the three components of Cost in the blended Revenue/Cost/ROAS calculation shown on every creator, piece of content, and product (see Understanding Revenue, Cost, and ROAS). A collaboration with a high spend and little to show for it in ROAS is one of the fastest ways to spot an underperforming creator relationship before you renew it.

Compensation structure

Step 3 of creation is where you set how creators are actually paid for this specific collaboration. It's funded from your account's Marketing budget — a separate balance from the Credits that fund AI Workforce and tracking — and Socialscale pays creators directly as their Payer of Record (see Credits and marketing budget: two separate balances and Creator Payments). This sits alongside, not instead of, any standing storefront commission a creator already earns.

For performance-based collaborations specifically — most naturally paired with Social Media or Storefront Impressions types — Socialscale tracks the underlying metric (views on a post, for example) on an ongoing basis, checked daily, and pays the creator directly into their Wallet as it accrues. There's no manual approval step per payout.