What is Campaign Drift?
Last reviewed by Moderation API
Campaign drift is when the messages a brand sends no longer match the 10DLC campaign they were registered under. The campaign was approved for one thing, and the live traffic has become something else.
A typical example: a dental practice registers a customer-care campaign with appointment reminders as its sample messages. Three weeks later the same number sends “0% APR smile loans. Apply now: bit.ly/…”. Nothing in that message looks like spam. But it breaks the registration three ways: lending content on a campaign that did not declare it, an embedded link the campaign said it would not use, and a public URL shortener.
Why drift matters
A campaign is approved once, but carriers and direct connect aggregators keep checking its traffic after approval. They list drift from the registration as a reason to suspend a campaign, and content violations are fined per message. Fines travel down the messaging chain and usually land on the campaign service provider (CSP) that sent the traffic.
How to catch it
Spam filters score each message on its own, so they rarely see drift. To catch it, each message has to be checked against its own campaign record: the registered use case, the approved samples and the declared content. A manual review at approval cannot do this, because it sees only the samples and never the live traffic.
Campaign drift is a different problem from model drift, where a machine learning model gets less accurate as its input data changes.
Moderation API’s 10DLC compliance add-on checks every message against the campaign it was sent under.
