Target campaigns by country with targeting.locations.include — country-level only, no region or DMA targeting.
Thrad campaigns are targeted by country. You set targeting on the campaign at create time (or update it later) through targeting.locations.include, an array of country objects. There is no separate targeting resource — targeting lives on the campaign body.
Targeting is country-level only. Region, state, and DMA (metro) targeting are not supported. This is a deliberate difference from OpenAI Ads — locations are resolved to a country and any sub-country detail is ignored.
Bearer token: Authorization: Bearer ak_.... One active key per organization — create it in the Thrad Platform dashboard under Settings → API keys. Examples below read it from the THRAD_ADS_API_KEY environment variable.
ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code, e.g. "US", "DE", "GB". Case-insensitive on the way in — codes are uppercased server-side. As an alias, you may send id instead of country_code (e.g. { "id": "us" }); the value is read from country_code first, then id.
Every location in include must resolve to a country code. An entry with neither country_code nor id is rejected with 400 invalid_value and param: "targeting.locations.include".
On read, each targeted country is expanded to an object with id, type, and country_code — type is always "country", and id mirrors the uppercased country code. The campaign you created above reads back like this:
The lowercase "de" you sent reads back as "DE". Timestamps (start_time, end_time, created_at, updated_at) are Unix seconds. A freshly created campaign submits to review, so it reads back as status: "paused" with review_status: "in_review".You omitted start_time on create, so it defaulted to roughly two days out (the earliest allowed launch window) — that is why start_time reads back as a non-null Unix timestamp rather than null. end_time was also omitted and stays null (open-ended, delivering until the budget is exhausted).
Send a new targeting object to POST /v1/campaigns/{id} to replace the campaign’s countries. The same normalization and validation apply on update as on create.
Do not send status in a campaign update body — campaign status changes go only through /activate, /pause, and /archive. Sending status on a campaign update returns 400 use_status_action. (Ad groups and ads do accept status in their update body — that restriction is campaign-only.)
Create the campaign, then open it in the Thrad Platform dashboard and confirm the targeted countries before it goes live. The campaign starts in review (review_status: "in_review") and will not deliver until it is approved, so this is the right moment to catch a wrong or missing country.
If you need finer-grained delivery than country level, that is not available through targeting. Region, state, and DMA targeting are intentionally unsupported — design your campaigns around country-level reach.
