You may be in a situation where you are using Sales Automation Manager on your workstation and you have an Act! Remote data base on your workstation. The Master data base is elsewhere (such as in a Cloud Web hosting environment) and not directly accessible by the SAM program. The problem is SAM wants to define the fields that are needed for managing the Campaign for you and this is not possible if SAM only has direct access to a Remote data base.
SAM assumes it has access to the Master data base and can create the fields it needs. If this is not the case it is possible to create the fields manually in the Master data base and then sync the definitions to the Remotes. At that point SAM, accessing the remote, can't tell the difference where the fields came from and should go on with its processing.
As the field requirements are not well documented in the SAM User manual here are the specifics.
Each campaign needs two fields named as follows in the Contact record. <Campaign name>_Stage <Campaign name>_TaskCompleted
The <Campaign name> part is exactly as the Campaign is named in SAM, including spaces if present, so for example if the Campaign is named "Activity Reminder" then the fields would be named "Activity Reminder_Stage" and "Activity Reminder_TasksCompleted". There are no additional spaces or punctuation between the Campaign name part and the trailing suffix that starts with the Underscore character. Each field can be defined using Tools/Defined Fields as data type Character, Allow Blanks, and Field Length 50. If SAM defined the fields the _Stage field would also get a drop-down created for it and assigned to it with the same name as the field ("Activity Reminder_Stage" in this case) with values of the public stage names in that Campaign (stage names that do not start with the underscore ("_") character). The drop-down list of stage names is a convenience to the Act! user to be able to manually put a contact into a particular stage without knowing and having to type the exact stage name but the presence of the dropdown is not a requirement for SAM to do its processing.
Note that any other fields referenced by the SAM campaign in Compare Field conditions or Set Field actions, etc. also need to be present in the Act! data base or you will get a run-time error from SAM when the campaign is attempted to be run. The field creation processing in SAM would also attempt to create those fields if asked but again that is not possible with a Remote. Just define the fields in the Master as appropriate for the data they will contain, sync the definitions to the Remote, and SAM should have no problem using them.