Make your Facebook Ads budget even more efficient with automated rules. Learn all about why and how you should use automated rules.

Creating automated rules is a new and very meaningful feature, that allows advertisers to automate the decision making and management of their campaigns. Setting up automated rules is very easy to do, and do not require any technical knowledge.

What are automated rules?

Automated rules allow you to automatically get an alert email, or pause your campaigns, ad sets or ads, according to preset conditions you define, when creating a rule. When the automated rule will meet the defined conditions, the rule will be activated, and will pause the campaigns, ad sets or ads, or will send an alert email, according to your choice.

For example, you can choose to create a rule based on cost per conversion. When your campaign or ad set cost per conversion exceeds a certain amount, automatically turn it off. You can also set your rules by reach, CPM, the amount spent etc.

How to make Facebook do the work for you?

On the Ads Manager or Power Editor, choose the campaigns, ad sets or ads you want to create a rule for, and then click “Create Rule”.

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A rule creation window will pop up:

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This is where you set your automated rules. There are a few different settings you need to choose:

Apply Rule to – Choose which campaigns, ad sets or ads to apply the automated rule you are creating to. Once created a rule, you can always go back and change your selection. You can also apply an existing rule on any new campaign you are creating.

Action – Choose between turn off the campaign, or send a notification email when meeting the rule preset conditions.

tip Tip: If you feel that automatically pausing makes you lose control of your campaigns, start with email based rules, that will let you know on required changes.

Subscriber – If you chose an email alert as the action, choose who will get the alert email. You can choose only people with access to the ad account.

Conditions – Define the criteria to base the rule on. You can choose more than one criteria, which means the rule needs to meet all of them to be activated. There are different criterions to choose from:

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For example, I chose to pause my campaigns if the cost per lead is higher than $5 and the amount spent is higher than $1,500. Facebook automatically adds another condition, that the campaign must also reach a minimum of 8,000 impressions, in order to let new campaigns and ad sets to gain traffic, and see their actual results before pausing them.

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The automated rule will pause this campaign, only when the three conditions will happen.

tip Tip: Choose the parameters that are most important for you, and would have made you pause your campaign manually. In most cases it will be the cost per your chosen objective, that is getting to a higher level than you are willing to pay, or amount spent that is exceeding your budget. In ads level, it would be low CTR or high frequency.

Time Range – Choose the time range to base your rule on. For example, If the rule is set to pause the campaign when the cost per lead is higher than $5, and the time range is “Last 7 Days”, the rule will calculate the cost per lead going back 7 days.

Attribution Window – Choose how to attribute the users interactions with your ad. You can choose the attribution window for impressions and clicks separately.

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Frequency & Schedule – When your automated rule will test the conditions. It is set for a daily check by your account’s time zone.

Rule Name – Choose how to name your automated rule.

tip Tip: Don’t choose names like “Rule 1”, “Rule 2” etc. Make sure to choose names that make sense, and describe what the rule does. For example, if your rule is set to send an alert email when the amount spent goes over $1,500, name it: “spent > $1,500, email”. Naming your rules in a way that makes sense, will help you apply them to future campaigns.

Bottom line

While automated rules are still basic, and enables only two actions, it is expected that Facebook will increase the automating abilities with more powerful rules. Use automated rules, to make sure you are not spending the budget on low performing campaigns, ad sets or ads.

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