Leverage Facebook’s Automated Rules to Efficiently Manage and Maintain Campaigns

By Tamer Rizk, Digital Marketing Specialist

Checking the performance of your Facebook campaigns and making the necessary adjustments on a daily basis can be a tedious and time-consuming task, especially if you're responsible for many accounts, budgets, and campaigns. Maintaining campaigns is a continuous process of optimizing and tweaking. Increasing a bid, pausing an ad set, decreasing a budget - these are just some of the recurring tasks that can consume your time. Having a systematic process to determine what changes need to be made when certain parameters are met leads to effective and efficient campaigns.

With Facebook's new Automated Rules feature, you can have Facebook run checks for you and take the appropriate actions you would normally do manually. Essentially, this feature allows advertisers to create specific rules in Ads Manager or Power Editor that will trigger specific updates or notifications, saving time and streamlining campaign maintenance.  You are limited to 100 automated rules per ad account; these can be applied to campaigns, ad sets, and ads.

Understand the Basics of Creating Rules

Tip: Before you create an automated rule, think of what parameters are most important to you and would lead you to take make adjustments manually. Automated rules are most effectively used to quickly capitalize on opportunities and minimize the impact of poor performers.

There are a few different settings you need to select when setting up automated rules.

1. Go to Power Editor or Ads Manager.
2. Check the box next to the ad set you want to create a rule for. Note: Rules can only be associated with objects on the same level only - meaning you can apply a single rule to three ad sets or three campaigns, but you cannot apply a single rule to three ad sets and three campaigns.
3. You will then be presented with a bar with several options; click “Create Rule”:
   
4. A new window will appear, allowing you to set your rules:
   
5. Select “Apply Rule To” and choose where you want the rule to apply. Note that you can apply your rule to a specific campaign, ad set, or ad - or you could apply your rule to all active campaigns, ad sets, or ads.
6. Select “Action” and choose what you want your rule to do. Once a certain condition is met, Facebook will trigger the action you specified. The options are:

• Turn Off Campaign

• Send Notification

• Adjust Lifetime or Daily Budget (increase or decrease by)

• Adjust Manual Bid (increase  or decrease by)

Finally, select “Conditions” and choose what will activate your rule. Conditions are used to evaluate whether an action will be taken or not. Listed below are the conditions that are currently available. The four criteria you can implement towards a condition are: “is greater than”, “is smaller than”, “is between”, and “is not between” a value you specify.  

Note: If you add more than one condition to a rule, then you must meet all of them in order to trigger the rule. If you want an action to happen when either of the conditions are met, then you will have to create a separate rule for each condition.

The conditions include:

• Daily Spend
• Lifetime Spend
• Frequency
• Results
• Hours Since Creation
• Cost Per Result
• Cost Per Mobile App Install
• Cost Per Website Conversion
• Cost per Add Payment Info
• Cost per Add to Cart
• Cost per Add to Wishlist
• Cost per Complete Registration
• Cost per Initiate Checkout
• Cost per Lead
• Cost per Purchase
• Cost per Search
• Cost per View Content
• CPC (Link)
• CPM
• CTR (Link)
• Lifetime Impressions
• Impressions
• Reach

Choose a name for your rule and click “Create” - now your rule is active!

Manage your Rules

1. Navigate to Power Editor or Ads Manager.
2. Click on “Automated Rules”.
3. In the “Manage Rules” table, you'll be able to edit your rules or turn them on and off:
   

Automatically Adjust Budget or Bid

Click on “Action” section; open the drop-down menu; and select Adjust budget or Adjust manual bid. From there you can increase the budget or bid by a percentage or fixed amount, or you can also set a maximum or minimum budget or bid.

Example of Automated Rules at Work

Let's say your objective is to drive traffic to promote a page. You will want to create a rule that capitalizes on the most efficient cost possible.

To do so, you'll create the rule based on CPC (Link) and apply an Action that will increase your daily or lifetime budget once an efficient CPC is met, which is the Condition. Set your impressions to at least 10,000 before triggering a rule so that Facebook has a reasonable sample size to work with.

Now let’s say you’d like to minimize the impact of a poor performer.

Create a similar rule but decrease budget or pause the ad set when an inefficient CPC is met. To automatically turn off poor-performing ad sets, click on the “Action” section, open the drop-down menu, and select turn off ad set. Proceed to set up your conditions.

In the following scenario, you are trying to capture leads at a cost of $10 and don't want to spend more than $2,500 on this specific ad set if you are not achieving your desired CPL of $10.

Facebook will add a third condition of at least 8,000 impressions in order to have a large enough sample size to work with. This rule will pause the ad set once both conditions are met; Cost per lead is greater than $10, and the amount spent is greater than $2,500.

Bottom Line

Facebook’s Automated Rules is a powerful tool that can help save you time and money by making efficient changes quickly. However, it does not mean you can set a rule and forget about it. Constant monitoring and optimization are needed alongside the automated rules to achieve success.