Automated Rules on Facebook Ads

What are automated rules on Facebook Ads and how do you set them up?

As the number of advertising campaigns grows, it becomes more difficult to check their quality. In order to simplify the work that comes with a large amount of data, correctly allocate the budget and optimize the time of interaction with advertising campaigns, it’s worth using the automated rules on Facebook Ads. In this article, we’ll go over what this is, why you should do it, and how they help targeting specialists.

What are automated rules for?

Automated rules allow you to activate and deactivate ads, check up on and manage your budget, and set up notifications. To activate a setting, you need to set the corresponding criterion and select the action of interest.

Next, using examples, we’ll consider three tasks that can be solved using automated rules:

• Adjust the frequency of ad impressions.
• Control CPC and conversion rate.
• Adjust the schedule for ad impressions with a set daily budget.

How and why should you limit the frequency of impressions?

Having ads with too frequent impressions of can lead to an increase in the cost of a targeted action in, for example, targeted Instagram ads. To prevent this from happening, it’s worth using automated rules which you can use to turn off ad brodcasting if they have been shown to users more than two times (the number is indicated in approximate and depends on your product and marketing strategy).

How do you do this? In this case, the settings are made at the campaign level, so the first we do is tick the campaign of interest. After that click on “Rules” and select “Create a new rule” in the drop-down list.

A configuration window will then open and here we set two parameters:

1. Select to apply the rule to all active ads.
2. Moving down to “Conditions”. In the list of conditions, look for and select “Frequency”, and enter the number of impressions at which we want the ads to be disabled, for example, 3.

All that’s left to do is give the rule a name and save it. Now impressions, and therefore costs will be better under control.

How do I make a rule to manage the cost of conversion?

There are many factors that can affect the cost of conversion. And the sooner changes are noticed, the better. To save time and not miss the moment when costs go up, it’s best to set up a notification that will let you know about changes in the cost of conversion.

You can entrust this with automated rules, however, you should keep in mind thaht that this option is available for campaigns with the goal of “Conversion”.

As with the previous algorithm of actions, mark the campaign and create a new rule.

In the “Actions” item, select “Send notification only”. And in the “Conditions” we decided on the required conversion price, which should not be exceeded. In this case, that’s $3.

Rule for setting the schedule of impressions

If your campaign uses the budget for the entire period, then you shouldn’t have any issues with setting the display schedule. But if the budget is limited for a day, then planning for impressions is not available. In this case, another automated rule can help pick up the slack.

When we create it, we set the activation of the campaign as action and set the current date and time.

The next step is to create a schedule. To do this, open user settings and create a weekly schedule. There can be several display intervals within a single day.

After saving this rule, create another one for the same campaign, but this time already specifying the time when it will turn off.

Checking the Rules

You can check that all automated rules have been saved and are working correctly in the general Facebook Ads Manager menu. In the drop-down list, select “Automated Rules”, and a full list of them with detailed information, the ability to edit, delete and preview will open before you.

A bit more about the benefits of automated rules

This is a really handy Facebook Ads tool that makes doing campaigns easier and saves time.

What else can you do with automated rules:

• Check for and manage offline conversions.
• Enable or disable ads when various conditions are met (cost, number of mobile app downloads, etc.).
• Receive notifications about actions with advertising posts (including if someone leaves a comment).
• Check for the number and cost of mobile app downloads.

For more information on everything you can do with automated rules, see the corresponding Facebook Ads menu. By running several rules at the same time, you can ‘cross’ their conditions with each other. But the more ‘crossovers’ like this there are, the more difficult it is to control the accuracy of the rules and avoid a conflict of conditions.

Automated rules make it easier to keep your ads under control. But they don’t cancel out the need for the constant involvement of the targeting analyst in monitoring campaigns and the readiness to improve their settings.