Are you wondering how you could manage your Facebook ads more efficiently? Or maybe you feel like you do the same thing every day on your Facebook ads account and would like to automate it with Facebook automated rules?
In this article, we’ll show you exactly how we use Facebook’s automated rules to scale our ads and stop wasting Facebook ad budget on ads that are not performing well.
Why should you use Facebook automated rules?
When it comes to Facebook ads, you are either creating or managing. The creating phase usually encompasses the task of:
- Creating a Facebook ad account
- Linking a Facebook page & Instagram page
- Setting up everything in the business settings
- Creating the actual advertising
- Choosing the right Facebook ads audience
- Choosing the right Facebook ads placement
The creating phase is an important phase, but it’s not the most important.
In fact, a lot of marketers just focus on starting a lot of ads and doing the creating phase well while they are missing out on what running Facebook ads is all about.
Facebook ads are all about constant optimization and decision-making based on the results.
You guessed it, Facebook automated rules greatly help with optimizing your Facebook ads with is probably responsible for 90% of the success of your ads.
It’s why I often disagree with clients thinking they can run their ads when I see that all they do is launch ads and do no optimizing.
Not only will their results be bad but even if they performed, they would slowly stop performing with ad fatigue which can only be combated with new creatives and better optimization and processes.
I must admit that we use Facebook automated rules only on large Facebook accounts. When you have 500 ads running at the same time, it’s often hard to cut the budget on those low performing ads manually and you’ll probably end up saving a lot of money by doing so.
If you only have 10 ads running, it’s better to optimize the ads yourself because metrics are not the only factor when taking smart Facebook ads decisions.
What are Facebook automated rules?
When you create a Facebook automated rule, Facebook takes action on your behalf. For example, if after 10,000 impressions, your return on ad spend is still below a certain value, you can tell Facebook to turn off the ad in question.
On the contrary, if an ad is giving you a return on ad spend above three, you could ask Facebook to increase your ad spend by 50% per day.
If you already have a system for turning off ads or scaling your budget, why not giving it to Facebook to let them do it for you? That’s the train of thought behind using Facebook automated rules.
Hot tip: you shouldn’t just let Facebook run your automated rules for you. The goal here is to have Facebook help you manage your ads by taking away menial tasks, but it’s still important to have a human check the results and make a few manual decisions based on other things than metrics.
How to pick the right Facebook ad performance metric?
When it comes to metrics, you’ll have people who swear by ROAS, which stands for return on ad spend. Although I must agree that ROAS is often the most important metric for brands, it’s not always the case.
If profits are not trackable for your business, I won’t let you down. Let’s take a look at the options you have in terms of metrics:
- Impressions
- Amount spent
- Lifetime spend
- Frequency
- Mobile app installs
- Cost per mobile app installs
- Mobile app purchase ROAS
- Website purchase ROAS
- Daily ratio spent
- Lifetime ratio spent
- Audience reached in percentage
- Time
- App/website conversions
- Cost per app/website conversions
- Offline conversion
- Cost per online conversion
As you can see, the options are quite limitless. To better grasp what you should set up, you need to understand how it works.
Step #1 – You select the level at which you want to apply the rule (campaign, ad set or ad level)
Step #2 – Then you choose what you want Facebook to do such as turn off the level you selected, adjust the budget or adjust the bid.
Step #3 – You choose the conditions and this is where it can get complicated with all the options. For example, you could say all the campaigns with the word “amazon” when the cost per purchase is above $10, lower the budget by 10%.
Step #4 – Choose the timeframe in which Facebook should check your data. Should they measure in the past 7 days or only measure in terms of the last 24 hours?
Step #5 – Finally, you can choose if Facebook should check continuously, every day at a certain time or you can customize that part yourself.
As you can see, the metric you needed to choose lies in step #3 with the conditions. It’s easy to create what you want, but it’s hard to know what to do. It’s why in this article, I’ll show you where to create those Facebook automated rules while also giving you our most used five rules.
Where to find Facebook automated rules in the business manager?
There are two ways to find Facebook automated rules. The first way is inside the “ads manager” and the second is inside the menu under “automated rules”.
When it comes to the “ads manager”, you should be able to see it after you select a campaign and you click on the 3 dots inside the ad set level. It should look something like this.
On the flip side, when it comes to the menu method, all you need to do is click on the top left menu and select “automated rules“. This is what is should look like.
How to create Facebook automated rules?
Facebook automated rules are super easy to create especially once you know where they are. If you don’t know where to find them, just go over the section above.
In this section, I’ll go through all the options with you
Step #1 – At this step, you just have to go find the automated rules with the methods above, either by going in the ads manager or through the menu and selecting automated rules.
Step #2 – Now is the most important time of your Facebook automated rule creation process, it’s time to choose between all the options you have. When you click create, a popup opens that looks like this.
Before you choose which Facebook automated rule you want to create, it’s important to understand how they are structured. You have five different levels: action, condition, logical expression, frequency and time range.
The action level is what you want the rule to do once your condition and logical expressions are met. According to Facebook, you can, for instance, turn off your ad/ad set/campaign, adjust your budget, and so on.
Here’s what the options look like.
You also have a few options when it comes to adjusting the budget.
And there are even more options when it comes to adjusting manual bids…
You can then select a schedule which is how often Facebook should verify that your conditions are fulfilled which I’ll explain below.
The condition and logical expression level allow you to choose which metric you’ll look at to trigger the action you selected. For instance, your condition could be “cost per click” and your logical expression would be above $2.
There are tons of options when it comes to matching your conditions and logical expressions so I recorded a little GIF for you.
And this is where the frequency & time range levels become important. The frequency is how often you want Facebook automated rules to review your condition and logical expression: daily, weekly or even continuously?
Here are all the options you should see there.
The time range affects the amount of data taken into account. For instance, you could select a one day window. This would mean that Facebook analyzes if your “cost per click” is above $2 based on one day’s worth of data. If you would choose 7 days, then Facebook would take into account the data of the last seven days to draw conclusions.
Finally, you have notifications, subscribers and rule names which are pretty self-explanatory.
Step #3 – So what do you do if you want to delete, turn off or edit an automated rule? It’s quite simple actually, you just have to go in the menu, select automated rules and then you’ll see a table with the last row called action which will have all the options you desire.
It looks something like this.
Strategy #1 – Decrease daily budget by X when ROAS is below X
When should you set up this Facebook automated rule? This rule should be set up as soon as possible if you are running ads to generate a profit.
Considering that by now you should know where to find Facebook automated rules in your business manager, I’ll get straight to the meat.
First, we usually apply the rule to all active ad sets but not all active campaigns. Why? Well because not all our campaigns are focused on generating profits, which means we don’t always have the same goal. You could also choose to apply it to a specific ad set by selecting the ads manager.
We then select “decrease daily budget” by either a percentage or a certain amount. We prefer using the percentage method because adding $1 to your budget might take too long for you to catch your advertising wave.
Then, you need to select “website purchase” is “smaller than” and input the amount that you require to stay profitable. For instance, if you need to make $2 per $1 of ad spend, then input 2.
We also suggest adding another condition for the rule to only be applied after your ad ou ad set has been seen by at least 8,000 people. If you didn’t know, you can have multiple conditions. This is what it would look like:
You can then select a timeframe which we recommend to be 7 days. We don’t like using daily because the results do vary a lot on a day to day basis.
Finally, make sure to set your schedule to appear at least daily or more, but never continuously since decreasing your budget every 3 minutes is essentially like turning off your ad.
And here you go, you’ve set up your first Facebook automated rule.
Strategy #2 – Decrease daily budget when CPA is below X
When should you set up this Facebook automated rule? This is a good rule to set if you are optimizing your ads for a specific result such as leads or purchases.
The first step to create this rule is to figure out which “cost per acquisition” is too low for you to keep the same Facebook ads budget. To scale, you want a high return, to keep steady you want a good return and to decrease you want a positive yet low return. Usually, we decrease the budget when the ROAS is still positive yet very slim.
After going inside the “ads manager” or inside the menu item “automated rules”, you’ll have to make the following selections.
You’ll first want to select all active ad sets or select only one ad set in the ads manager. After that, you’ll need to select “decrease daily budget” and select a percentage. We recommend starting with a 5% decrease.
As you can see, you’ll also need to choose a minimum daily budget cap. This amount is the budget at which you don’t want to decrease anymore, it’s the lowest. We usually set this up to be of at least $10 per day.
At this stage, you’ll need to choose the action frequency, the conditions and the time range. We recommend “once daily” for the action frequency.
For the conditions, we recommend, after finding your CPA, to choose when the cost per result is greater than the number you found and impressions above 8,000. Finally, we recommend the time range to be 7 days or 1 day if you want to micromanage.
All that’s left is for you to select schedule as daily, add the names of the people who should be informed of that rule and give that rule a name.
Strategy #3 – Notification when the frequency is above X
When should you set up this Facebook automated rule? This is a good rule to set for all your ads to go and see if your Facebook ads frequency is starting to negatively impact your results.
The goal of this automated rule is for you to take a look at if your Facebook ads frequency being high is having a negative impact on your results or your quality score. Otherwise, you should not touch an ad that is still performing well even though the frequency is high unless you have a good reason to do so.
After going inside the “ads manager” or inside the menu item “automated rules”, you’ll have to make the following selections.
You’ll need to select all active ad sets or select a specific ad set inside the ads manager and then you’ll need to select notifications only.
The “condition” of this Facebook automated rule is quite easy. You choose frequency greater than, and we recommend the number 2.1, meaning when people have seen your ads 2.1 times on average. We also recommend picking the lifetime time range because you most likely won’t get 2.1 within a day unless you spend a lot or have a tiny audience.
You’ll then have to choose how often you want Facebook to check that rule which is called schedule which we recommend to set daily.
As usual, you’ll have to then choose the people that will be notified and the rule name and you are good to go.
Strategy #4 – Turn off ad sets when ROAS is below X
When should you set up this Facebook automated rule? Again, if you are aiming for results then you should set up this rule. One thing to keep in mind is that turning off an ad is a drastic move and should be used mostly as an emergency.
The first step to set up this rule is to find the breaking point of your return on ad spend, which is the point where you start losing money. To calculate this, you just have to find the cost per purchase you can afford to pay.
Say that above $40 per purchase you start being unprofitable and your product sells at $60, this would mean that below a Facebook ads ROAS of 1.5 you become unprofitable.
It’s really important to set this rule at the breaking point because you don’t want to turn off an ad that brings you profit unless you have budget issues and you want to prioritize better-performing ads.
After going inside the “ads manager” or inside the menu item “automated rules”, you’ll have to make the following selections.
At this stage, just select all active ad sets or select the ad sets you to want inside the ads manager and then select as the action “turn off ad set”.
You’ll then have to select two conditions. The first one is that your lifetime impressions have to be above 8,000 and then add that your website purchase ROAS is above a certain number.
And then, choose the timeframe to be daily or 7 days, because if you choose “lifetime” you would turn off the ad once that campaign has made you lose money overall.
Finally, pick the daily schedule, choose a name and add the required subscribers.
Strategy #5 – Increase daily budget by X when ROAS is above X
When should you set up this Facebook automated rule? This is a good Facebook ad to set if you are able to measure your Facebook ROAS and wish to scale your budget as long as it drives a certain ROAS.
This is the best rule if you want to scale your Facebook ads. Although scaling often feels like a hazardous skill and everyone claims they have the best method, the truth is that it depends on a lot of factors.
One thing for sure is that if your audience and your creative is generating amazing results, then the best way to scale is to slowly increase your budget as a percentage.
After going inside the “ads manager” or inside the menu item “automated rules”, you’ll have to make the following selections.
First, select all active ad sets or take only the ad sets you want inside the ads manager. Then, you’ll need to set up the action which is “increase daily budget” by 5%. You’ll also have to set the maximum budget which is the budget you don’t want to scale past.
Next, you’ll have to select de conditions which will be lifetime impressions above 8,000 and the website purchase ROAS is greater than 3 in our example. We suggest your ROAS to scale to be high enough for it to diminish because scaling often reduces the ROAS.
We also recommend selecting the time range to be daily, meaning that Facebook will check daily if your ROAS is above a certain number in order to scale or not.
Finally, choose the time range to be either 7 days or daily, the schedule daily and then choose the subscribers and the rule name.
Are Facebook automated rules a must?
Facebook automated rules are by no means necessary to succeed with Facebook ads. In fact, if you don’t manage a lot of ad accounts then it might be better for you to manage your ads yourself.
At K6, we think managing your ads manually is always the best option, but some Facebook ad rules might help you when managing your ads becomes too complicated. They might even help you scale when you know you should increase your ad spend but you feel too scared to do it.
Does Facebook notify screenshots? A lot of parts inside Facebook ads remain a mystery but what matters is focusing on what you can control such as Facebook automated rules. If you feel like we should add something to this article let us know, we’re always trying to improve.