Why You Should Be Using Facebook’s Automated Rules (+ How to Set Them Up)

Facebook has recently announced its latest advertising feature – the automated rule. These were created to help advertisers save time and effort managing and monitoring their campaigns by applying specific rules to specific conditions within a campaign, ad set, or individual ad.

Let’s break it down.

When you’re running ads, do you constantly find yourself checking in, tweaking, and analyzing the performance? Well, the aim of the automated rule is to take this off your hands.

These rules put the control back in your hands and, rather than constantly having to check up on your campaigns, the automated rules will run these checks for you and implement actions automatically that you would usually do manually.

What Exactly Are Facebook’s Automated Rules?

Setting up, managing, and monitoring Facebook ad campaigns aren’t quick, easy tasks.

In fact, they require a lot of manual work that takes a lot of time – and what if your ad isn’t performing well? What if the target audience you’ve chosen isn’t converting like you hoped? What if the copy on your ad isn’t inspiring people?

You’ll find that you’re constantly updating your settings, tweaking copy, testing different audiences, and swapping out old images for new ones.

Cue the new Facebook automated rule.

This new feature allows you to set rules that align with your ad’s performance in order to automatically change the settings. So, if a target audience isn’t working well for you, the automated rule will change your bid or budget. Or, if you’re spending too much per conversion, the automated rule will pause or tweak the campaign.

The rules can be set up in the Ads Manager and Power Editor, and you’ll get a notification of changes made to your campaigns either via Facebook notifications or via email.

Why Facebook Automated Rules Will Help Your Business

Let’s face it: it’s impossible to start an ad campaign, hit go, and just let it roll. You could, but you’ll find some ads outperforming others, some ads underperforming, and others just ticking along.

It then becomes your time-consuming job to tweak and optimize the campaigns so they’re performing at their best. You might need to increase your budget in one set, decrease it in another, or stop an entire set completely.

If you run a lot of Facebook ads, it’s likely you have a system in place that determines when you make these changes, whether it’s if the cost per conversion is too high or your ads aren’t converting as you hoped they would.

With Facebook automated rules, you can automate this process, meaning Facebook makes the changes in your system for you so you don’t have to spend all your time tweaking and optimizing your ad sets and campaigns.

Of course, you’ll still need to monitor your campaigns, but the automated rules cut back on some of the time spent tweaking and re-working.

So, What Can You Automate?

The rules are pretty expensive. When you create a new rule, you can set it to automate things like:

• Turning off campaigns, ad sets, or ads
• Adjusting the budget of ad sets
• Adjusting the bids of ad sets

Every time it makes a change to your campaigns, you can set it to send you an email notification.

Key Things to Know About Automated Rules

Before you start setting up automated rules and playing around with the features, here are some key things you should know.

• One ad account can have up to 100 rules (including both active and inactive rules)
• A single rule can be applied to 200 separate objects
• Each rule can have more than one condition but can only have one condition type (e.g. you can’t use the Cost Per Result rule more than once in a single rule)

To keep things simple, all your automated rules can be set up, monitored, and managed in the Manage Rules section of your Ads Manager.

How to Create a Rule For a Campaign, Ad Set or Ad

Now you know what Facebook automated rules are, how they work, and why they’re important for your business, let’s take a look at how you can set one up for a campaign, ad set, or ad.

1. Go to your Ads Manager or Power Editor

2. Check the box next to the campaign you’d like to create a rule for

3. Click “Create Rule” – a new window will appear where you can set up the rule

4. Go to the “Apply Rule To” section and choose where you want the rule to apply

5. Go to the “Action” section and choose what you want your rule to do when your campaign meets the conditions

6. Go to the “Conditions” section and choose and specific condition that activates your rule – click “Add” when you’ve chosen. To choose more than one, click “+” and add more

Tip: at this point, you can play around with the amount of time and attribution of your rules. E.g. if you want to change the number of days of data gathered in your rule, go to the “Time Range” section and choose a specific time range.

7. Choose what kind of notification you want to receive (Facebook will always send you a notification on the platform, but you can choose to receive an email, too)

Tip: if you have multiple people on your ad account, you can add subscribers to the rule so they get notifications when something changes as well.

8. Choose a name for your rule and click “Create” – your rule is now active

9. Track the activity on your rule in the Automated Rules section of your Ads Manager or Power Editor

Facebook ads can be incredibly powerful for your business, but you need to constantly be monitoring and optimizing your results in order to see success with them.

The emergence of the new automated rules makes it so much easier to set specific conditions for your campaigns, ad sets, and individual ads, meaning you don’t have to spend as much time micro-managing your ads.

Will you be trying out Facebook’s new automated rules for your business?