Facebook Introduces Automated Ad Rules

Less busy work, more optimization – that’s the goal of Facebook’s new Automated Rules tool for ads. Using this new feature, you can create rules and resulting actions to automatically apply to ads.

Last Fall, Facebook introduced this new feature to help marketers speed up the ad optimization process. If you’re like most people, you probably spend a lot of time checking in on your ad performance. Now, Facebook can carry some of that weight to make your marketing duties a little easier.

This new tool is particularly useful if you have many ads running, but not a lot of time to spend on daily ad maintenance.

When to Use Automated Rules

You set a condition for your ads, then an action you’d like Facebook to take when your ads meet that condition. Here are some situations where you might use these rules:

• If your ad isn’t performing well, you may want to end or pause the ads from running.
• If your ad is getting a lot of clicks, you may want to increase the budget so you can reach more people.
• When your ad’s performance begins to slow, you may want to be notified of its decreasing performance.

Automated rules can help you cut down ad maintenance time, but it’s important that you continue to personally monitor performance to make sure you’re meeting all your marketing goals.

How it Works

Facebook gives a long list of conditions and actions to set your automated rules. Here are just a few of the options Facebook offers:

Conditions

• Cost per Lead
• Cost per Mobile App Install
• Cost Per Result
• CTR (Link)
• Daily Spent
• Impressions
• Reach
• Results

You can also define more specific values here. Facebook allows you to set greater and less than values to each condition. For example, if your Cost Per Click is low, you may want to increase your budget to reach more people. You can tell Facebook to set an automated rule for this. It might look something like this:

If the CPC is less than $0.25, increase the budget by 20%.

Actions

• Send a notification to yourself or other people on your ad account when your rule makes changes
• Turn off your campaign, ad set or ad
• Adjust the budget of your ad set
• Adjust the bid of your ad set

If you have multiple people on your team, you can also tell Facebook to notify other members when a rule is applied.

Creating Automated Rules

In your ad account, find a campaign you wish to add rules to then click Edit Campaign.

You should see an option to create a rule to the right of your Campaign Name. You can also set rules for specific ad sets, new ads and campaigns. To add automated rules to ad set and campaigns, simply click Edit Ad Set then Create Rule. Facebook will guide you throughthe rest of the conditions and actions process.

For more information on Automated Rules, visit Facebook’s Help Page.

Happy optimizing!

This post was written by Social Summer Camp Intern, Francesca Neely-Dickey