• Kill Ad Sets When Spend is 2x More Than Your Target Cost per Purchase
• Pause Your Least Performing Ads
• Kill Ad Sets with Negative ROAS
• Decrease Budget for Specific Days of the Week/ Specific Hours of the Day
• Pause High-Frequency Ads

Automated Rule 1: Kill Ad Sets When Spend is 2x More Than Your Target Cost per Purchase

Scenario: Your ad sets have been running for more than 3 days, the spend is more than 2x your Cost per Purchase (CPP) but there is no sale.

What action should you take? This is a typical scenario which indicates that your ad sets are underperforming and you need to take control of your ad spend. Why? Because 3 days is enough time for an advertiser to make a decision about ad performance while the spend is enough for Facebook to optimize the performance. So if you make no sales after these conditions are met, just kill the underperforming ad sets.

Let’s suppose your estimated product Cost per Purchase is $10. Therefore, if the spend exceeds $20 after 3 days, you tell Facebook to shut off the ad set. Here’s what  this rule will look like in Adscook:

Pause (Adset) if 
Spend Last 3 days > 2x Cost Per Purchase Last 3 days
And
Purchase Last 3 days  < 1     

Note that you need to switch to Dynamic function to implement this comparison metric on Adscook. This is just another standout feature in Adscook that will allow you to set conditions not only against fixed prices but also based on the trends.

Eager to test it out? Sign up now for a 30-day Adscook free trial and automate your smartest strategies.

Automated Rule 2: Pause Your Least Performing Ads

Scenario: You’re running a Facebook birthday discount campaign for your Ecom store. You target all people in New York with upcoming birthdays and test out 3 offers: “Buy one, get One Free” vs “Get 25% Discount” vs “Get a Product with free shipping”. If you’re also testing out different creatives for each offer, it can become messy and time-consuming to identify which of your ads are throwing your money down the drain. If you identify your losers on time, there is either a room for improvement or a chance to cut down expenses.

What action should you take? Good news is that you can set Facebook Automated Rules to check the performance of your ad variations 24/7. The rule then identifies the losers and takes automated action – for example, pauses them on schedule or decreases bid . On Adscook we’ve developed a unique Ranking condition based on relative metrics. It allows you to apply the rule to a portion of bottom performers. 

To apply this rule, select the action Pause or Decrease Bid By on the ad level. While defining conditions, switch to Relative function and set ROAS (last 3 days) is within 20 % Lowest. What does it mean? If you’re running, say, 5 ad variations, the condition calculates and ranks 1 ad out of 5 as the lowest performer (20% of 5) and pauses it automatically.

Here’s what this rule will look like in Adscook:

Pause (Ad) if 
ROAS 3 days is within 20 Lowest % 
And
Purchase Last 3 days  < 1     

Automated Rule 3: Kill Ad Sets with Negative ROAS

Scenario: Your retail store Facebook ads are running for 3 days already. While monitoring your ads you see that your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) isn’t breaking even or, worse still, is falling below the acceptable ROAS for 3 days in a row. You might be generating some sales, but what’s the point if you’re not generating revenue and are therefore draining your budget?

What action should you take? Before even taking any action, you should first define what the acceptable ROAS is for your product, in other words what’s your negative ROAS.

The formula for calculating ROAS is quite simple: Revenue / Cost = ROAS. Let’s assume your Facebook advertising spend is $1000/month. You decide that you will hit your acceptable ROAS only if you gain twice as much as you spend. In this case, your revenue should be at least $2000 to reach your goal and continue running the ad. This means your acceptable ROAS is 2000/1000 = 2 or 1:2, which means that for every dollar spent, you gain 2 dollars.

Now that you know what your acceptable ROAS is, it’s easier to take control of your ad spend. Before taking extreme measures and shutting off your ad sets, you can still take some steps to optimize your ROAS. For example, you can adjust your targeting strategy, improve your conversion landing page, or test other creatives.

However, if you’re still not hitting your acceptable ROAS, simply pause the underperforming  ad sets. We’ve integrated this proven strategy right into the Adscook rule creation process. With a few simple steps you can connect your ad account(s), select campaigns and assign this ready-made rule right away. Sign up for a free Adscook trial and try it for yourself.

 Pause (Adset) if
 Spend Last 3 days > 50 Last 3 days
 And
 ROAS Last 3 days  < 2    

Automated Rule 4: Decrease Budget for Specific Days of the Week/ Specific Hours of the Day

Scenario: Say you’re running a lunch delivery service and your ads are likely to drop in performance on weekends. You would like to keep them running on weekends just for some exceptional cases while also ensuring you don’t drain your budget.

What action should you take? The best action is to decrease your daily budget by a certain percentage every Saturday at 10am, then reset every Monday 10am. This action can successfully  be automated, thus eliminating the manual work you would otherwise have to do every Friday.

To automate this workflow on Adscook, you should choose the action Decrease Budget by, for example by 20%. If you want the rule to apply to a specific ad set, define the condition by ad set name. If you’d like to apply it to all running ad sets, set the condition Spend (Last 7 days) > 1 or Impressions (Last 7 days) > 1000 – anything that’s likely to apply to any of your ad sets, that’s up to you.

Go ahead and in the Schedule section enable Custom rule checking. Select Saturday 10AM and that’s it.

Now the rule will automatically decrease the daily budget of your ad sets by 20% every Saturday morning while you can enjoy your weekend without needing to worry about your ad performance.

Now to reboot your ad sets on Monday, you should create another rule. This time apply the reverse action Increase Budget by 20% and setting a custom schedule Monday 10 AM.

In the same way, you can take control of your ad spend for specific hours of the day when your ads are underperforming.

Pro tip: In case of decreasing budget or pausing ads for specific hours every day, there’s an option in Adscook to auto-reset right in the same rule.

Automated Rule 5: Pause High-Frequency Ads

Scenario: You are running multiple ads and it’s becoming time-consuming to manually check the frequency score of each ad and take relevant actions

What action should you take? Ideally you would like to keep your ad frequency as low as possible to maintain a high conversion rate. As you know, ad frequency metric shows the average number of times each unique user sees your advert. As the frequency increases, the CTR decreases and the CPA increases accordingly, which leads to underperforming ad sets.

For example, if your ad frequency is 3, this means that a unique user has seen your ad 3 times on average and still has not taken any action. So they are either not interested in your offer or are really annoyed with seeing the same ad so many times. In such cases you should always be ready to act when frequency increases in order for your ads to not blow your budget.

A study by SocialMediaToday shows that the recommended frequency is 1.8 – 4 for optimum ad performance. A frequency greater than 4 is therefore a warning sign that your ad performance may be decreasing.

You can combat ad fatigue in many ways, for example by refreshing creatives, expanding target audiences or varying the wording. So you might consider pausing your high-frequency ads to readjust them later. Luckily you can automate this action and control your ad frequency 24/7.

To apply this rule in Adscook, select the action Pause and set the condition Frequency to be greater than 3. But with frequency metric alone, you can’t be sure your ads are underperforming as the ideal frequency differs from business to business. That’s why we’ll combine this metric with the Cost per Purchase metric. If your target CPP increases along with frequency, this is a clear sign that frequency is leading to underperformance.

Here’s what that rule will look like in Adscook:

Pause (Ad) if 
Impressions Last 3 days > 8000
And
Frequency Last 3 days > 3
And
Cost Per Purchase Last 3 Days > $10  

Now It’s Your Turn … 

Facebook ads are not set and forget! You should always keep your finger on the pulse to identify when your budget is blown and reduce your costs.

As a human being you can’t do it 24/7. Instead you can set up smart Facebook Automated Rules to do it for you. We’re not claiming that once you apply automated rules you’re free from checking your ads daily. You still need to scale your ads, regularly refresh your creatives, etc.. However you’ll be at peace that you’re not spending your budget on ads that don’t work.

The strategies we’ve shared above are just a few ways you can manage your ad spend. We welcome you to create your own Facebook automated rules today right in Adscook. Get started for free today!

The post 5 Facebook Automated Rules to Control Your Ad Spend 24/7 appeared first on Adscook Blog.

What if you could automate your ad management system while still maintaining a healthy ROI? Luckily, it’s possible with Automation Rules! 

In this article we’ll look at what’s essential when using automation rules in the first place. We’ll also show you how Adscook Automation Rules can help you get started or simply change the way you’re currently automating your campaigns. 

Here we go! 

• What are Automated Rules?
• How Automation Rules Will Fit into Your Business
• Get Started with Proven Automation Strategies
• Define Your Own Automation Strategy, Easily

What are Automated Rules?

Here are a few common use cases:

• If you manage multiple client accounts, you always risk draining some of your budget on non-performing ads. It simply happens because you can’t check all your ads 24/7 and stop them on time. Set up an automated rule to pause your ads if their CPA is too high or if ROAS is negative.

• If you have winning ads, you may consider scaling the budget. To ensure the scaling happens consistently and smoothly, set up a rule to increase your budget by certain percent, say 30%, if purchases are increasing or the ROAS is positive.

• If you run ads for a food delivery chain, for example, your audience is likely to purchase more at lunchtime. So to ensure you are not blowing your budget, use automation rules to start your ads before lunchtime and pause them after. 

How Automation Rules Will Fit into Your Business

It really is as amazing as it sounds – you can automate most of your ad management workflows. It saves lots of time and lets you focus more on creative matters. You’ll also save money, because you won’t need to hire additional resources. It also means you can scale more rapidly. All of this makes you a more powerful marketer. 

Although many marketers already apply automation rules to their ads management process, the level of utilization depends on how well they have done their homework. You can set a few rules to automate several simple routine tasks, like pause underperforming ads or set notifications on important changes. But you can go further and automate your whole ad buying strategy. To achieve that, you need a clear understanding of your marketing funnel and Facebook advertising strategy.

Let’s dive a bit deeper.

Define your Facebook ad funnel first

No matter what kind of business you are running, your customers go through a certain journey. The steps they take from visiting your website to purchasing your products, define your marketing funnel. Depending on your business, the number of steps and nature of the funnel are different.

To achieve a higher ROI, a marketer’s task is to optimize each step of the funnel to its maximum. So, we should focus on two main metrics – conversion costs and conversion rates at each funnel step.

Once you have those KPIs defined, it’s a great time to set your automation rules and translate your funnel strategy into a group of conditions.

Here is what you should have in place before automating your campaigns:

• Map out your buyer’s journey and the number of touchpoints that a potential customer interacts with, e.g. product page view – add to cart – purchase – upsell.

• Decide what you offer or communicate at each touchpoint.

• Measure the amount of time that takes the prospect to move up from one stage to the next in the funnel and to ultimately reach the final stage. 

• Define the Key Performance Indicators for each touchpoint, e.g. cost per product view, cost per add to wishlist, cost per add to cart, cost per purchase, cost per upsell/cross sell/re-sell.  

• Calculate the Key Performance Indicators for each milestone, e.g. you may calculate that your maximum cost per purchase is $30.

An example of a Facebook ad funnel for Ecommerce business:

Define your advertising strategy & tactics

Besides using a defined funnel and KPIs, each marketer has their own proven advertising strategy. 

• When do you increase your campaign/ad set budget? 
• How much is the optimal budget raise? 
• When should you consider campaigns as non-profitable? 
• What’s your attribution model?
• Do you increase your bid if your total daily spend is below a certain amount?
• Do you turn off a specific campaign every Friday?

The answers to these questions define your advertising strategy and thus help you automate your campaigns. It’s much smoother and more streamlined than if you start without a strategy in place.

Only after you have a well-established marketing funnel and advertising strategy, you are truly ready to adopt automation rules and run your campaigns on autopilot. 

Get Started with Proven Automation Strategies

If you haven’t run any automation rules so far, creating the first one may seem intimidating. It’s becoming much easier when you apply an already proven strategy and just adjust your KPIs.

Adscook has integrated the most useful set of strategies into the rule creation process. With a few simple steps you can plug your ad accounts, select campaigns and assign predefined rules which will start monitoring your campaigns and ensure your efficient ad spend. To see it in action, join the 30-day trial now.

Here is what you can do with Adscook proven strategies:

• Normalize Delivery for Low Bids
• Pause Negative ROAS
• Scale Best Performers
• Scale Aggressive but Safe
• Activate Late Conversions
• Pause Least Performers

Tip: Not only beginners, but expert advertisers can also find something new among these strategies that will fit into their specific needs.

If you want to learn more on when and how to use these automation strategies, get access to our free Facebook Ads Automation Cheat Sheet here.

Define Your Own Automation Strategy, Easily

While gaining more experience, every Facebook marketer develops their own secret sauce. The strategy may include some very tailored action sequences, like duplicate, increase budget, start before or after midnight etc.

To automate all of your actions, you need very robust automation rules. Adscook’s automation rules module is the most advanced in the market while also having a very simple interface. Start a 30-days free trial now and create your first rule with Adscook.

The rule structure is quite simple. You choose: 

• The campaign level (campaign, adset or ad) that you want your rule to apply to
• The action your rule will take, e.g. increase budget, pause, duplicate etc.
• Specific metrics/conditions that trigger the action, e.g. CPA is greater than $5
• Action frequency, e.g. the rule will check your metrics every 12 hours and take the action.  
• The channel you want to be notified by 

Facebook’s native automation tool, as powerful as it is, is not sophisticated enough to satisfy all business use cases. Besides, it’s not smoothly integrated into Ads Manager which may create some disruption and slow down the processes especially when you are managing tons of ads. 

At Adscook we have taken it upon ourselves to build the easiest interface for the most complex automation strategies and provide you with additional automation options.

Here’s what extra opportunities Adscook automation provides:

• Automate more actions
• Create more complex condition statements
• Act based on the trends
• Easily find winners and losers
• Check more frequently for more accuracy 
• Stay up to date with notifications 

Automate more actions

More actions equals more automation opportunities. Facebook’s native tool supports all the basic actions to turn common optimization strategies into automated rules, like increase/decrease budget or bid, turn off, send notifications, etc. 

But while working with dozens of clients we’ve noticed there are other repetitive actions taken manually to optimize ads or to simply manage workflows. 

Here are some of the additional actions Adscook supports:

Duplicate

There are two main reasons why you would like to duplicate your ad sets or ads – to reuse your successful assets in a new campaign or to scale your winning ad sets by increasing budget. 

On Facebook, you can only duplicate your ads manually by selecting the “Duplicate” option on campaign, ad set or ad level. If you have hundreds of ads, then manual duplication will clearly eat up your time. 

Successfully automate “duplicate” action in Adscook and specify some additional options, like keep your original item as is or pause, leave your original budget or set a new one.  

Delete

We have added the “Delete” action to give you full control over the quantity of your ads and to help you keep your account clean. 

Whether you have a number of non-performing ads that are outdated or you have just reached the maximum number of ads, either way deleting them one by one manually is time-consuming. Simply define the conditions and automatically delete unnecessary ads by bulk, using “Delete” action on Adscook. 

Set Budget

This action helps you manage your budget more effectively. Apart from increasing/decreasing your budget, you will also be able to set an exact amount. Whether you want to set different budgets for your separate ad sets or want all your ad sets to have the equal budget, this action will really come in handy. 

Remove Spending Limits

When you are just starting with CBO, it’s a safety net to set a max spending limit on your ad sets to prevent Facebook from spending more than a specific amount. But when your ad sets start showing great results, spending limits may turn from a safety net into a growth slowdown. On Adscook you can create a rule to remove spending limits automatically when the ad sets show great performance. 

Add to Name

Naming conventions of your campaigns do matter to stay organized and manage your rules more effectively. So, name your campaigns as descriptively as possible. You can easily automate this process by “Add to Name” action.

For example, to tag your best performing ads “Winners”, simply choose the “Add to Name” action, enter the name and set conditions that define your best performers. The rule will look like this: 

Action: Add to Name “Winners” 

Condition: 
Purchase last 3 days > 5 
AND
ROAS last 3 days > 2 

Create more complex condition statements

Here is the part where you get strategic. While defining your rule conditions, you specify the KPIs and metrics that matter most for your strategy. The more room for customization you have, the easier you will be able to automate the most complex strategies.  

As Facebook itself mentions, there is one major limit to its condition statements:

You can add more than one condition to your rule. However, your campaign, ad set or ad must meet all conditions to trigger the rule (supports only AND operator).

This means, that on Facebook:

• You can’t connect your conditions with the OR operator 
• You can’t easily automate your most complex strategies as you don’t have enough flexibility to group or nest your conditions

There is a more feasible and quicker solution. We know that some of the most advanced advertisers among you have faced this limitation on Facebook’s native tool, and this is precisely why we have decided to solve it on the Adscook platform. 

Now you have an option to connect your conditions with the OR operator within a single rule.

For example, you have defined 2 separate conditions that indicate ad sets are draining your budget and you want to pause them if even one of the conditions is met. 

Condition 1: 
Spend (last 3 days) > 50 
AND
Purchase (last 3 days) is 0
 
 OR 

 Condition 2: 
Spend (last 3 days) > 50
AND 
ROAS (last 3 days) < 1  

Instead of creating two separate conditions, then assigning them one by one to the asset, you can create multiple conditions within a single rule and assign to your object. Here is how it looks like on Adscook:

All in all, on Adscook you will have two options – (AND) or (AND), (OR) and (OR) which gives you enough flexibility to play around with any combination of conditions, group them, nest them or do whatever else bakes your cake. Join Adscook now to easily automate your most complex conditions. 

Act Based on the Trends

Analyzing data trends is crucial to optimize your Facebook ad campaigns and keep them healthy. If you don’t have benchmark metrics yet, you need to compare your metrics over time to determine if your KPIs are improving or declining, and only after that act.

Comparison adds context to your data and makes it more meaningful. For example, how do you know if you are having a good CPA this week if you are not comparing it to the CPA of last week?   

You may act differently based on the trends – scale your ads, decrease the budget or shut them off altogether. 

On Ads Manager, to identify trends you usually select the metric you want to compare, then choose the time period, enable the comparison toggle, look at data changes and act based on the results. As you see this may be tedious especially when you have so much on your plate. 

On Adscook you can set up a rule to compare your metrics automatically and take an action based on trends. We have added dynamic conditions to carry it out easily. 

Let’s say, you want to check and pause your adset if the ROAS has declined this month compared to the previous month. You just need to switch to Dynamic conditions, choose the pause action and set the comparison condition. Here is how it will look on Adscook:

Action - Pause
Condition: ROAS this month < 1x ROAS last 30 days
Function - Dynamic   

Easily Find Winners and Losers

If you run Facebook ads without constantly checking your best and worst performers, you are simply wasting your money and effort. 

If you identify your winners, there is even more opportunity to go profitable. If you identify your losers, there is either a room for improvement or a chance to cut down expenses. But finding your winners and losers among dozens of campaigns, ad sets and ads is not as simple. 

You would have to look at key metrics one by one, compare them and take actions accordingly. Facebook’s native automated rules can help you set conditions based on performance, however they lack ranking opportunity. 

On Adscook software you can easily do that by setting ranking conditions based on the relative metrics. It allows you to apply the rule to a portion of selected objects (either top or bottom performers).

Let’s look at an example: 

You have 5 ad sets within a campaign, each having different ROAS:

Ad set 1 - ROAS = 4
Ad set 2 - ROAS = 3
Ad set 3 - ROAS = 2
Ad set 4 - ROAS = 1
Ad set 5 - ROAS = 0

To automatically identify your best performing ad set and scale it, you just need to set up a rule on Adscook to increase the bid of the ad set with ROAS within the top 20%. What does this mean? The condition calculates and ranks 1 ad set out of 5 as the best performing (20% of 5) and increases its bid. Ad set one has the highest ROAS, so it’s your best performer.

What if you change the comparison within the top 40%. In this case the rule will rank Ad set 1 and Ad set 2 as best performers and increase their bids accordingly (40% of 5). 

The same applies to bottom performers. If you set up a rule to decrease the bid of the ad sets with ROAS within the bottom 40% , the rule will rank Ad set 3 and Ad set 4 as the least performers and take action on them. 

Note that if you enable “Include zeros”, Ad set 4 and Ad set 5 will be ranked as the least performers instead. 

Want to see it in action? Join Adscook free for 30 days.

Check More Frequently for More Accuracy

The frequency and schedule of the rule makes a world of difference. 

The more frequently you check your rule conditions, the less chance of missing even the smallest changes. On the other hand, checking and executing rules too frequently may ruin your campaigns. So, it all depends on your campaign type and your strategy. 

That’s why we make it possible on Adscook to check your rules from as little as 15 minutes to 72 hours or set a custom schedule for the rules to run on specific days and at specific times of day.

On Facebook’s native tool, you have an option to set a custom schedule but there are no flexible premade frequency intervals. You have two options: either check your rules continuously (rule runs as often as possible, usually every 30 minutes) or daily (at 12.00 am Pacific Time). 

Stay Up To Date with Notifications

To stay on top of things, you should get real-time notifications of your rule executions or errors. On Adscook you will have an option to get alerts either via email or slack channel. Simply choose the one that best suits you and your team. 

Now It’s Your Turn

Automation is a dream for any busy Facebook advertiser. There’s so much data to track, analyze and use to make meaningful decisions.

Using Adscook’s Automation tool allows you to automate even more of your strategies and workflows. This means less repetitive tasks, more organized work routine, maximized ad results and of course, peace of mind. 

Have you already tried automating your Facebook ad campaigns? What strategies are you using? What’s the automation tool that suits your team best? Feel free to share your experience and thoughts with us in the comments section below and let’s build a better advertising future together. 

The post How to Automate Your Facebook Ads Like a Pro appeared first on Adscook Blog.

As a Facebook marketer, you probably define two major stages when it comes to running campaigns: 

Discovery – When you spend money on testing different audiences, creatives, copies, etc., to find a winning combination and eventually reach a positive ROI.

Scaling – Once you finally find the gold mine, you want to squeeze as much out of it as possible. You therefore need a proven mechanism to increase the ROI and at least maintain the level you’ve reached. 

In this article, we’d like to share 4 automated rules to scale your Facebook ads easily.

Increase Your FB Ads ROAS with Automation

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What is Facebook Ad Scaling?

1. If your ads aren’t at least 30% profitable yet but you’re already thinking about scaling them, you’re definitely on the wrong track. Would you consider participating in a rally race if you hadn’t yet passed your driving test? Probably not. 
2. If you think scaling is all about increasing your budget and then sitting back and seeing conversions pile up accordingly, you’re on the wrong track again. Scaling Facebook ads is a strategy that needs to be thought out.

Here are our top tactics for using automated rules to implement Facebook ad scaling in a smart way.

#1: Make Small Budget Increases Every 3-4 Days

This is by far the most common Facebook ad scaling tactic because if you do it methodically, it’s the least risky strategy. But what exactly do we mean when we say to do it methodically? We mean that you should avoid big budget increases. If you make any big changes to your ad sets, the FB algorithm resets its learning phase and starts all over again. If you make small changes, however, such as small budget increases, the data gathered from the initial learning phase is maintained and picks it up from there. 

So what’s our recommendation? To increase your budget by 15-20% and do it incrementally every 3-4 days. 

The best thing about this is that you can now automate that action – yes, really! Let’s take a look at how to do this with Adscook automation rules.

First, decide what condition you want your ad set to meet in order to trigger the increase budget action. The condition should be something that will indicate your ad profitability. See below:

This rule will automatically increase your ad set budget by 15% every 72 hours (every 3 days) if the number of purchases within the last 3 days is at least one and the cost per purchase is under $20. The conditions can change as per your business goals. For example, we have analyzed and determined for ourselves that we are ready to spend a maximum of $20 per purchase, and at least one purchase within three days is a good indicator for us that we’re being profitable. 

Isn’t it time-consuming to go in and check your ad performance and increase your budget every 3 days manually, especially if you have multiple ad sets running? That’s precisely why automation is there: to lend a helping hand and save you valuable time.

#2: Duplicate Your Winning Ad Sets with Increased Budget

Do you still think that a dramatic budget increase will positively impact your ad set performance? Even if you have a gut feeling that it will work and your ROAS will not decrease, don’t put the pedal to the metal. There is a less risky method to significantly increase your budget, and that’s by duplicating your winning ad sets. 

Here’s the deal. Simply duplicate your successful ad set so it has exactly the same target audience, ad copies and creatives, while not pausing the original one. The only difference is that you set a higher budget on the duplicated version.

Increase Your FB Ads ROAS with Automation

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Let’s say you have an ad set that’s performing brilliantly at a daily budget of $20. You duplicate it so it remains exactly as it is, but you double the budget to $40. After all, why not clone an ad set that’s already proven to be winning rather than creating a brand new one? Regardless, the Facebook algorithm will treat it as a fresh ad set and start a new learning phase. 

Do you have multiple ad sets running? Want to test the scaling tactic while optimising your time? You can automate the process using Adscook automation rules, as shown below:

The action triggers every 72 hours (3 days) if the number of purchases in the last 7 days exceeds 10 and if the cost per purchase is less than $20. You can even set another condition with OR logic within the same automation rule. This means that once at least one of the conditions has been met, the action triggers. 

As simple and convincing as it may seem, this Facebook ad scaling tactic can prove controversial. What if my own ads end up competing against each other, you may ask? Well, it depends on the size of your audience. If you target a broad audience with a daily budget as low as $10, the chances of your two ads meeting and competing against each other are slim to none. The situation is entirely different if you have a narrow audience, however.

#3: Increase the Manual Bid on Ad Sets with Low Deliverability

Of course you’d like to set the lowest bid on your ad set, but be aware that this may result in low deliverability. You don’t want to have to come back every hour to check whether your bid is set as it should be in order to achieve the desired results. This is where automation rules come in: they’re meant to do the time-consuming job for you and scale your ads effectively.  

This scaling tactic involves slightly increasing your bid on ad sets with low reach so that you guarantee your ad deliverability. Let’s look at the example below:

This automation rule will check daily whether the ad set has enough reach and, in the event of low reach (<100), it will trigger the action of increasing the bid by 10%. This ensures that the bid increases until the ad starts delivering.

#4: Be Notified of High Ad Frequency

High ad frequency = low ad performance. This equation may confuse you a little because, after all, why should you be concerned about your ad being shown to people frequently? Quite simply, if people see the same ad on their news feed day in, day out, they may end up becoming annoyed and report or hide the ad – I’ve been in this position several times! It’s known as ad fatigue and you want to avoid it at all costs. 

In brief and basic terms, this is how ad frequency is calculated: 

Average frequency = Impressions/Reach

So, to combat your Facebook ad frequency issues, you can use scaling tactics, such as changing your ad creative, targeting a different audience, scaling your existing audience or simply changing your offer. 

And the best part? You can partly automate this process thanks to Facebook’s automation rules, and here’s how. 

First, you need to decide how high you consider to be too high for your ad frequency. Usually, if the frequency exceeds 3, keep your eyes open or set a rule on Facebook to do it for you. 

This rule simply means that Facebook will check daily and send you a notification if your ad frequency was greater than 3 the previous day. Once you’ve been notified, it’s up to you to decide how to respond; you can go so far as to turn off your ad. 

You may have already conducted analysis and concluded that your high ad frequency is completely damaging your ad performance and decided that the best way to fight it is to just turn it off. If so, you can go ahead and automate that action as well.

Conclusion

While automation in general is sometimes seen as a threat to human jobs, if we look at it in a more positive and rational way, we can admit that automation saves time and eliminates routine tasks. A case in point is Facebook Automated Rules – they make life easier, free up room for creativity and, most importantly, scale your Facebook ads to increase profitability. 

Have you tried any of these scaling tactics before? Do you know of any other tactics we haven’t mentioned? Share them with us in the comments below or just drop by to say hello.

Want to scale your Facebook ads more easily with Adscook Automated Rules? Join now and start 30-day free trial.

The post 4 Automated Rules to Scale Your Facebook Ads appeared first on Adscook Blog.

It’s simple… Automate.

Perhaps the idea of Facebook’s Automated Rules seems intimidating. Maybe you’ve been ignoring this tool, thinking that you’re fine with things as they are because, after all, you trust yourself more than a system to do things for you. However, this could be just a fallacy, because in reality, Facebook Automated Rules can make things easier, save you time and improve your ad performance if you use them correctly and effectively.

Increase Your FB Ads ROAS with Automation

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So, today we are going to cover:

• What Exactly Are Facebook’s Automated Rules
• Anatomy of Facebook’s Automated Rules
• Practical Guide: How to Create Facebook Automated Rules
• 3 Common Examples of Automated Rules

What Exactly Are Facebook’s Automated Rules?

This is the dream of every overloaded advertiser. When juggling multiple client projects with large budgets, day-to-day checks, updates and optimizations are a must, otherwise it’s only a matter of time before something goes wrong. With Automated Rules, Facebook suggests automating all these manual actions, keeping your costs under control and, ultimately, maximizing your ROAS. 

Do you want to increase your budget if the CPA is below an allowable amount? Check! Do you want to pause an underperforming ad set? Check! Do you want to be notified when your ad frequency is high? Check! 

Automated rules can successfully execute your commands based on conditional if-then statements. You could say “Hey, Facebook, be alert: if you see my ad spend has been over $100 within the last 2 days, then turn it off”, and the tool will do exactly as you ask because it never sleeps, never takes a vacation and never calls in sick. Sounds amazing, right?

Now that we’ve discussed the essence of Facebook’s Automated Rules, let’s take a closer look at their anatomy!

Anatomy of Facebook’s Automated Rules 

The structure of Facebook’s Automated Rules is actually pretty simple. Let’s break down the main parts: 

Apply rule to: This variable is about the active campaign, ad set or ad level that you want your rule to act on. You can either choose a specific one or set your rule to affect all active campaigns, ad sets or ads. 

Action: This variable decides which action your rule will take on your chosen asset. Actions include turn on ads, turn off ads, adjust budget, adjust bid and send notification only. Be aware, however, that actions change depending on your campaign, ad set or ad level. For example, adjust manual bid (Increase bid by, Decrease bid by, Scale bid by target field) actions come up only at the ad set level, while at the ad level the available actions are turn on ads, turn off ads and send notification only.

Conditions: Conditions define specific metrics that should take place in order for your specified action to trigger as a result. This is the most important part as it requires you to have done some serious thinking about your business goals. For example, you need to decide whether a particular amount of ad spend is high or low for your business and turn it off or increase your budget accordingly.

Metrics are numerous and grouped under categories like Most common, Settings, Time, Mobile app events, and Website conversions.

Here are some of the most common metrics:

• Spent
• Lifetime Spent
• Frequency
• Results
• Cost per Result
• Mobile app install 
• Cost per mobile app install
• Mobile app purchase ROAS
• Website purchase ROAS

The metric to express something is grouped with logical expressions and numerical values, such as is greater than …, is smaller than …, is between … and …, and is not between … and …. 

To make the condition complete, there is also Time range, which allows you to decide which time range data you want the rule to capture. 

Attribution window determines the days between when someone viewed or clicked on your ad and took the desired action. You can leave it on default (after viewing ad – 1 day, after clicking ad – 28 days) or select custom settings.

Schedule: Here you specify the schedule/frequency according to which you want the rules to be checked and executed if conditions are met. 

Notification: This specifies that Facebook will notify you once a certain rule is performed. If you tick Email, the notification will also be sent to your email address.

Subscriber: Here you specify subscribers who will receive the rule results. Only those people who have access to the ad account can be added. 

Rule Name: Lastly, you should give your rule a name: it’s a good idea to think of a descriptive one so you’ll remember it in future.  

Practical Guide: How to Create Facebook Automated Rules

Enough about theory: let’s take a look at automated rules in action! In this section, we’re going to walk you through the process of setting up rules from scratch. 

Increase Your FB Ads ROAS with Automation

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Step 1: Select the Campaign Level 

Before you even begin to create a rule, bear in mind that rules only work on active campaigns, ad sets and ads. 

There are two ways to create Automated Rules: 

1. When you want to apply your rule to all active campaigns, ad sets or ads
2. When you want the rule to affect a specific asset, i.e. a specific campaign, ad set or ad 

Therefore, if you want your rule to act on all campaigns rather than specific ones, go to Ads Manager and click on the three-dot menu. Hover over All tools in the drop-down menu and select Automated rules in the Create & manage section. 

Next, click on the green button, Create Rule. In the pop-up window you’ll see the option “Apply rule to”. Go ahead and select one of the three options: All active campaigns, All active ad sets, or All active ads.

If you want to apply the rule to a specific asset, go into Ads manager, select one or more active campaigns to which you want your rule to apply and click on Rules → Create a new rule. The same popup window will appear, only this time you’ll see that the specific campaign has already been selected. From there, you can choose the option of active ad sets and ads that belong to that campaign. In the same way, you can select the specific ad set or ad to which you want your rule to apply. 

Step 2: Decide Which Action You Want the Rule to Take

Once you’ve selected the level, it’s time to choose the automated rule action. As we have chosen Ad set level, the following actions are available: Turn off ad set, Turn on ad set, Turn notification only, Adjust Budget and Adjust manual bid. So, let’s select the Turn off ad set action. 

Note: If you’re not yet sure what action you want Facebook to take, you can always simply be notified of your ad changes by selecting the action Send notification only.

Step 3: Define the Condition That Will Trigger the Rule

At this point, you need to define under which condition you want the ad set to be turned off. As previously mentioned, this depends on your business goals. What change in your ad set will be critical for your business to tell Facebook to just shut it off? 

Let’s choose CPA from multiple metrics to define the condition. Suppose that a CPA of over $20 is unprofitable for your business, so you wish to turn off the ad set once this condition is met. 

After selecting CPA, set the logical expression is greater than, enter the numeric value $20 and click Apply. 

For the second metric, click on the plus sign, select Purchases from the list of metrics, set the logical expression is smaller than and enter the numeric value; in our example, this will be 1. 

Note: In Facebook’s native Automated Rules tool, two or more conditions are connected with the AND logical operator only, which means that all relations should match in order for the expression to be true. Therefore, if you want the rule to trigger when at least one of the relations is true, but not all of them, Facebook has a limitation here. You’ll need to look for a third-party tool if you want to have this feature at your disposal. 

To add even more context to your condition, let’s choose the time range Last 3 days and leave the Attribution window with the default values. 

Step 4: Tell Facebook How Often to Check Your Rule

Remember that you’re giving Facebook a command, so it needs to be defined in as much detail as possible. Continue with Schedule to instruct Facebook as to how often it should check the condition and trigger the action if it is met. 

• If you choose Continuously, it will check the rule as frequently as possible (usually every 30 minutes)
• If you choose Daily, it will check the rule every day at 12.00 a.m. Pacific Time
• If you choose Custom, you’ll be able to adjust the schedule on specific days and times 

In our example, let’s choose Daily.

Step 5: Tell Facebook Who Will Be Notified 

It’s now time for Facebook to report back to you about its actions. You can be notified of the results both in-app and via email if you wish.

Step 6: Name Your Rule 

Lastly, give your ad rule a descriptive name and click on the Create button. Congratulations, your first rule is now up and running! 

Step 7: Post Factum: Manage Your Automated Rules

After creating your rule, you’ll be taken back to the Automated Rules dashboard. Here you can monitor and manage all your rules: preview, edit or turn on/turn off any rule, track all the changes affected by the rules and tweak them for more precise performance.

Let’s Create Facebook Automated Rules – 3 Common Examples

Example 1: Increase daily budget on ads that yield winning results

Condition: CPA is lower than $10, Purchases are more than 2

Action: Increase the daily budget by 20% once daily 

Time range – Last 3 days

Here’s how this will look in Ads Manager:

This rule allows you to generate even more sales by increasing your budget by 20% daily because recording more than 2 purchases in the last 3 days with a CPA of less than $10 is a great payoff that’s worth more investment. This is only true, however, if your product is priced higher than the CPA!

Example 2: Turn off an underperforming ad

Condition: Website purchase ROAS is smaller than 2

Action: Turn off ad set 

Time range – Last 7 days

Let’s see how this will look in Ads Manager: 

As you know, ROAS is one of the most important metrics, if not the most important, when it comes to measuring the efficiency of your campaigns. With this rule, then, you simply tell Facebook that a ROAS below 2 (200%) is not acceptable for your business, so it’s better to turn off the ad. A time range of 7 days allows the ad enough time to gain traction.

Example 3: Send notification in case of high ad frequency

Condition: Frequency is greater than 2, Lifetime impressions is greater than 8000, CTR is lower than 3%

Action: Send notification only 

Time range: Last 30 days

In Ads Manager, this will appear as follows: 

As you know, ad fatigue can damage even the most successful ad. This issue occurs when your audience grows tired of seeing your ads over and over again. The aim of this automated rule is to protect your ads against ad fatigue.

Let’s suppose that if ad frequency is more than 2 but CTR is lower than 3% in case of impressions more than 8000, this could damage your ad performance, so of course you’d like to be notified if that happens. You can change the metrics at any time, at your discretion.

To Sum Up…

Ultimately, there’s nothing intimidating about Automated Rules. Why would you bother to come back to Ads Manager every 2-3 hours to check your ad performance when you can have Facebook do it for you?  

If you’re just beginning to dip your toes into Automated Rules, start by taking a couple of simple rules discussed in this guide, testing them and experimenting with them until you feel comfortable enough with the idea of automation.

Have you ever applied an automated rule to your Facebook ad campaigns? How did it go? Feel free to share your thoughts on Facebook’s Automated Rules in the comments section below!

The post How to Use Facebook Automated Rules (Anatomy + Practical Guide) appeared first on Adscook Blog.