We’re going to go over the rules that are available within the Facebook or Meta Ads Manager. So, what do rules do? Well, they basically let you automate certain things within your ads account. For example, if certain criteria are met, you can turn on or off a campaign, or you can increase or decrease your budget. These rules can help you manage your account more effectively.
Inside the Ads Manager, in the Campaigns area, you should see an option for rules. Rules can be applied at all three levels: the campaign level, the ad set level, and the ads level. You can apply rules to the entire campaign, to specific ad sets, or to individual ads if you want. For instance, if you wanted to apply a rule to just two ads, you could go ahead and do that.
I’m going to start at the campaign level because once you understand how to apply rules in general, you can figure out if you need to apply rules at the ad set or ad level. Let’s go ahead and click into the rules menu. We’re going to click “Create a New Rule” since I don’t have any rules currently. If you already have rules that you want to manage or change, you could click the option to do so. We’ll explore that a little bit later once we create a rule.
Let’s go ahead and create a rule. You’ll see several options here. There’s the custom rule, which is where we’re going to spend most of our time. There are also options to enable Advantage+ Creative, reduce auction overlap, optimize ad creative, and reduce audience fragmentation.
I hesitate to use these four options because they can make modifications to your campaigns, ad sets, and ads that you may not want. However, if you click into one of them and proceed to the next step, you can set it to send a notification only.
Facebook will alert you when it thinks you might want to enable Advantage+ Creative, and then you can decide for yourself. That’s something you want to go ahead and do versus letting Facebook control your entire campaign.
One thing you might want to do is actually turn on those four rules just to see when they trigger.
Just send yourself a notification ‘When does this actually occur? When would I use this?’ Then, you can see for yourself if it’s something that you want to use within your account. But I’ve never given Facebook full control to go ahead and just change things because it seems too scary and I worry something could go wrong.
Let’s go ahead and create a custom rule. We’ll go into ‘Custom Rule’ here and click ‘Next.’
Now, we go through this little rule creation wizard. The first thing we have is the rule name. I’m going to come back to it after we create the rule so that way I can be descriptive in my rule name.
Next, we have ‘Apply Rule To,’ with ‘All Campaigns’ selected as the default option. You can also choose ‘All Active Ad Sets’ or ‘All Active Ads.’ Additionally, if you came down here, selected two campaigns, and went over to the rules and created a new custom rule, then you could go ahead and apply the rule to these two campaigns. I’m just going to do ‘All Active Campaigns.’
Then, we have our action options. We click ‘Turn Off Campaigns’ , ‘Turn On Campaigns’ ,’Send Notification Only.’
If you want to be notified when certain criteria are met, you could go ahead and do that. Then, you can manually check your account and make any adjustments you may want to make. There are also options to adjust your budget. You can increase or decrease your daily budget or increase or decrease your lifetime budget. In this particular example, we’re going to go ahead and increase our daily budget. You can see that more options popped up here, so we can increase our daily budget by, let’s just say, 5%.
Your rule will apply to campaigns that are active at the time the rule runs. Only campaigns with daily budgets can be managed with this action rule, so any sort of lifetime budget campaign you have running will not be impacted by this particular rule. Now, we have the maximum daily budget cap. In instances where you’re increasing or decreasing your budget, you may want to set a maximum rule so that you don’t start spending a million dollars a day or something crazy. I’m just going to put in $100 for the sake of example.
Next, we have ‘Action Frequency.’ This is the minimum amount of time until the same action can be taken on an object by a rule. The default value is once every 12 hours. Basically, this sets a throttle on the number of times it will increase your daily budget by 5%, so it won’t increase your budget by 5% unless it’s been at least 12 hours. There’s also the option for ‘Schedule,’ where you can schedule when the rule will actually run. You can play with these two settings to find a balance of what you actually want.
I’m going to go ahead and set this for once hourly because I’m going to set my schedule for daily. So, my rule will only run once a day, even though my action frequency is set to once hourly. That’s just something to be aware of—there are two places where you can actually schedule when your rules will fire off.
Let’s come back up here to ‘Conditions.’ When will it increase my budget by 5%? We can hit this drop-down here, and there are a bunch of different options: amount spent, lifetime spent, frequency, results, cost per result, mobile app install cost per install, mobile app purchase ROAS, website purchase ROAS, settings options, time options, cost per website conversion, Meta Pixel options, and so on. There are a bunch of different options for criteria of when you want this rule to run.
However, the most common one I use is ‘Cost per Result.’ So, if the cost per result is less than $10, then I want this rule to run. Based on my calculations, any time I can acquire a customer for under $10 so I might as well keep increasing my budget.
You can also see that it added this option for ‘Lifetime Impressions is greater than 8,000.’ Basically, Facebook wants to make sure that your campaign and ads have run long enough to receive enough impressions and data to get an accurate cost per action before it starts running these rules. It sets this condition automatically to ensure that you have enough data before it starts increasing your budget and things like that. If you want to remove it, you can, but Facebook recommends not doing that. So, I’m going to add it back.
Now, the next field we have is ‘Time Range.’ This is the amount of time that Facebook will look back on your campaign to see how things are going. As you notice, you can hover over these little icons, and they will give you a definition of what each option is. This is the number of days’ worth of data you’d like to apply your rule to. ‘Maximum’ means it would look back the entire length of your campaign, which may or may not be something you want, especially if your campaign has been running for months. That might be a lot of data for it to look back on. Something more reasonable might be to look back at the last 3 days. So, if my cost per result has been less than $10 over the last 3 days…
If I’m adjusting my budget, I’ll look back 3 days or maybe 7 days. You can also go ahead and include today as well if that’s something you want to do. However, I usually stick with 3 or 7 days when I’m adjusting my budget, so I’ll leave it at that.
Now we get to the schedule option, which I mentioned earlier when we talked about frequency. The first option is “continuously,” so the rule runs as often as possible, usually every 30 to 60 minutes. If I click this option and set it for once hourly, then if my cost per result is less than $10 over the last 3 days, my budget would increase by 5% roughly every hour, up to $100 USD. That would be a rapid increase in my budget, which is probably not what I’m aiming for. More than likely, you would want to set the rule to “daily” if you’re doing something like that. This way, your budget is adjusted just once daily.
Alternatively, you could set up a custom schedule.
If you want to select different days and times for your rules to run, you can do so here. You can also select multiple time frames for the same day by clicking the plus button. For example, Tuesday could have two windows when your rules could run.
We’ll come back to the schedule options in a few minutes because I want to show you a little trick.
For my particular example, I’m just going to go with “daily.” Next, we have the notification option. You can receive notifications on Facebook and enable the option to receive an email. This way, you can keep track of the rules via email because, you have way too many Facebook notifications, and it’s simpler and cleaner to get an email.
Now let’s name the rule. I named it “If cost per result is less than $10, increase budget 5% once daily up to $100.”
I can then go to “Manage Rules” to review or edit this rule. In the Manage Rules area, you can see my rule. If I want to turn it off, I can flip the switch, and the rule will no longer run. This could be useful if you no longer want to use the rule.
I’ll go ahead and turn it back on. Additionally, you can edit your rule if needed, run the rule manually, or delete it.
Finally, I’ll go back to the Ads Manager and campaign area. I want to set up another set of rules to help schedule my ads.
If you’ve ever set up an ad set before and chosen a daily budget, you’ve seen that you can’t schedule your ads to run on specific days and times like you can with a lifetime budget. However, by using rules, you can turn your ads on and off based on your schedule.
Every day, I can hit “create,” and the rule will be set up. Now, I need to set a rule to turn off my ads as well. I’ll go ahead and create a new custom rule, click “Next,” and set it to turn off ads during non-business hours. We’ll leave it to apply to all active campaigns and remove the conditions. The time range is fine at maximum, but we’ll set a custom time.
However, there are some downsides to this. First and foremost, you won’t ever spend your daily budget if you do it this way. Additionally, turning your ads on and off multiple times can mess up Facebook’s algorithm, so it might not be the best option. However, I found that if you’re running a small local campaign with a 3-mile radius around your business, this method of scheduling your ads might be worth the downside. There’s only so much optimization the algorithm can do in a small area because everyone in that radius will likely see your ads multiple times anyway. This strategy may or may not be something you want to test out, but I wanted to show you that it’s something people do.
So, here we go. We’ll go to “Rules,” create a new custom rule again, and click “Next.” I’ll name this “Turn On During Business Hours,” and leave it set to all campaigns. I’ll change my action to “Turn On Campaigns.” I’m not going to set any conditions for this rule. I’ll close this off and leave the time range at maximum. Then I’ll come down to the schedule and set it to custom. I’ll run this rule when my business is open, from Monday to Friday, and set up our hours.
I’ve set up all my times. If the start and end time are the same, the rule will run once per day. All times are in Eastern Time because that’s the time my ad account is set to. This looks good to me; I want the ads to turn on at 9:00 a.m. We’ve got Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, and we’re going to turn it off at 5:00 p.m. every day. I can go ahead and hit create and then that rule will be set up
This rule will run at 5:00 p.m. every single day, and I can click on “Create” and close. Now, my ads will turn “Create a new rule” and “Custom Rule” and next and and Turn off ads during non business hours” . We’ll leave it apply to all active campaigns and we want to go ahead and turn off the campaigns. We’ll go ahead and remove the conditions time range is fine at maximum but we’re going to set a custom time frame and we got Monday Tuesday Wednesday, Thursday, …
Since I’m only running ads for 8 hours a day, I’m not going to spend my full daily budget, so I may need to go in and actually increase my budget on my ad sets to ensure that I’m spending the amount I want to spend every single day. Also, it’s not very good for the algorithm to turn ads on and off multiple times, but if you’re advertising to a small local market, this may be an okay way to schedule your ads.
I just wanted to show it to you. So, that’s it for creating rules within the Facebook or Meta Ads.