One of the great things about paid digital marketing is the control you have over your campaigns. You get to determine the ad creative, the targeting, the budget, and many other aspects. However, the problem with having that much control is the need to make regular changes to ensure optimal performance. Some channels offer options to help with this through automated rules.
In this blog, we’re going to talk about TikTok automated rules. I’ll show you where to find them in the interface, what they do, and how you can start using them to optimize your campaigns.
In the TikTok Ads Manager, it’s really easy to find the automated rules. They’re just above the campaigns where they’re listed.
To create a new rule, you can click either create a new rule or manage existing ones.
Since this is still a relatively new feature, TikTok has a helpful bubble explaining how automated rules can increase control and efficiency. You can set automated rules to send notifications or make changes to your ads when certain conditions are met.
To get started, click “Create New Rule.” This will open a window on the right where you can build your automated rules in TikTok.
The builder is divided into several sections. At the top, there are different templates of rules that TikTok has already built for us. The middle section is where you set up which portions of your account the automated rules will apply to, as well as the conditions themselves. Below that, you’ll find the different settings for the rules.
The first thing you’ll notice in the “Apply Rule To” section is that if you don’t check the box next to a campaign name, the rule will apply to all active campaigns. If you want to select specific portions of the account, you can click to choose all active ad groups, all active ads, or even the inactive sections of the account.
To apply an automated rule to a specific campaign, you need to check the box next to that campaign when creating the rule.
I’ll go through the builder as is.
Let’s start by walking through some of the templates that TikTok has available. You can see on the “Create a Custom Rule” section.
We’ll do that in just a little bit, but there are two rules sections that I can’t use: the “Schedule Delivery” and “Unlock Potential” sections. These can’t be applied to campaigns and ads in the “Unlock Potential” section, and they can’t be applied to something that is already active in the “Schedule Delivery” section because it’s already delivering. You can’t schedule it to turn on something that’s already on.
So let’s go over to the “Enhanced Performance” section.
This section will increase the budget for ads that are performing well, which is a feature that most other platforms don’t have. When clicking on this “Enhanced Performance” template, the conditions and actions sections change.
We have an “if-then” condition that helps you adjust the lifetime budget based on the performance of your account.
Going back up to the “Control Budget” template,
you’ll notice it changes the conditions and actions again to reflect a strategy where you turn off ads with unexpectedly high costs. These templates are really helpful because they make it easy to start with a rule that’s already built, so you don’t have to do everything from scratch. Even though I’m not going to show you what the “Unlock Potential” and “Schedule Delivery” rules look like because I’m not eligible for those types of rules, you can follow the same process by clicking on them and letting the condition and action sections reset for that strategy.
Now, let’s go through the condition and action section and talk about how this works. As you can see, TikTok uses an “if-then” setup.
If certain conditions are met, then this action will be taken. For example, in this automated rule, if the lifetime budget spend rate is greater than a certain percentage and the CPA over the last three days is less than a certain amount, then the automated rule will increase the lifetime budget by a specified amount, and you can set a maximum lifetime budget cap.
If you were to use this template, all you would need to do is input the settings you want. There are many different conditions you can use in the automated rule builder. Let’s click the dropdown to see what those conditions are.
They can be based on your advertising objective, total cost, daily budget spend rate (the percent of the daily budget that has been spent when the rule runs), lifetime budget spend rate (the percentage of the lifetime budget that has been spent when the rule runs), CPM, CPC, conversion, conversion rate, impressions, clicks,… Therefore, it’s probably easy to understand that click-through rate for example could be a condition if the click-through rate over a certain date range is greater than three percent, I want to increase my budget.
but if something has a specific name and you only want to do it for a specific ad creative, you can specify a name that either contains, does not contain, begins with, ends with, or matches perfectly.
Then you would enter the text over here.
Overall, it’s a pretty simple setup, and since I didn’t enter anything, TikTok is showing an error.
If you set up any conditions and decide you don’t want an additional condition, for example, if you don’t want to have the CPA rule, you just need to click the trash can to remove that condition from your automated rule.
You can see that you can have up to five conditions.
If you want, you can continuously add conditions to make it as customized as you want, up to five.
Each condition has an “and” operator; there are no “or” statements here. If you want a rule that relies on an “or” statement, you’ll need to create a second rule within TikTok.
Once you’ve narrowed down your conditions and decided what scenario needs to occur for this rule to run, you then choose the action you want it to take. In this example, it’s using the “adjust lifetime budget” option, but there are other options available. You can turn off a campaign, turn things on, have it notify you, adjust the daily budget, or adjust the lifetime budget.
The notify option will send you an email letting you know that the conditions have been met, so you can look into the account and decide what to do based on the performance you see. This is useful if the available actions (which are part of a relatively limited list) don’t cover everything you want. Utilizing the notify option for automated rules is a great way to alert you to adjust your campaigns manually.
For now, let’s leave this as “lifetime budget.”
Based on the conditions met, this rule would have you increase the budget. You can also decrease the budget by a certain percentage or value, or adjust it to a new level.
If I click “adjust to,” it means setting a completely new budget, unrelated to the previous budget.
You’ll notice there’s another action, a frequency cap, which is not eligible for the “adjust to” option.
If I change it to “decrease by,”
you can adjust by a dollar amount or a percentage. For example, to increase by 10, you would input 10. The frequency cap option limits how often the rule will run, offering choices like only once, once every 24 hours, once every 48 hours, or once a week.
This helps you control how often the action takes place, allowing your campaign to stabilize before making further adjustments. For now, I’ll select a “once every 24 hours” frequency cap to stop the error message. Once we’ve set all our conditions and actions, the rule is ready to go.
We’re going to scroll down to the rest of the settings and finish closing out this automated rule. The first thing we get to choose is the run schedule,
which determines when TikTok checks if the above rule conditions have been met. This is different from the frequency cap or any other if-then conditions. It dictates how often TikTok checks for these conditions. The most frequent option is every 30 minutes, which is the default. This means that every 30 minutes, TikTok will review all aspects of your account to see if any of your conditions have been met. If they have, it will then run the actions specified in the automated rule. This is similar to how Facebook’s automated rules run on a regular cadence of every 30 minutes.
You can also switch and have your Rule run daily, so it checks once a day, or at Specific times, running every 30 minutes within the selected time periods.
For the first section over here , you can choose to have the rule run only on Wednesday and Thursday
from 1 AM to 4 AM, running every 30 minutes within that time frame.
from 1 AM to 4 AM, running every 30 minutes within that time frame.
This type of rule scheduling could be useful for promotions running during specific days or hours, allowing TikTok to make adjustments automatically instead of you having to log in and do them manually. When you’re done with that automated rule, remember to delete it so it doesn’t keep running outside the promotional period.
For now, I’m going to switch it back to run every 30 minutes so it’ll be smaller on the screen.
You then decide if you want to be notified when your rule conditions are met. This is a personal preference. By default, notifications are on, but you can toggle them off if you prefer. I’ll leave them on for additional options.
Next, you can decide who gets notified. There are two user profiles tied to this ad account. To notify both, check the box next to their names.
You then set your notification schedule. You can choose to be notified every time the rule runs, which could be as often as every 30 minutes if conditions are frequently met, resulting in a lot of notifications. Alternatively, you can choose to have “Send notifications together at a specified time”, which might be more manageable.
It could also be useful for you to use this last section here which is also notify me if conditions aren’t met. If it’s useful for you to know that your rule ran and you didn’t actually meet those conditions again as often potentially as every 30 minutes of every single day. You can toggle this switch over and then you’ll be able to get a notification.
that your rule ran on TikTok and we didn’t meet those conditions so no actions were taken. That seems like a little bit of a silly thing to have every 30 minutes so i’m gonna leave that off.
The last step is to name your rule. You should give it a specific name so you know what it is. Since I’m just creating a placeholder rule without applying anything
I have one more thing to show about automated rules. I’ll close this builder, and now we’re back in the main campaign tab.
Earlier, I showed that you can access automated rules by clicking this list and creating a new rule here.
If you want to apply a rule to a single campaign, you can check the box next to it, go up to Automated rules, and the dropdown will change.
Now you can go up to Automated rules, and the dropdown will change.
You can Create a new rule, Apply an existing rule, or Manage the rules within.
If I just go to apply an existing rule, you’ll see that this account doesn’t have any rules.
However, this is where you would choose what rule you want to apply from a list of existing rules. It would display the rule name, conditions, and actions in this builder, allowing you to preview and understand what you’re applying to your campaign. I’m going to go ahead and click cancel.
The last step is to manage the rules for the account itself. I’ll click “Manage Rules,”
which brings me to a new screen.
Here, you can see the “Manage Rules” section, an operations log to view past rules and their outcomes, and an option to create a new rule directly from this page.
I wanted to show you this because this page is not accessible from any of the asset drop-downs.
You need to go to the main section of Ads Manager and click “Manage Rules” to reach this screen, where you can adjust all the rules set up in the account.
Just like the automated rules for other platforms we’ve covered on this channel, TikTok’s automated rules have a lot of potential. They can help ensure your account is always moving forward, especially with tasks that are highly repetitive and don’t require much thought each time. However, don’t expect them to solve all your performance optimization challenges overnight or act as a silver bullet for perfect performance.