Facebook Automation: The Optimizer vs Facebook Comparison

Facebook automation has been around for a while, but with Meta’s increasing complexity and competitiveness in recent years, more and more advertisers are turning to automation tools in 2023. 

These tools take on the repetitive and time-consuming tasks of campaign management, freeing up your time and allowing you to focus on other aspects of your business while improving your performance results. 

In this article, we will delve into the world of Facebook automation tools, specifically exploring the benefits of Facebook’s own automated rules versus those of external tools like The Optimizer.

We will cover the similarities and differences between the two automation engines, helping you understand which platform aligns best with your specific needs and goals.

Facebook Automation: What Is It?

Fundamentally, each tool, feature, or strategy that allows you to automate manual tasks related to Facebook advertising is considered Facebook automation. 

For the purposes of this article, we will focus specifically on Facebook automated rules. With automated rules, you can set conditions that are automatically triggered based on various criteria. If these conditions are met, predefined actions will be executed. For example, the condition can be “if conversions are lower than 1”, then take the action of “pausing the ad set”. 

The benefit of these automated rules is that they save you an immense amount of time and money by managing aspects of your campaign optimization process on autopilot.

Facebook Ads Manager: Automated Rules

You can set automated rules directly from Facebook Ads Manager, or you can use external tools like The Optimizer. 

The Optimizer: Automated Rules

Facebook Automation: The Similarities Between The Optimizer and Facebook

Both platforms are able to automate most manual campaign optimization tasks, such as pausing or activating campaigns, ad sets & ads, based on a set of predefined conditions. 

You can also increase or decrease bids and budgets automatically, as well as apply dayparting. 

Although both platforms are fully equipped to successfully carry out these core functions, there are certain actions and features that you can only access with The Optimizer. In the next few sections we will explain what these features are, and when to use each platform. 

Facebook Automation: Cloning Ad Sets

One of our top rules that most experienced Facebook advertisers are using is automatically cloning top performing ad sets. 

If you want to boost winning ad sets, but don’t want to increase their budget by more than 20% to avoid confusing Facebook’s algorithm, you can set rules to clone them instead. 

You can set conditions such as “If ROI is higher than 75%, clone ad set”. In this case, The Optimizer will check if any ad sets meet this criteria, clone the ones that do, and set them automatically live. 

Facebook Automation: Connecting Multiple Accounts

One of the benefits of The Optimizer is that it allows advertisers to manage all their different ad accounts from a single platform with no limitations. 

Facebook, on the other hand, only allows you to connect a maximum of 25 ad accounts. If you are running ads for multiple clients as part of an agency, or if you have more than 25 ad accounts for various offers and purposes, Facebook’s cap can be quite limiting. 

Additionally, if Meta is not your only advertising platform, The Optimizer also allows you to manage other traffic sources such as TikTok, Google Ads, and native platforms like Outbrain and Taboola, all from one place.

Facebook Automation: Connecting Third Party Trackers

If you are using a third party tracker, such as Voluum, ClickFlare, or Google Analytics, you can connect your tracker with The Optimizer. 

What this means is that the system will pull data both from your traffic source (Facebook), and from your tracker, and present this data in a single report.  

Here is an overview of the different trackers that are supported by The Optimizer:

You will also be able to use the data from your third party tracker to set automated rules. For example, you can set a rule that says “If tracker ROI is higher than 50%, increase budget by 10%”. 

Facebook Automation: Utilizing Custom Metrics

Both The Optimizer and Facebook offer hundreds of different metrics you can use to build your automated rules. However, The Optimizer goes even further by allowing you to calculate your own custom metrics and use them to set up rules. 

You can also select which metrics you want to be displayed on The Optimizer’s reports. This will allow you to focus only on the data that truly matters to your business.

Facebook Automation: Rule Application

After you have built your automated rule, you will need to choose which campaigns will read from this rule. 

On Facebook, you only have three options: all active campaigns, all active ad sets, and all active ads.

So if you want to set separate rules with different criteria for different campaigns, you cannot do that on Facebook. The Optimizer allows more flexibility by giving you the option to apply rules to specific campaigns or groups of campaigns. 

Facebook Automation: Rule Schedules

The next step in completing your rule setup would be to determine how often a certain rule needs to run. Facebook gives you the option to run the rule either continuously or once a day. 

With The Optimizer, you can run the rule at 11 different schedules, from as often as every 10 minutes, to once per week. You can also adjust the rules to run twice per day, or every 6 hours, depending on your objectives. 

Facebook Automation: Notifications

If a rule has been executed, you would most likely want to be notified in order to stay up-to-date with all the changes happening to your campaigns. 

Both The Optimizer and Facebook will allow you to choose between getting notified when the conditions you set in your automated rules have been met and the rule has been executed, or only getting a notification (without executing the rule). 

With Facebook, you can receive your notifications via email or Facebook. With The Optimizer, you can also send notifications directly to your Slack or Telegram account. 

Facebook Automation: Cost

While The Optimizer offers more complex rule-building functionalities, you need to consider that this is a paid tool, and the benefits of using it are much higher if you are juggling multiple accounts, playing with bigger ad budgets, and trying to scale. 

If you are just getting started and are easily able to manage your campaigns manually, then leveraging Facebook’s free in-platform automation is a better option at this stage. 

Facebook Automation: Conclusion

Facebook automation is essential for advertisers in order to keep up with the platform’s fast-growing and competitive landscape. 

Facebook offers their own in-platform automation rules, which are a great starting point if you are working with smaller budgets and a limited number of accounts/campaigns. 

Automation tools like The Optimizer are perfect if you are trying to scale fast. With our tool, you can connect as many ad accounts as you need, integrate third-party trackers, gain more flexibility when it comes to building, applying & scheduling rules, and access additional rules such as automatically cloning ad sets. 

If you are also advertising on TikTok and are curious about how our rules compare to the ones offered by TikTok, read our article TikTok Automation: The Ultimate TikTok vs The Optimizer Comparison.