If you are currently running or aim to run paid campaigns on Meta Ads at scale, it means that you are or will soon be managing multiple campaigns simultaneously. Spread across multiple ad accounts, testing multiple hooks, angles, creative elements, etc.
Imagine having like 30-50 campaigns running at the same time, having to review their ad performance every day, work on new creatives, new angles, not to consider everything else you need to optimize down your campaign funnel.
These X automatic rules will help you get rid of babysitting your campaigns, especially if you are managing considerable daily budgets.
Automatically Stop Low-Performing Campaigns
Not every campaign or ad set you launch is guaranteed to succeed. Only a small percentage of all launched campaigns or ad sets become winners. As such, shutting down low-performing campaigns or ad sets on time is crucial to save ad spend waste.
The following rule will shut down a low-performing campaign after its 3rd day of running in case it doesn’t deliver the aimed results. As you can see from the screenshot below, the rule analyzes the total ad spend of the campaign, its daily performance over the last 3 days. Then on midnight of the specified time zone, it pauses the campaign automatically.
This approach ensures each newly launched campaign or ad set gets enough time and budget.
An alternative way of setting up this automatic rule is by replacing the CPA with the ROI (tracker), which is calculated based on the ad spend reported from Meta Ads and the revenue reported by your analytics platform. This is one of the unique capabilities of TheOptimizer, which allows you to optimize based on accurate combined statistics from more than one information source.
Both of the above rules are set to execute actions at the campaign level. Using the same logic, you can easily set up rules at the ad set level.
Automatically Scale Budgets on Good-Performing Campaigns
Once you land on a good-performing campaign, your next optimization step is scaling it. However, this is something you shouldn’t do on gut feelings (like most media buyers do). Instead, you should take a data-driven approach that you can replicate and scale confidently.
This is what the following rule does. It looks at the total spend of the campaign, the number of collected results over the last 7 days, as well as the actual day-to-day CPA over the last 3 days. Once everything meets the thresholds, the rule will increase the daily budget of the campaign 2x a week by 20%.
This rule executes budget changes at the beginning of the day according to the selected time zone (usually ad account time zone) to ensure a smooth budget pacing throughout the day.
Also, the frequency of budget changes ensures smooth, consistent scaling while accounting for CPA fluctuations that can occur after a budget increase.
Alternatively, you can change budgets 3x a week or even more frequently by adding one more day in the execution schedule.
Automatically Drop Budgets on Increased CPA Campaigns
Quite often, when you increase budgets too aggressively, the CPA tends to go a bit higher than your CPA goal. When this happens, it’s best to drop back the budget to levels when your CPA was within your CPA goal. It’s a form of telling Meta that you don’t like the results you’re getting.
This rule drops the bid specifically for when your campaign or ad set has been running with a good CPA (below a specific threshold), then in the last couple of days the CPA has increased (above a specific threshold). If the CPA is higher than your threshold for two consecutive days, then the rule will drop the daily budget of the campaign or ad set by 20% at the beginning of the day, according to the ad account time zone.
You can create a similar rule using ROI or ROAS as a metric. Just make sure your conditions properly qualify which campaigns or ad sets the rule is going to adjust budgets too.
Automatically Pause Degrading Campaigns or Ad Sets
Sooner or later, campaigns come to a dead end where they don’t perform that good anymore. Especially those that used to be good performers and generate good profits. When that moment comes, it’s best to turn off the campaign to prevent wasting the profits it generated.
This rule looks at campaign performance over the past 7 days. It first checks whether the campaign has generated at least 50 conversions during that period. If it meets that threshold, it then compares the ROI from days 6 to 4. If ROI during that window was higher than 20%, the rule proceeds to evaluate the ROI over the most recent 3 days, one day at a time. If it detects a consistent decline and sees that the ROI on the most recent day has dropped below -20%, it pauses the campaign or ad set.
The goal of this rule is to cut wasted ad spend as early as possible when performance starts to decline. If you prefer a less aggressive approach, you can expand the time frame and allow more than one day of negative performance before triggering a pause. You can also adapt the rule to use ROAS or CPA instead of ROI, depending on how you track performance.
Update Saturated Ads – Alert Rule
This rule constantly monitors the performance of your ads and sends you an email, slack, or telegram alert to notify you it’s time to refresh your ads. This way you don’t let a good-performing campaign degrade to a point of no recovery; instead, you keep on feeding it with fresh creatives.
The rule first checks if the ad has spent at least $5 over the last 6 days. If it meets that condition, it then looks at the CPA for the most recent 3 days and confirms whether performance has been consistently good across all three. Finally, it checks the ad frequency between days 3 and 1. If frequency is 3 or higher, the rule sends a notification prompting you to refresh the creatives.
Consider adjusting this rule to your performance thresholds. Instead of using the CPA, you can alternatively use ROAS, ROI or any other important metric for your campaign.
Automatically Pause Saturated Low-Performing Ads
While you keep on feeding your campaigns with fresh ads to keep up the performance of your campaigns, it is best to kill any saturated ads that are generating results above your KPI goals.
This rule checks if your ad has spent $5 or more over the last 7 days. It reviews the CPA for each day to see if it consistently exceeds a specific threshold. It also checks if the ad’s frequency is higher than 3. If all these conditions are true, the rule automatically pauses the ad.
Consider adjusting this rule to your performance thresholds. Instead of using the CPA, you can alternatively use ROAS, ROI or any other important metric for your campaign.
Automatically Clone Winning Campaigns – Same Ad Account
As part of your scaling strategy, apart from increasing campaign budgets, you should also clone winning campaigns. This not only allows you to scale up the ad spend, but also gives the opportunity to land on a broader audience pool that will allow you to further scale your winners. On top of it, the cloned campaign will carry on part of the learnings from the original one.
This rule checks if the campaign has spent at least $150 over the last 5 days. It also verifies that the campaign has generated 50 or more results in the last 7 days. If those conditions are met and the CPA has stayed below your set threshold for the last 4 days—indicating stable performance—the rule triggers the creation of 3 clones of the original campaign.
The cloning process runs every Tuesday at midnight (PST), and each clone starts with a reset budget of $100/day. Cloning at midnight (based on the ad account’s time zone) prevents issues where campaigns are cloned mid-day and end up spending their full daily budget in just a few hours.
The rule creates 3 clones instead of just one because not every new campaign will perform well. By launching multiple versions, you increase your chances of finding at least one that continues to deliver results.
Since performance isn’t guaranteed right away, starting with a $100 daily budget helps reduce the risk of overspending during the early testing period.
If you’re using rules like this to clone campaigns, it’s highly recommended to also set up stop-loss rules. These will automatically pause underperforming clones before they waste too much budget.
Consider adjusting the rule thresholds to your KPIs.
Automatically Clone Winning Campaigns – Different Ad Account
Hardcore media buyers know that once they find winning campaigns, it’s best to start scaling them not just vertically (by increasing budgets) and horizontally (cloning). They take it further by cloning winning campaigns across multiple ad accounts. This strategy doesn’t just multiply spend and results, it also spreads risk. If one ad account gets restricted, you’re not stuck with everything paused. You’ve got clones running elsewhere, keeping your performance going.
Similar to the previous rule, this one checks if the campaign’s performance has been stable over the last few days. If all conditions are met, it creates two exact clones of the campaign every Tuesday at 12am CET, based on the ad account’s time zone. The clones are launched in the specified ad account, and the budget is reset to a reasonable starting amount to keep spend under control during the initial run.
When using rules like this, it’s highly recommended to have global stop-loss rules set at the ad account level. These act as a safety net, automatically pausing underperforming campaigns before they burn through too much budget.
