Using Automatic Rules to Detect Performance Dips and Take Action

March 12, 2024

TheOptimizer

TheOptimizer

TheOptimizer Team

Watching your campaigns doing great one day, then suddenly tanking the next, is frustrating – especially if you’re running dozens or hundreds of campaigns. It becomes virtually impossible to catch these performance dips and react on time to minimize losses.

Luckily the new automatic rules in TheOptimizer platform give you the ability to automatically detect performance shifts as they happen and automatically take action to get your campaigns back on track.

In this article, we will go over a few known scenarios and see how implementing such automatic rules can help you.

Media Buyer’s Challenge

Managing hundreds of advertising campaigns at once requires you to keep a close watch on the performance of each campaign,  ad, group of ads, and even specific keywords or places where your ads appear. Imagine you have 100 campaigns. That means you’re tracking thousands of different components, and their performance can change at any moment. When managing numerous campaigns across various platforms, you can sync all your calendars in real-time through OneCal, ensuring you never miss a beat and always stay on top of your schedule

Trying to handle this process manually makes it incredibly difficult to accurately track how each campaign and its various elements are doing. Moreover, it becomes virtually impossible to quickly spot when performance drops and to take steps to reduce losses in time.

The Solution

Instead of hiring an army of media buyers and virtual assistants that can cost you a fortune, all you have to do is set up the right automatic rules that will monitor and take specific actions when a performance change happens.

Let’s go over a few known situations that most media buyers deal with and look at the automatic rules that will help them handle that specific situation.

1. Meta Campaigns Performance Drop

The Problem (real-world scenario)

Let’s say that you’re running a few hundred campaigns on Meta and most of them are cruising at 20% to 30% ROI (return on investment). One day, you wake up to see that 25 of your scaled campaigns are showing a significant increase in CPA and a negative ROI exceeding -40%. As a result of this performance drop you’ve gone from positive 20% ROI to negative -30%

The Solution

Create an automatic rule for your Meta campaigns that monitors the current performance of your campaign or ad set and executes a specific action when performance drops. Let’s look at a Pause Ad Set rule example:

Meta Ads Rule Example - Detect Ad Set Performance Dip

This rule looks at the ROI between the last 5 and 2 days if it is greater than 20%, then looks at the ROI between Today and Yesterday if it is less than -15%, and then looks at the CPA between Today & Yesterday to see if it is greater than 150% of the CPA between the last 5 and 2 days. If all these conditions are true, the rule will pause the ad set.

Try this rule now >>

 

2. Mass Testing Meta Campaigns

The Problem (real-world scenario)

Let’s consider the situation where you are constantly launching new campaigns on Meta and want to automatically pause any campaigns that don’t reach the break-even point within the first 7 days of running a campaign.

The Solution

Create an automatic rule for your Meta campaigns that monitors the progress of your campaign ROI. If by day 7 the campaign hasn’t reached the break-even point, then you want to pause the campaign.

Meta Ads Rule Example - 7 Days Campaign test rule

 

This rule looks at the last 7 days’ performance of the campaign monitoring the progress of the campaign ROI checking the ROI between the last 5 and 2 days, the ROI between Today and Yesterday, and if the number of Leads during the last 7 days is less than 50. If all conditions are true the rule will pause the campaign.

Try this rule now >>

 

3. Native Ads Publisher Performance Drop

The Problem (real-world scenario)

A native advertising campaign gets traffic from roughly 1500 to 3000 publisher sites. Quite often it happens that one or more of the top-performing sites end up from over 20%+ ROI to negative -50% or worse. Imagine how challenging it is to manually monitor and capture these performance drops on hundreds of campaigns.

The Solution

Create an automatic rule for your native advertising campaigns that monitor the ROI changes of your publisher sites. For example, if the publisher site ROI drops from positive between the last 4 to 2 days, to negative between today and yesterday, you either want to pause the site or drop its bid when possible. Let’s look at a Pause Site rule example:

Native Ads Rule Example - Detect Publisher Site Performance Dip

 

Try this rule now >>

 

Conclusion

Monitoring the ever-changing performance shifts of your advertising campaigns manually can be a daunting task. Thankfully, with the help of smart automatic rules available on TheOptimizer, you get an automated solution to identify and address these issues before they significantly impact your budget and ROI.

By automating the process of detecting performance slumps and triggering predefined actions, you can:

  • Free yourself from the burden of constant monitoring: Delegate the task of identifying dips to TheOptimizer, allowing you to focus on strategic campaign development and analysis.
  • React swiftly to potential losses: Smart rules can trigger immediate actions like pausing underperforming campaigns or adjusting bids and budgets, minimizing the potential losses.
  • Gain valuable insights: Analyzing the data captured by smart rules can help you identify underlying causes of performance drops, allowing you to refine your overall campaign strategy for long-term success.

Sign up for a free trial of TheOptimizer today and experience the power of automated campaign management.

Need help with setting up rules?
If you're looking for an easier way to manage your social, search and native advertising campaigns with the help of automation, one of our experts will be happy to talk to you over a personalized demo call.