Facebook Automation — All Available Rules

TheOptimizer’s automation engine runs against your Facebook campaigns on a schedule you define. Each rule evaluates a set of conditions and fires a specific action — or sends an alert — when those conditions are met. This page covers all the action types available for Facebook and how they work.

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Rule Levels

Facebook rules can operate at three levels of your campaign hierarchy: Most rules are written at the ad set level. Ad sets are the most actionable unit on Facebook — they control audience, budget, and delivery, and they can be independently paused or scaled without touching the rest of the campaign.

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Available Actions

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Pause / Start

Pause rules are the most common in the dataset — 1,025 of 2,940 analysed rules pause ad sets. They are typically combined with spend thresholds or CPA conditions to stop losses before they compound.

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Budget Changes

Budget rules are typically triggered by ROI or CPA thresholds. Use percentage increases for proportional scaling; use fixed amounts for large-budget campaigns where percentage increases would be too aggressive.

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Bid Changes

Bid adjustments are less common than budget changes (133 of 2,940 analysed rules). They are most effective when combined with strict ROI gates and Facebook pixel confirmation — bid up only when the algorithm has enough data to use the increased bid effectively.

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Clone (Duplicate)

Cloning rules are intentional scaling tools, not accident triggers. They are typically scheduled to run every few days to avoid fragmenting budgets across too many copies at once.

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Alert Only

Alert-only rules are useful for monitoring conditions you want to review manually before acting — for example, detecting a tracking discrepancy between Facebook Results and tracker conversions.

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Available Condition Metrics

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Spend & Budget

• Amount Spent — total spend in the selected time window
• Daily Budget — the current daily budget allocation (supports dynamic comparisons like “80% of Daily Budget”)
• Traffic Source CPA — cost per acquisition as reported by Facebook

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Tracker Metrics (from your connected tracking platform)

• Tracker Conversions — conversions reported by your tracker
• Tracker CPA — cost per acquisition from your tracker
• Tracker ROI — return on investment from your tracker
• Tracker Revenue — revenue reported by your tracker
• Tracker EPC — earnings per click from your tracker

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Facebook-Native Metrics

• Facebook Results — conversions recorded by the Facebook pixel
• Avg. CPC — average cost per click
• CPM — cost per thousand impressions
• CTR — click-through rate
• Frequency — average number of times each person has seen your ad
• Video Average Play Time — average seconds of video watched (for video ads)

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Campaign Properties

• Campaign Created At — the date the campaign was created (useful for protecting new campaigns from premature pausing)
• Campaign Status — current status (Active, Paused)
• Ad Set Status — current status of the ad set
• Campaign.payout — your configured payout for the campaign (enables rules like “CPA > 140% of Campaign.payout”)

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Time Conditions

• Hour of Day — trigger rules only during specific hours (e.g., pause at 22:00, resume at 08:00)
• Day of Week — trigger rules only on specific days

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Data Intervals

Rules evaluate conditions over a time window you choose: 53% of Facebook rules analysed use Today as the data interval — real-time monitoring is the dominant pattern on this platform.

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Scheduling

Rules can be scheduled to run:

• Immediately (as soon as conditions are met, evaluated every few minutes)
• Every N hours (e.g., every 2 hours)
• Once daily at a specified time
• On specific days of the week

Immediate execution is typical for loss-protection rules. Daily scheduling is typical for budget scaling. Cloning rules typically run every 3 days.

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Popular Rule Patterns

For ready-to-use rule templates with specific conditions and thresholds, see Popular Rules — Facebook. That page covers 23 proven patterns across same-day guardrails, budget scaling, CPA optimisation, reactivation, bid adjustments, and creative rotation.