Optimization on Facebook is an integral part of managing our paid campaigns on a daily basis. Facebook has an automated rules tool that allows us to automate optimization in the ongoing management of our campaigns. Automated rules enable us to execute our optimization method; one of the key benefits, in addition to performance improvement, is preventing the system from unnecessarily spending money.
In the following article, we will discuss creating custom rules tailored to our goals in order to save costs, improve results, and let the system handle daily operations as much as possible, freeing up our time to find new audiences, new creatives, and new ideas
Rules on Facebook
Here is a short brief on the campaign:
Rules can be applied to campaigns/ad sets/ads in Facebook’s paid advertising platform. In the following article, I will provide an example of rules in eCommerce environments and how I use these rules to improve campaign results.
Example:
Niche: Lifestyle
Target: 60 NIS per lead
How do I know which rules to build?
There is no single truth and no single formula – everything depends on campaigns, budget, goals, and targets. The rules and rule system you build on Facebook depend solely on your business model. For example, we have a client whose target cost per lead is no more than 60 NIS; I will build rules for active ads so that if an ad generated more than 2 leads at a cost of over 60 NIS per lead – turn off the ad.
Why only over 2 leads?
For the simple reason that if we turn off an active ad that spent 60 NIS and brought 1 lead, we eliminate the chance that the ad will bring another lead and stabilize at 2 leads at a cost of 30 NIS. Therefore, room for maneuver must be provided, dividing the rules into two categories – ads that brought more than 2 leads and ads that brought fewer than 2 leads.
Assuming our target cost is 60 NIS, we will decide up to what spend amount we let the ad run if it brought fewer than 2 leads.
How to build rules?
We will do this by selecting the campaign and choosing the option to create a new rule:
A new window will open immediately:
We will also have the option to receive email updates from Facebook about the rules that ran that day, allowing us to stay in control at all times.
Rule #1 - Turn off an ad that spent more than our target cost per lead and brought 0 or 1 leads
This rule is very important for stopping ads that didn’t generate money or brought one lead at a cost exceeding our target cost, where we will set an upper limit amount that we won’t be willing to exceed. I recommend adding 20% to the target cost and stopping there
In this case – I’ll set a limit of 72 NIS and turn off the ad if it failed to generate 2 leads or more.
We will do this as follows:
Rule #2 - Cost per lead when there are more than 2 leads
If an active ad brought 2 leads at a cost per lead of over 60 NIS – we turn it off. In this case, I look at a timeframe of the last 7 days, but I recommend setting rules for the last 7 days / last 14 days and Lifetime to cover the possibility that campaign costs are rising, but over the total period, the cost is still within my range.
We will do this as follows:
Rule #3 - Adding budget to ad sets that perform well during the day
You can do a lot with rules – and this is where your creativity needs to shine. I use rules that operate on my ad sets throughout the day, and I see the results accordingly.
In this example, I’ll show you a rule that works as follows:
At 15:00, I will check all active ad sets; if an active ad set is delivering good results – I’ll give it a 15% budget increase.
At 18:00, I’ll want to check my active ad sets again, and if there’s a good ad set – I’ll give it an additional 10%.
Note that you shouldn’t raise the budget too much, for fear that the ad set will very quickly exhaust and burn through our audience. Do not exceed a 20% increase in the daily budget, so as not to hurt the results
We will do this as follows:
Continued:
Click on CREATE
Note that you can adjust the hours according to your personal preference.
Facebook Rules in eCommerce Environments
The eCommerce landscape is very complex, and all available data must be taken into account, not just the purchase volume. You can get down to very fine details with rules, but here I will share 2 rules that every advertiser must know and apply in eCommerce.
Rule #4 - Budget increase during the day for an ad set with good ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)
In this example, the ROAS that must always be maintained according to the client’s request is no less than 3.
We will focus on ad sets that performed well throughout the day, and as we did in the previous rule – at 15:00 and 18:00, we will examine the ROAS of the ad sets on that day. If there is an ad set that meets our ROAS target – we will give it a budget increase.
We will do this as follows:
Rule #5 - Lower budget during the day for an ad set with a ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) that doesn't meet our target
If we let active ad sets run and don’t pay attention every day to what’s happening – we’ll find our ad sets spending unnecessary money, and our ROAS will drop accordingly. Therefore, you need to pay attention at any given time and let Facebook’s system do the work on its own so as not to waste unnecessary funds.
This time, we’ll want to reduce the budget during the day for an ad set that doesn’t meet our ROAS.
The reason we only look at today’s results is that today the ad set is underperforming, so I don’t look back a week, a month, or at yesterday. For example, if we looked at yesterday and an ad set delivered good results yesterday, leading us to increase its budget today to 150 NIS, the ad set would spend the 150 NIS without meeting our ROAS target – which is what we don’t want to happen.
I recommend reducing ad sets that are not performing well by at least 30% / lowering them to a fixed low budget (e.g., returning them to 20 NIS).
The rule will look like this:
And click on CREATE.
If the rule lowers the budget at 15:00, but the ad set improves by 18:00 – we have a rule that will add budget back to it.
Rule #6 - Cost per purchase control
If we want to maintain a fixed cost per acquisition and not exceed it – we will add the following rule:
Summary
In this post, I provided examples of several rules that will allow you to optimize campaigns and achieve better results automatically. There are many more rules we can implement – this is where your creativity comes into play. Facebook campaigns are not a one-size-fits-all doctrine – you need to push boundaries and think outside the box. With the help of rules, we can significantly improve conversion rates, lower cost per lead, improve performance in the eCommerce space, and ultimately, for those managing clients – make clients happier.
It is recommended to run rules in every ad account. And above all, best of luck!
About Me
Guy Margi, 26 years old, specializes in digital campaign management across a variety of channels.
