How to create automated rules

Automated rules watch your Meta campaigns, ad sets or ads and take action the moment your metrics cross a line you set — so you don't have to babysit the Ads Manager. A rule reads like a sentence: check my ad sets every hour using the last 3 days; if cost per purchase is greater than €50 and spend is greater than €20, turn them off.

You build rules from the ads manager. Open the Automated rules dialog (the lightning-bolt icon), then click New rule or pick a template. Every rule belongs to one ad account.

Choosing an action

Every rule does exactly one of five things when its conditions match. Pick from the Then section:

• Turn off (pause) — pauses the matching campaign, ad set or ad. If something is already paused it's counted but left alone.
• Turn on (activate) — re-activates matching entities.
• Increase budget — raises the daily or lifetime budget by a percentage or a fixed amount.
• Decrease budget — lowers it the same way.
• Notify me (no change to ads) — sends an alert without touching your ads.

The Notify action delivers through whatever channels you've enabled for Automated rule matches in Configuration → Notifications (email, Slack, ClickUp). If none are on, the match is still recorded in the rule's run history.

A live plain-English Rule summary at the top of the editor restates your whole rule as you build it, so you can sanity-check it before saving.

Combining conditions with AND / OR

In the If section you add one or more conditions. Each condition is a metric, an operator, and a value — for example CTR (all) is less than 0.6.

• Metrics include amount spent, impressions, reach, frequency, clicks, link clicks, CTR and link CTR, CPC, CPM, cost per 1k reached, purchases, purchase value, ROAS, cost per purchase, leads, cost per lead, landing page views, add to cart, ThruPlays, post engagement and more.
• Operators are is greater than, is less than, is at least, and is at most.

Use the Match ALL / Match ANY toggle to combine conditions:

• Match ALL = AND. Every condition must be true (e.g. cost per purchase > €50 AND spend > €20). Pairing a performance metric with a minimum spend or impression threshold avoids acting on entities with too little data.
• Match ANY = OR. Any single condition firing is enough.

Add as many conditions as you need with Add condition; remove one with the × button. One condition is always required.

One thing worth knowing: count metrics (spend, purchases, leads, impressions and similar) that Meta reports as zero are treated as 0, not "no data." So a condition like purchases is less than 1 will correctly match an ad that has had no purchases. The editor shows a tip under any "count is less than" condition to remind you.

Picking the date preset

The Measured over dropdown sets the window the metrics are pulled from. Your options are Today, Yesterday, Last 3 days, Last 7 days, Last 14 days, Last 30 days, and Lifetime. Shorter windows react faster to fresh performance; longer windows are steadier and less noisy. A 3-day window is a sensible default for most pause and scale rules.

Setting budget min / max caps

When the action is Increase or Decrease budget, two optional fields appear:

• Min budget — the rule will never push a budget below this floor.
• Max budget — and never above this ceiling.

Caps are guardrails. If a scaling rule runs repeatedly, the max cap stops it from ballooning a budget; the min cap stops a decrease rule from shrinking a budget to nothing. Budgets are adjusted on whichever the entity uses — daily or lifetime — and the run history records the exact change (for example €50.00 → €60.00).

Scheduling

The Check section sets how often the rule evaluates:

• Manual only — never runs on its own; only when you click Run all now.
• Every 30 min
• Hourly
• Every 3 hours
• Every 6 hours
• Once a day — choose the hour from the time picker. Times are shown in your local time zone.

Disabled rules never run on a schedule, regardless of cadence — flip the Enabled switch off to park a rule without deleting it. You can always trigger every enabled rule immediately with Run all now on the rules list.

Starting from a template

The fastest way to a working rule is the Quick start templates on the rules list. Each one drops a ready-made rule into the editor for you to tweak:

• Pause high CPA — pauses ad sets whose cost per purchase is too high (with a minimum-spend guard).
• Scale winners — raises ad set budgets by 20% when ROAS is strong.
• Cut low CTR ads — pauses ads with weak click-through once they have enough impressions.
• Frequency alert — notifies you when ad set frequency gets high.

Click a template, adjust the metrics, thresholds, schedule and budget caps to fit your account, give it a name, and hit Create rule.

Next steps

• Manage rules and view run history to see exactly what each run matched and changed.
• Run an optimization audit for one-off, AI-assisted recommendations.
• Set up notifications and the daily digest so rule matches reach you on Slack, ClickUp or email.