The holidays are just around the corner and that means a well-earned break for most of us. However, Facebook and Instagram ads never sleep, and someone is going to have to keep an eye on them over the holiday period. Or are they? Thanks to Facebook ads automation, you can relax and drink copious amounts of mulled wine, or slip into a food coma, without worrying that your ads are tanking.

Rule Number One: USE RULES!

When you create automated rules in Ads Manager, the rule will take fire (read: take action) as soon as those conditions are met. So why is this useful? Well, if you’re worried about CPL’s skyrocketing or frequencies creeping up, whether you have one advert or one thousand, a rule will always fire.

Think about the manual checks you might do to optimise ads:

Do you pause a low-performing ad when it hits a specific metric?

Do you increase your budget if a certain number of people click on your ad?

Do you increase your bid if your total daily spend is below a certain amount?

Do you increase your budget based on return on ad spend (ROAS)?

Do you turn off a specific campaign every Friday?

If so, you can put a rule in place so that when those conditions are met, you are notified or changes are automatically made as specified by the rules that you create.

When you create an automated rule, you choose:

• The criteria that triggers the rule
• The action your rule takes on the ad
• The active campaign, ad set or ad that you want the rule to affect

How To Use Them

To scale up or down – for example, if you’re ROI is still too low after 20,000 impressions, you can pause your ads – or if you’re ROI is over 5, you could tell the system to increase budget by 25%.

Cap frequency – especially good for extended breaks of annual leave, when you might want to pause ads if they hit a certain frequency.

Pausing unprofitable campaigns – if your CPA is higher than your desired CPA.

A traffic purchasing automation tool is a useful thing. If you use the rules correctly, you can save a lot of time and turn off poorly performing ads, ad-sets or campaigns without the need for manual intervention.

Too Advanced? Try Automated Ads

A different tool completely to the above rule based ad automation, Facebook’s automated ads sit in between beginner-level boosted posts and full blown, funnel Facebook ads in terms of ease and effectiveness. Whilst not recommended for any marketers familiar with Facebook ads manager, because they   mirror theease of setting up boosted posts and allow the ability to optimise throughout the ads lifetime, they are a solid option for FB newbies.

What Are They?

Automated ads essentially take the guesswork out of Facebook ads. They were created for small business owners that have little to no marketing expertise, but marketers of all levels have been known to use automated ads on Facebook.

At the start of the setup Facebook will ask you a few simple questions about your business. These questions help Facebook understand how your business works on a basic level so it can offer the best advice it can for your campaign.

After answering these questions you will be asked to identify your campaign goal in ads manager, Facebook will then help you take the next steps to create and manage your ads. Facebook have helpfully identified four key steps of the ads creation which users generally need help with -this can also prove handy for an experienced marketer trying to box off all their ads before the holidays!

• Multiple ads – If you create up to six different versions of your ad. Facebook will then suggest CTA’s, copy and creative assets that they believe will work for your ads based on the information on your page. After a while, Facebook will begin to automatically show the best-performing version.
• Audience suggestions – Based on the information on your page, Facebook will offer some targeted audience suggestions if you are struggling to identify relevant interests or behaviours. Facebook also offers the option for automatic audiences in which they create and improve an audience using detailed targeting expansion.
• Recommend a budget – Facebook will also take a look at your goal and recommend a budget that will most likely get you’re the best results. They also have a useful forecasting tool if you want to decide your own budget.
• Ad notifications – You’ll receive useful notifications throughout your ads lifetime to help you understand any issues that have arisen and how to deal with them.

Experienced Facebook ads managers may turn their noses up at automated ads, but for beginners, opting to use this tool over the holiday period will save you a lot of time in this busy time of the year – as well as allowing Facebook to optimise the performance and show the best performing ad while you are out of office.