As your business continues to grow and expand, it becomes necessary to apply tools that help to meet your increasingly greater ambitions. That’s where a resourceful but straightforward tool like automated rules come in. In a previous article, I discussed the 3 main types of automated rules and the 3 stages a typical ad set undergoes. Here, I give concrete examples of how we have done it here at ROI Hunter using our advanced features.
A Quick Recap
Types of Automated Rules:
Watchmen - monitors active ads in your ad set and stops poor performing ads.
Boosters - monitors active ads in your ad set and increase the spend on well-performing ads.
Activators - monitors paused ad sets and then reactivates them if they end up meeting your goal because of a delay in attribution for example.
Stages of Ad Sets:
Infancy phase - ignore
Learning phase - set lower goals
Mature phase - expect these ads to reach 90% of your KPI
Now let's take a look at how we can use this knowledge and combine it with ROI Hunter’s advanced automated rules.
Automated Rules - Infancy Phase
Picture this scenario: You just created a couple of ads that you have kept running, and now you need to determine which are going to help you to generate ROI and which are going to be a waste of time, energy, and money. It is at this first stage that you have 2 options - you either completely ignore the ads (e.g., for 1 day or 20 USD ad spend), or you can decide to find potential in the ad by evaluating a different part of the funnel or buyer’s journey. An example of this evaluation could occur after spending 15 USD where you assume that the ad generates at least two Add to Cart transactions. You can choose to be even savvier and check if after the first 10 USD spent whether or not the ad is bringing in high-quality traffic using bounce rate or time spent on site (that is right, with ROI Hunter you can even use metrics from Google Analytics in your automated rules). If the price of Add to Cart transactions is too high or if the brought traffic isn't right, then you can stop the ad quickly with minimal damage.
EXAMPLEs
Note: In case you want to ignore the ad completely, then use rule Created = YESTERDAY in second stage's rules.
Automated Rules - Learning Stage
In the second stage - Learning - we expect that the ad has already started to generate some transactions (purchases). This ad is still learning who to reach so we won't be that strict with meeting the KPIs set for it. It’s OK if the ad meets at least 60% of the target ROI. This stage can be defined by the ad spend between 20 and 50 USD (or the equivalent of 2 daily budgets). Thanks to ROI Hunter's advanced options you can set the condition “the ad was created yesterday.” This way you give Facebook the space to learn the optimal audience to reach for your advertisement. Also, our second-day rules can check twice a day, (e;g., 3 PM and 11 PM) with slightly different conditions (e.g., 60% of the target at 3 PM and then at 11 PM 70%), if the ad is anywhere close to reaching your KPIs.
EXAMPLEs
Automated Rules - Mature Phase
At this point, the ads with the highest potential made it through two rough days of testing. You can predict with some accuracy that these ads will achieve your target ROI and it is at this point that you want to start scaling. This time we will need two automated rules to evaluate the distinct situations and work on specific levels.
If the ad set has not reached at least 90% of the ROI, then we use a rule that will decrease the daily budget of that ad set by 20% - in this case as you noticed we are working with ad set level.
In case the ad reaches even lower ROI, let's say less than 80%, then such an ad within the ad set should be paused.
EXAMPLEs
To be able to scale all the well-performing ad sets, you need to reach as many people as possible while the ROI is still good. Thanks to ROI Hunter’s Performance Goals feature, this can be secured with a simple rule stating:
If the ad set is meeting goal, then increase the daily budget by 25% this rule is again operating on ad set (because of the budget).
This rule should run once a day otherwise you can mess up the optimization algorithm which starts over and over again after each change. Our Performance Goal feature uses a green thumbs-up if the ad is performing as expected or a red thumbs-down if the ad is not performing well. With our automatic rules, you can plug in The “thumbs” variables.
Note: In the second case we are more tolerant and scale ad sets which reach 90% of your target ROI.
The last rule you should set up is an Activator, which checks all of your paused ads (because rules are pausing only ads, not ad sets) and if the ads gain any late transactions (due to attribution) and the ROI is suddenly OK, then the ad should get another chance to prove itself and should be activated.
This article is an example of how automated rules can work for you, help you to scale only well-performing ads and stop poor ads stop in time. Using automate rules as outlined here decreases the number of ads which stay active but then thanks to Boosters, reaches more and more people every day. If you would like to find out how ROI Hunters Advanced Automatic Rules can work for you, then please contact us here.
