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.
Available Actions
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Available Condition Metrics
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
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
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)
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”)
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
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.
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