After configuring Billy Grace and ensuring data flow into the platform, you are ready to set up Automations. The Automation creation process involves defining your objectives, selecting the desired metrics to track, and determining the campaigns / ad set you want to optimize. By setting clear goals and aligning them with the key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter to your business, you lay the foundation for successful Automation.
Automation settings
When you create a new Automation, the first step is to name your Automation Group.
When you click on Create the steps to follow will be visible.
Automation Name: The name of the Automation, visible inside the interface of BG.
Goal to optimize: Which goal should BG optimize? e.g. Revenue, Impressions, Sessions, Clicks or any Custom Event.
Attribution Model: Should Billy Grace us Last Click, Multi-Touch Attribution (Clicks) or Unified Marketing Measurement (Clicks + Views) to attribute results?
Attribution Window: Select the desired attribution window, 1-day, 7-day, 30-day or unlimited.
Click Next
Campaigns
The budgets of the channels below can be automatically updated:
Meta
Google Ads
Pinterest
TikTok
Bing
The budgets of the channels below are only recommendations and need to be manually adjusted in the ad managers:
Criteo
Reddit
Xandr
Snapchat
Display & Video 360
Selected Campaigns and ad groups
Choose the campaigns and ad sets here that have the same overall goal. For example, a purchase in the webshop. You can select campaigns and Billy Grace will recommend or change the budget on the lowest level possible. For Meta and TikTok, this could be either on campaign or adset level, depending on which level you’ve currently set your budget. For Google, you’ll receive recommendations on campaign level.
If there is an ad set budget in the campaign, then an arrow (>) will be shown on the right side of the campaign name. If you press on the arrow, you will be able to select the specific ad sets inside the campaign. When you click on the box of the campaign level, all the ad sets of the campaign will be selected. This selection will also be used in the added automation rules (if any).
Click Next when you added the campaigns and ad sets.
Budgets & schedule
In the next step, you define the maximum daily budget and start and optionally the end date.
Daily budget: What is the maximum overall daily budget? e.g. the budget available over all the added ad sets/campaigns. We recommend matching the daily budget of the automation to the daily budget of all campaigns added in the admanagers.
Why? This way, the automation can recommend how to re-divide the budget to achieve your goal most efficiently. If the automation should spend more or less budget than currently set-up in the admanagers, it will recommend increasing or decreasing all campaign budgets to achieve the daily budget goal.Sync Total Daily Budgets With Ad Managers: As described above, we advice matching the daily budget set in the automation to the total daily budget in ad managers. To automate this process, the sync toggle retrieves current budgets via API each night, updates the automation budget accordingly, and then proceeds with recommendations, avoiding conflicts like exceeding maximum percentage increases.
Minimum Spend Per Campaign / Ad set: This is the minimum a campaign/ ad set should have spent in order for the algorithm to give budget recommendations. This is useful when you add new campaigns/ ad sets to an already running automation.
Run Frequency: Which days the automation will run. If all days are selected, it will run daily.
Start Date: Start date of the campaign. This can be set in the past to avoid a 5 day learning phase.
End Date: End date of the campaign.
Change Budgets Automatically Each Night: Select if you want Billy Grace to change the budgets of your campaigns automatically. Daily recommendations are available in the Automation Performance report.
Automatically update Target ROAS/CPA once a week: Select if you want Billy Grace to automatically update your target ROAS/CPA once a week, based on our recommendations.
Toggle "Advanced Mode"
Use the budget upscale parameter to get more difference between the spend and the budget of a campaign/ ad set. Read more here
Click Next
Automation rules
In this step, you are able to add Automation Rules. Rules can be used to influence the algorithm or to add an extra layer of Automation based on rules you can create yourself. Read this article for a how-to.
Summary & launch
Check all settings one more time and click on Launch to save.
Depending on the amount of conversions that are generated through ads, the algorithm of Billy Grace can take up to 5 days to find sufficient data points.
After the warm-up period, you can Navigate to Automations to see an overview of all the Automations in your Billy Grace account. You can return daily to Automation Performance to see the daily budget recommendations and results.
You can read this article for some inspiration for setting up your first Automations.
Things to take into consideration
When combining the sync total daily budgets toggle with a max budget % rule in automation, the max can be overwritten by the sync option. See the below example:
Daily budget in BG is €100
Daily budget in ad managers is €100
Automation rule = increase daily budget by 10% and max 20%
So the max is 100 * 1.2 = €120. Then, the daily budget increases because the automation rule is true
Daily sync is on
New daily budget in BG becomes €110 (because budgets sync)
Then the automation rule of max 20% is 110 * 1.2 = €132
Therefore, we advise using a max budget € instead of % in combination with the sync toggle.
Frequently asked questions (FAQ)
Is it possible to add the same campaign to multiple Automations?
This is not possible as doing this could potentially lead to conflicts. As one automation might try to scale up a campaign while another Automation will try to scale down the same campaign. To avoid this, it is not possible to add the same campaign to multiple active Automations.