In this article, we describe several strategies that you can use in Automations. Over time, these strategies will help you to improve your ROAS and/ or CPA by scaling or reducing spend.
The algorithm behind Automations is designed to spend the budget you set for an automation as efficiently as possible between the campaigns/ adsets selected to maximize the goal of the automation. By looking for the highest incremental uplift possible in the available setup (campaigns, daily budgets, and other settings). To help the algorithm make the right decisions, you can add your strategy via automation rules.
Don’t have an Automation live yet? Read this article first.
Automation Rules
With automation rules, you can define your own objectives and influence the algorithm to make decisions faster. Below, we share strategies that can work well based on your marketing objectives. If this is the first time you're hearing about Automation Rules, read this article first.
In the strategies described, we advise adding multiple Automation Rules to one Automation that is optimizing campaigns/ adsets (within a channel or across channels). In the examples, we use ROAS, but this can be changed with a metric suitable for your use-case.
The x values in the below examples need to be determined by you. A common approach for this is looking at your Billy Grace dashboards, as the ROAS in Billy Grace can be different from the one reported in the ad manager.
Strategy 1: Scaling up or down as long as ROAS targets are met
This will scale up campaigns and the total budget if performance is good, and scale down campaigns and the total budget if performance is poor.
Automation Rule 1: Increase daily budget by x% with a maximum of x% if the ROAS (or other metric) is greater than x and the spend is greater than x in x period
Automation Rule 2: Decrease daily budget by x% with a maximum of x% if the ROAS (or other metric) is less than x and the spend is greater than x in x period
Automation Rule 3: Increase Campaign/Adset budget by x% with a maximum of x% if the ROAS is greater than x and the spend is greater than x in x period
Automation Rule 4: Decrease Campaign/Adset budget by x% with a maximum of x% if the ROAS is less than x and the spend is greater than x in x period
What Automation Rule 1 looks like in the Billy Grace platform:
Strategy 2: Increasing budget for a certain date range or on strong performing days
This will increase the total budget on your selected date range when you expect people to have more spending power, for example on and after payday or in the weekends. Of course, you can adjust this based on your own data insights.
Automation Rule 1: Increase daily budget by x% with a maximum of x% for a certain date range (for example on and after payday)
Automation Rule 2: Increase daily budget by x% with a maximum of x% every Saturday and Sunday
What Automation Rule 1 looks like in the Billy Grace platform:
Strategy 3: Increasing budget based on the weather
This will increase the total budget if you expect the weather to have an impact on people their willingness to buy your products
Automation Rule 1: Increase daily budget by x% with a maximum of x% when the temperature is above x degrees in your country
Automation Rule 2: Decrease daily budget by x% with a maximum of x% if the weather is forecasting rain
What Automation Rule 1 looks like in the Billy Grace platform:
Hopefully the strategies above will give you some guidance on how to use Automations together with Automation rules. You can of course extend these rules to include other variables that are available.
If Billy Grace does not automatically manage the budgets, then you will only get recommendations from Automation Rules. This will not work optimally. Therefore, we recommend turning on automatic changes on Automation and Automation Rule level. This is done in the setup of an Automation, see below:
Automate budget changes:
Automatically execute rules: