In this tutorial Shaun Whynacht walks viewers through Facebook Ads Manager’s “Rules” feature to prevent overspending and creative burnout. He explains how ad frequency (the number of times a creative is shown to the same user) signals burnout, recommending a rule of >5 impressions per user over 30 days as a threshold. He demonstrates creating a rule that automatically turns off campaigns when frequency exceeds this limit, and shows how to apply rules at the campaign, ad set, or ad level. The video covers additional rule actions such as decreasing daily budgets by a percentage or floor amount, stacking multiple conditions (e.g., frequency > 5 and spend > $50), setting the time window for calculations, scheduling rule evaluations (continuous, daily, etc.), and configuring notifications via Facebook or email. Whynacht also illustrates cost‑per‑result rules to cap spend on under‑performing ads, and explains how to manage, edit, or delete rules. The tutorial concludes with a call to subscribe to the BlueCow Marketing YouTube channel.
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Have you ever tried to run Facebook ads and then you get the ads set up and then you forget about it, you come back and you find out that, you know, it was underperforming, you were spending way too much, and you wish you just had eyes on it all the time? Well, let's solve that. And that's what we're gonna cover in today's video, covering Facebook rules. So one of the things that we look at in Facebook advertising is ad creative burnout. What that means is the amount of times an ad or a specific creative it's shown to a particular audience or group of Facebook users. And that is represented under frequency. So if you haven't been able to find that, you can obviously go and customize your columns and bring up that metric right here. Now, what we like to do as a rule of thumb, and you could be a little bit different and every audience could have a higher threshold, is we say if an ad has been shown to the average user 5 or more times in a set period, and we usually look at it you know, in a 30-day period, then we would consider that that ad is beginning to burn out. And the reason for that is the audience is too small for the amount of budget. So you can either reduce your budget or increase your audience and then get that frequency down. Now, this one here, this is obviously just our account. All these ads have been turned off, but this one here, let's say, is over that threshold of 5. So it's at 5.5. Facebook has this little option up here called rules, and you can do that at the campaign, ad set, or ad level. Level, depending on what it is, but it's going to be the exact same setup. What we're going to do here is we're going to say create a new rule. We're going to give it a name. So what I'm going to give it is frequency is greater than 5. And then I'm going to say turn off ad. That's going to be the rule. Now you can apply it to one campaign. So one that you'd have selected, which here is that one, or you can say all active ad sets in that campaign or all active ads or all active ad ad campaigns or all ad sets and all ads, right? So you've got your, your ability to do that. Now, if you were in the actual ad level, you could select a couple of the ads and then just have those selected there. So we're going to do this clear across the board and say all active ad campaigns. Now, what do we want to have happen? So you've got a couple of options that are in here. You can turn off the campaigns, you can turn on campaigns, you can send a notification. So if you want it to just be notified and then go in and check and you can make that decision at that point. And then you've got budget adjustments. So if the frequency is too high, one of the options is to decrease the daily budget if you're doing that on a daily ad spend. So you could actually set that in here. In this case, what I'm going to show you is just turn off the campaign. Now, if you were to decrease, you could actually go in here and say percentage decrease. So you could decrease it by 10%, 20%, whatever that is, or your minimum daily floor budget in here. So I don't want to decrease it more than $10 a day,, but we're set at, let's say, $30 a day. We want to decrease by, by, you know, 30%. So we could do that. And then your frequency in here is every hour, every 12 hours, biweekly, weekly. So there's some options that are in here. So let's go back and let's just say we're going to turn off that campaign. Now, what is the condition of that? It is going to be the frequency is greater than 5. So put 5 in there. And we're going to add that rule. Now you can stack rules in here. You can hit plus. So for example, if it was for certain ads where your frequency was over 5, but your, your ad spend was over $50 a day, you could do conditions like that. So you can start to build kind of the automated processes that you want to have in place for your ad campaign. And now here, the time range is based on what? And this is important. Where is it going to calculate that that frequency from? So I know we said the last 30 days, so that's what I'm going to select there. And then do you want to schedule this? So continuously means that it's going to be on all the time. It's going to be looking usually every 30 minutes. Now daily could be, you might have peak times where, you know, the overnight hours, you know, you don't really want to consider that, but maybe through the day you want to, or you want to look at it, you know, in the overnight hours, but not through the day, completely up to you. And then here, do you want to be notified when that rule takes place? You can do it by Facebook, which is by default, or you can get an email, a copy once a day to see if any of those rules have been met. And then you simply hit Create, and now it is set up under Rules. And you can come back here at any point and manage those rules, and it will come in here, and you can go ahead and adjust them, turn them on, turn them off. You can create multiple rules. So there's a lot of functionality that you can do in the rules that are there, and it allows you to do, you know, quite a bit of things that you might want to consider to automate those processes. Things like, you know, I don't want to spend over X amount per day, right? Or, you know, if the, you know, the results aren't there. So for example, if your cost per result is over, you know, $30, that would be something that you might want to create a rule in here where it's like, okay, all ActiveCampaigns, we want to, you know, either turn off or notify. So we'll do turn off again. No, and that is going to be based on the cost per result. So if you are doing, you know, conversion-based ads and it's, you know, a lead magnet or it's even a purchase conversion and you say, okay, we're selling a $30 product and we know our cost to acquire and with our margins and everything, we don't want to spend over $15 to get somebody to buy that. We could actually say the cost per result, if it is greater than $15, and we want to turn off that, that campaign, essentially, right? We'll also get the notification. So, you know, it's been turned off. You can go in and make adjustments to that. So you're allowed to kind of cap those results based on, on the way that you're setting things up. So a lot of cool functionality just within Ads Manager here in Facebook. So check it out, the rules. I guarantee it's going to save you a a lot of headache, a lot of frustration, and essentially save you money in the long run. So if you like this video and want to see more, go to our YouTube channel at bluecow— or youtube.com/bluecowmarketing. Please subscribe to us there. We love putting out this content for you.
