Rules
Rolling out. If you do not see Automation in the menu yet, your account does not have it switched on. You can still create and read back rules through the AI Copilot.
A rule is one sentence: watch these things, and when every one of these conditions is true, either tell me or turn it off. You write it at Automation, then Rules.
Writing a rule
The builder opens on its own when you have no rules yet. It has five parts.
Name
Anything you will recognize later, up to 80 characters. Something like Stop the expensive ones beats Rule 1.
What it watches
Whether the rule looks at every campaign, every ad set, or every ad in the account.
On Google Ads a rule can watch campaigns and ad sets. It cannot watch individual ads.
You can also point a rule at specific things instead of the whole account, up to 50 of them.
Conditions, all of which must be true
Up to five conditions. They join with and, never with or, so every one of them has to be true before anything happens. If you want two independent triggers, write two rules.
Each condition is a number, compared against a value, over a period.
What it can watch:
| In the builder | What it means |
|---|---|
| the amount spent | Money spent |
| the number of times it was shown | Impressions |
| the number of clicks | Clicks |
| the number of conversions | Conversions |
| the cost per conversion | Spend divided by conversions |
| the return on money spent | Conversion value divided by spend |
| the click rate | Clicks divided by times shown |
| the link click rate | Link clicks divided by times shown |
How it compares: is over, is under, is at least, is at most.
Over what period: yesterday, over the last 3 days, over the last 7 days, or over the last 14 days.
Only after it has spent at least
The spend floor. The rule ignores anything that has not yet spent this much.
This field cannot stay empty. A rule with no spend floor fires on a handful of clicks and turns off things that never had a chance, so Adsap rejects it. Set it to a number where you would believe the result. If one conversion normally costs you 40, a floor of 10 tells you nothing.
What it does
- Only tell me. The rule reports what it found and changes nothing.
- Turn it off for me. The rule turns the matching thing off.
Turning off is the only action available. A rule cannot change a budget, edit an ad, or switch anything back on.
Reading the rule back
As you fill the builder, the rule appears underneath as a plain sentence, with its guardrails on the line below:
Turn off any ad in this account where the amount spent is over $50.00 over the last 7 days, and the number of conversions is under 1 over the last 7 days.
Checked only after it has spent at least $50.00, at most once every 24 hours for the same one, ignoring the most recent day, because conversions take time to be counted, never while it is still settling in or was changed in the last 2 days.
Read that sentence before you switch the rule on. A rule you cannot read back is a rule you cannot trust with your budget. That is the whole point of showing it: if the sentence does not say what you meant, the numbers above it are wrong.
The guardrails
Every rule gets these. They show on the rule itself, not hidden in a settings page.
| Guardrail | Default | What it stops |
|---|---|---|
| Spend floor | You set it, and it cannot be empty | Acting on something that has barely run |
| Cooldown | Once every 24 hours for the same thing | The same ad being hit repeatedly in one day |
| Recent days ignored | 1 day on Meta, 2 days on Google Ads | Judging something before its conversions have been counted |
| Still settling in | On, Meta only | Acting on something in its learning phase, or changed in the last 2 days |
You can set the cooldown anywhere between 1 and 720 hours if you want it longer.
Adsap applies the conversion-lag buffer on its own to the conditions where it matters: cost per conversion, return on money spent, and number of conversions.
Managing rules
The rules list shows each rule with its name and a badge saying whether it Turns things off or Only tells you. Each row also shows the readback sentence and its guardrails, a switch, and a delete button.
Switching a rule off leaves it in place with its history. Deleting removes it.
Emails
If a rule finds something, the person who created it gets an email.
This is not another mailing list to join. Creating the rule is the opt-in, and the off switch is on the rule itself. You get at most one email per day per workspace for each rule creator, so a rule acting on ten ads does not send ten emails.
The email includes the things the rule left alone and why. That is on purpose: “left alone because it was still settling in” is the guardrail doing its job, and hiding it would make the rule look broken.
Doing this through the AI Copilot
You can write rules by chat:
“Turn off any ad that has spent over 50 with no conversions in the last 7 days”
The assistant reads the rule back to you, including the guardrails it filled in, and writes nothing until you confirm. It does not invent a spend floor for you. Ask “what rules do I have?” to list them, and “what have my rules been doing?” to get the activity log.
Before you switch a rule on
- Run it on Only tell me for a week.
- Read the Activity log.
- If everything it would have turned off is something you would have turned off yourself, switch it to Turn it off for me.
If it would have turned off something you were happy with, the numbers are wrong, not the rule. Raise the spend floor or lengthen the period and try another week.