Budget auto-rules
Budget auto-rules are the small, boring corrections you would make yourself if you checked your ad numbers every morning: cost per customer creeps up, so the budget comes down a notch; weekly spend crosses a line, so the ads pause until you look. You write the rule once, in plain words, and SiteOps applies it — inside bounds you set, never beyond them.
The rules live in two places on purpose. Settings holds your base rules — a template, nothing more; editing it never touches a running campaign. Each campaign then has its own auto-rules switch, and flipping it on copies the base rules onto that campaign. From then on the copies belong to the campaign: you can tune one campaign's rules without changing any other, and without changing the template.
A rule is a decision table read as sentences: if this holds, do that; otherwise, if this other thing holds, do something else. Branches are checked top to bottom and the first match wins — the rest stay quiet. Every budget move can carry a floor or a ceiling, and no rule can start a campaign, cross those bounds, or go anywhere near billing. Rules nudge; you launch.
Quick links
What SiteOps reads
- Campaign numbers from the connected ad cabinet — spend, CAC, conversions, clicks, impressions and CTR — averaged or totalled over the window each condition names.
- Revenue and ROAS once a revenue source is connected, every number you push through the Push API, and every event the SiteOps SDK reports — all first-class metrics a rule can watch.
- On its own, inside your bounds: it lowers, raises or sets a daily budget, pauses ads, or sends you a note — and logs every action in the activity feed.
- Always waits for you, or never happens at all: launching a campaign, crossing a floor or ceiling, and anything to do with billing — rules never touch payments.
Set it up, step by step
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- Settings
- Base auto-rules
- Ads
- Campaign cabinet
- Auto-rules
- Calendar
- Activity
If something does not work
- I edited the base rules in Settings — why didn't my running campaign change?
- By design. The base rules are a template; each campaign runs its own copies, seeded the moment its auto-rules switch turned on. Edit the campaign's rules in its cabinet on the Ads view if you want that campaign to change. The template only shapes campaigns that opt in after the edit.
- A rule used to say "From your base rules" and now says "Set on this campaign" — what happened?
- You edited the copy inside the campaign's cabinet. The first edit detaches it from the template, so the origin line stays truthful: the campaign owns that rule now, and future base edits will never overwrite your tuning.
- Why doesn't my rule raise the budget any further, even though the conditions keep matching?
- It hit the ceiling you set on that branch. Floors and ceilings are hard bounds — a rule stops at the line, always. If the bound no longer reflects what you want, edit the branch and move it; nothing else will move it for you.
- Revenue and ROAS are missing from the metric list — where are they?
- They unlock when SiteOps can see revenue: connect Stripe, Paddle or Creem, or push your own revenue numbers through the Push API. Until then the list holds ad performance plus any pushed numbers and SDK events.
- The preview says the rule would not have fired in 30 days — is it broken?
- No — that is the dry run doing its job. It replays your last 30 days of numbers, and they never crossed the line you set. That can be exactly right for a brake you hope rarely fires, or a hint that a threshold is too loose to ever matter.
- Can a rule start a new campaign when the numbers look good?
- Never. Rules adjust budgets, pause ads and send notes — inside your bounds, on campaigns that already exist. Launching is always yours, and ads stay approve-first no matter how high your autopilot trust is set.