Automation rules for Meta budgets
Rules that watch your campaigns every 15 minutes, with cooldowns, dry runs and a circuit breaker.
An automation rule is a declarative rule that Hivenue evaluates on your Meta campaigns every 15 minutes. When the conditions you set are met, Hivenue performs the actions you declared, without you opening Ads Manager. Rules answer questions like "pause an ad if frequency goes above 4 over the last 3 days", "raise the budget 20% on ad sets with ROAS above 2.5x that are underspending today", or "notify me if leads in the last 24 hours drop below 10".
Rules are not written in natural language or SQL. You compose them from chips (clickable blocks) in a visual builder, and every decision a rule makes is recorded in an audit trail: why it fired, on which objects, and what happened next. That traceability matters when software is touching your ad spend.
Before you start
You need an active Meta connection in your workspace, at least one published campaign, and the admin role on the workspace (members see rules in read-only mode). You will find the builder in the sidebar under Meta Ads, then Automations. New to Meta on Hivenue? Start from the Ads Management module.
Step 1: Start from a template
Five prebuilt templates are the fastest way in. Click "From template" at the top of the rules list:
| Template | What it does |
|---|---|
| Surfing | Raises budget 20% on ad sets with ROAS above 2.5x over the last 3 days that are underspending today |
| Sunsetting | Pauses ads with frequency above 4 over the last 3 days (high frequency means a saturated audience) |
| Budget Cap | Pauses the campaign when daily spend passes your threshold |
| Frequency Cap | Pauses the ad when frequency passes 4 |
| Lead Velocity | Notifies you when leads in the last 24 hours drop below your threshold |
Clicking a template opens the builder pre-populated. From there: give the rule an operational name, narrow the scope (by default rules run on all ad accounts in the workspace), adjust the thresholds to your own targets, and set the cooldown and notification channels.
When you save, the rule appears in the list with its toggle disabled by default. That is a deliberate safety: no rule runs until you enable it yourself.
Step 2: Or build one from scratch
Click "+ New rule". The builder has three vertical blocks: IF (the trigger conditions, combinable with AND/OR and nestable up to 3 levels), SCOPE (the level to act on: campaign, ad set, or ad, and which ad accounts), and THEN (1 to 5 actions Hivenue will run on matching objects). Notifications go out in-app and by email.
Step 3: Set a sensible cooldown
The cooldown is the minimum time between two actions by the same rule on the same object. It exists because metrics oscillate: a ROAS bouncing between 1.4 and 1.6 around your 1.5 threshold would otherwise pause and resume the same ad set every 15 minutes, and Meta penalizes objects that change status too often.
The cooldown is per rule and per object, so one run can still act on 50 different objects. Typical values: 12 to 24 hours for pause and resume rules, 24 hours for budget adjustments, 1 to 4 hours for lightweight notify actions. The minimum is 15 minutes, the maximum 7 days.
Step 4: Dry-run before going live
While you edit a rule, a historical preview card simulates it against your cached data from the last 30 days: how many times it would have fired, on how many objects, and, for pause rules, an estimate of spend it would have saved. It updates live as you change chips, without calling Meta or touching anything. If it says the rule would have fired zero times in 30 days, it is probably too restrictive.
There is also a runtime dry-run: a checkbox on the rule. With it enabled, the rule runs on schedule but skips the actual Meta actions, logging everything in the audit trail as dry-run entries. The recommended path for a first rule: check the historical preview, save with dry-run on, enable it, watch the audit trail for 24 to 48 hours, and only then switch dry-run off.
Step 5: Read the audit trail
Click a rule to open its detail panel: a summary of the rule, a table with one row per evaluation run, and a drawer listing every individual action. Each action has a status:
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Succeeded | Action executed on Meta |
| Failed | Meta rejected it; the error detail says why |
| Cooldown blocked | The object was still in cooldown; expected skip |
| Dry run | The rule was in test mode; nothing was called on Meta |
Failed actions show a Retry button (admins only). Replays are explicit and manual by design: failures are usually persistent problems (revoked token, deleted object), so you diagnose first and retry deliberately. The original audit row is never overwritten.
Good to know
- Circuit breaker. If a rule fails 5 consecutive times, Hivenue disables it automatically and notifies you. Fix the upstream problem (reconnect Meta, adjust the scope), then click Re-enable on the banner in the rule detail. A single successful run resets the failure counter.
- API budget. Each workspace has a per-tick quota of Meta API calls. If you run many broad rules, some actions may be marked as budget exceeded and picked up on the next tick. It is back-pressure, not an error; narrowing scopes and raising cooldowns keeps you well under it.
- Notification dedupe. Notifications collapse per rule, object, channel, and day, so a rule matching 50 ads all day sends at most one notification per ad per day, not thousands.
- Limits. Up to 50 rules per workspace. Rules can pause, resume, adjust budgets, duplicate, notify, and create tasks; they do not edit creatives, and the evaluation cadence is fixed at 15 minutes.
Pair your rules with the numbers they act on: the Meta Insights dashboard reads from the same data the rules do.