This is an article about Automated campaigns and recent novelties. If you want to learn about the difference between old and new Standard campaigns, read this article.
Why and when should I use automated campaigns?
An automated campaign is set up once in Hunch, and based on your setup it will create and configure ad sets and ads inside.
This is convenient for massive campaigns and campaigns with frequent changes that depend on any kind of data that can end up inside one feed.
This kind of campaign required a feed where one row keeps all the data for one ad.
What is essentially different in comparison to old automated campaigns in Hunch?
New automated campaigns can do everything that the old ones could, with a couple of small functional differences that we will go through in this article.
But, for you the most important difference is that the new automated campaigns are creating campaigns with ODAX objectives on Meta, and the old automated campaigns created the old ones.
Why is this important? You can read here in more details, but essentially ODAX is performing better, Meta is building on it, and the old objectives are being phased out and the delivery of campaigns that are using them will stop during the year of 2024.
Availability of objectives
App Promotion objective will be available during February 2024.
All ODAX objectives except Engagement are available.
Difference from the old campaigns:
The old campaigns work with old objectives, not ODAX.
Limitations in comparison to Standard campaigns
Not supported:
the scenarios with product feeds (dynamic product ads)
Advantage+ setups
Availability of creatives
| Singe-item | Multi-item |
Image | single image | carousel, collage |
Video | single video | slideshow |
Campaign Setup: Structure
The structure of ad sets and ads inside campaign can be created in a usual way, but automated campaigns also offer an addition - you can automate the creation of your ad sets.
Any Ad Set can be a regular Ad Set, or automated.
If you make it automated, then it will multiply and configure based on the rules that you define.
If you want it to multiply, you should decide what combination of catalog columns constitutes a new ad set.
Here is an example of usage:
Select feed columns: Country, Language
Values in the feed column “Country”: Germany, Switzerland, Belgium
Values in the feed column “Language”: German, French
Existing combinations found in the feed: (Germany, German), (Switzerland, German), (Switzerland, French), (Belgium, French)
Resulting ad sets: (Germany, German), (Switzerland, German), (Switzerland, French), (Belgium, French)
Each time a new value appears in the feed, or an old value is edited or deleted - the campaign structure changes accordingly.
Difference from the old campaigns:
The old campaigns structure was defined similarly by the Feed Category Value, but also by the connected fields inside the form.
Campaign Setup: Ad Set and Ad Configuration
Fields inside ad set or ad form can be specified in the usual way or (in case that your ad set is automated) they can be read from the feed.
When they are read from the feed, make sure that you don't have ambiguities, otherwise your update will fail and campaign won't be refreshed.
What does this mean?
Well, if you defined structure with 2 catalog columns (as per example, Country and Language). Then, if you are using feed value for the setup of ad set or ad, you cannot have the same ad set with different values.
Let's expand on the previous example.
Select feed columns: Country, Language
Values in the feed column “Country”: Germany, Switzerland, Belgium
Values in the feed column “Language”: German, French
Existing combinations found in the feed: (Germany, German), (Switzerland, German), (Switzerland, French), (Belgium, French)
Resulting ad sets: (Germany, German), (Switzerland, German), (Switzerland, French), (Belgium, French)
Now, let's say the ad set (Belgium, French) has budget field read from the feed. But, since one row equals 1 ad, all those ads must have the same budget. It is impossible to have different budgets inside 1 ad set.
This ambiguity will lead to campaign not updating until this is resolved.
Difference from the old campaigns:
The old campaign would keep running and use the first budget that it finds as the ad set budget.
Obviously, this only applies for ad sets, not ads. One feed row is one ad, so you can configure each of them as you wish.
Feed is always changing - how does this affect the campaign?
It makes it live! The ad sets and ads keep appearing, editing and deleting based on the feed changes.
Several changes may happen:
New ad set creation - when a new item is added to the feed and it has a new set of parameters, for example (Belgium, Dutch)
New ad creation
when a new item is added to the feed and is inside the defined filter
if an existing item gets into the defined filter.
Ad transfer from one ad set to another - inside the feed, when one pair (Country, Language)=(Switzerland, German) gets the same values as another (Country, Language)=(Belgium, Dutch), this ad will be turned off, and then created again - now belonging to the second ad set.
Archiving ads - if an item drops out of the defined filter, the ad gets archived. This is not a reversible action, so if the same feed item gets into the filter again - a new ad will be created.
Empty ad set - the ad set where all ads migrate or get archived becomes empty but it still exists. If this behaviour gets you in a situation with too many empty leftover ad sets, rethink how the campaign structure (feed category) is defined.
Sync fail - ambiguous parameter inside at least one ad set (eg. different budgets for different items inside one ad set)
How else can I affect the campaign?
Aside of feed changing, or directly editing the campaign, there are a couple of more things that you can do:
Turning on/off the status on the manage page - It will override whatever happens in the feed. Once the status is touched on Manage, it will forever be disconnected from the feed and can only be changed manually from the manage page, so be careful. There are no bulk actions for automated campaigns.
Manually on Meta - Do not do this!
If any resulting entity of our automated ads is touched manually on Meta, we cannot guarantee what will happen from there on.
Any new sync will override the changed ad sets/ads only in case they are affected by the campaign or the feed change. If a new sync doesn’t include changes on the entities that were manually changed on Meta, they will keep existing on Meta in a parallel state.
Naming Ad Sets
Another change that may affect you and will probably at first seem frustrating is less freedom when choosing an Ad Set name.
Ad set name will be automatically generated from the columns that you selected for the structure. You will still have freedom to add a prefix as you like to the begining of the name.
This will pay off long term, since the new way is less prone to human mistakes and automated ads are already touchy.
Difference from the old campaigns:
The old campaigns have no naming control.