Real Facebook ads accounts. Real thresholds. Real Meta limits noted on every card.
Type your breakeven CPA, target ROAS, CPC ceiling, target CPI, or CPM benchmark — every rule's numbers recalculate from those inputs. The library uses six standard multiplier patterns that match how performance teams structure kill, scale, and pacing rules — every condition shows the formula inline so the math is never hidden.
Give the ad enough auction signal before pausing on a single bad metric. At $50 breakeven this is $50–$100 spent before a kill rule can fire — at $200 breakeven it scales to $200–$400.
Creative survived early funnel but never converted. Used in multi-tier cascade kills where each tier accepts more spend before firing.
Cost-per-purchase cleanly under breakeven — the ad is profitable enough to merit more budget. Every scale should pair with a rollback rule.
CPC climbing above your bid ceiling before conversions arrive is usually a hook or audience break. Catches the problem before the conversion data even lands.
Hard daily-cap math when budget overshoot from CBO is the bigger risk than pausing winners. Trim 30%, don't pause.
CPM above benchmark means the audience is saturating or the creative isn't winning attention. Phase 1 mobile UA kill before installs even start.
For OR-logic, cross-account management, automatic rollback after a scale, Slack alerts on creative fatigue, and a creative testing framework that runs Phase 1-3 across Meta and TikTok — Scalemate runs the whole sequence as one rule. Same thresholds. One account view. No 250-rule cap.
Automated rules are Meta's built-in monitor-and-act engine inside Ads Manager. Each rule watches a campaign, ad set, or ad on a schedule (every 30 minutes up to once daily), checks whether the conditions you set are true — CPA over $X, spend under $Y, ROAS below 2.0 — and runs an action when they are: pause, increase budget, decrease budget, or send a notification. Native rules cover the basics; this library is the production-tested set teams actually run, with thresholds you can tune to your own breakeven CPA and ROAS.
Meta's native rules pause, scale, or alert on a single condition group, evaluated on Meta's own scheduler. A third-party automation tool sequences steps as a chain — for example, scale up the budget, then roll back if performance degrades within 24 hours, then notify Slack — and runs on cross-account context Meta can't see. For teams running more than one ad account, the difference also covers OR-logic, frequency-aware throttling, and rollback pacing. See the full feature breakdown for what changes when chains replace single rules.
The creative-testing rules in the library follow a phased framework — filter by Creative pruning to see them. Phase 1 kills weak ads early on cheap signals (CPI, CPM-vs-benchmark) before they burn budget; Phase 2 promotes survivors using stricter CPA and spend thresholds; Phase 3 cleans up at higher confidence using ROAS. The kill rules elsewhere don't assume a phase — they fire whenever the threshold trips. The phased framework matters when you're running constant creative volume and need a predictable funnel; the broader 13 best Facebook ads automation tools covers when to switch between them.
Meta caps active rules at 250 per ad account. Hit the cap and the team has to delete or merge rules before adding new ones, which becomes a real problem on accounts running creative testing at volume — each new test needs its own kill, scale, and rollback rule, and 250 fills up faster than teams expect.
No — native rules can scale budget but won't roll back automatically. If a rule increases an ad set's budget by 30% on a CPA threshold and performance then degrades, the budget stays elevated until a separate rollback rule fires or someone trims it manually. Pair every scale rule with a matching trim rule, and accept that the rollback fires on its own clock, not chained to the original action.
Native rules can send an email or in-platform notification when a condition trips, but they can't post to Slack or include a campaign report. The library includes a creative-fatigue Slack-alert rule as the workaround — it watches frequency, CTR decay, and CPM drift relative to the campaign's own baseline, and the playbook version pipes the alert into a Slack channel with the affected campaigns named so the team can triage in one place. Cross-account ad campaign automation rules cover the same pattern at scale; native equivalent is a generic email saying a rule fired, with no creative context attached.
A static cheat sheet can't tell you this — the floor depends on your breakeven CPA. Heuristic for fair-test pause rules: set the spend floor at roughly 2× your breakeven CPA. If the team's CPA is $40, that means the rule waits until $80 spent before pausing on a CPA spike, enough auction signal to read true performance. Drop the multiplier toward 0.5× for noise-filter rules where you only want to skip $5 of impressions. The rule of thumb breaks down on high-AOV products where one conversion is worth much more than the spend floor — adjust upward.
Most aren't. The learning phase needs roughly 50 conversions before Meta's algorithm settles, and a 1-day window pause rule will fire long before that, interrupting the loop. Use 3-day or 7-day windows during learning, raise spend floors, and gate the kill rules to ad sets older than 48 hours. The scale rules are safer to leave on, but cap the cumulative budget bump per day to avoid resetting learning with a budget jump over 20%. Browse the goal filters above to find the rules safe for the learning phase.