Rules, auto-bidding and schedules
Three tools act on your campaigns for you. A rule reads a window of your numbers and acts on what passes its conditions. A tuner moves the weights of landers, offers or paths toward the one that earns most. A source schedule pauses and resumes your source’s campaigns, ad groups and ads by the hour of the week. They are under Automation: Rules, Tuning and Schedules.
None of them cloaks. A rule reads a subject’s totals, never a visitor’s attributes, and what it does applies to every visitor alike.
A rule has:
- Campaigns: 1 to 100 of yours.
- A subject, judged one at a time:
- each placement of each source campaign (a zone, a site, a widget), over the rule’s campaigns together;
- each path;
- each campaign;
- each source campaign, source ad group (Meta’s ad set) or source ad (a creative, a teaser), over the rule’s campaigns together, with bots’ visits left out.
- Conditions (1 to 10, all must pass), each comparing a measure with a threshold: visits, unique visits, clicks, conversions, revenue, cost, profit, ROI, CTR, CR, EPV, EPC, CPV, CPA, bot share, and, for placements, the automation score (how scripted a placement’s visits look, from the lander script’s signals; a placement without enough views is never judged).
- A minimum number of visits, so a placement is not blocked on a handful.
- A window (1 hour to 30 days) and an interval (every 15 minutes to every 24 hours).
- An action that fits the subject.
- Limits: actions per run, per day, and a cooldown before it acts on the same subject again (24 hours by default).
A ratio or per-unit measure over nothing is 0. To say “spent $5 and got nothing”, write cost >= 5 and conversions == 0, not a CPA.
Actions
Section titled “Actions”| Action | Does |
|---|---|
| Block placement | keeps the placement out of its source campaign through the source’s API, or lists it for you to export where the source has no API |
| Pause path | takes the path out of rotation |
| Pause campaign | the campaign’s URL answers 404; its ad keeps running at the source |
| Pause source campaign, ad group or ad | pauses it at the source, through its API; where the source cannot, the rule warns instead |
| Set bid | changes the bid at the source (see below) |
| Set budget | changes the daily budget at the source |
| Warn | changes nothing; Tallyray emails the workspace’s owner what passed |
New rules run dry
Section titled “New rules run dry”A new rule runs dry: it records what it would do and does nothing, and its would-be actions count toward no limit. Read its runs under Rules, then make it active. You can run any rule now by hand, dry or for real. A rule can be paused or archived. Every run records what it read and what it did, and every action keeps its outcome.
What a rule leaves alone
Section titled “What a rule leaves alone”- A subject it, or another rule, already acted on that is still so.
- A placement you unblocked, until you block it again; a path or campaign a rule paused and you resumed.
- A path that is the last active one of its rotation, which only you may pause.
- A source object already paused, or that you resumed after a rule paused it, at Tallyray or at the source.
- A source object the source reported no spend for in the window: a rule never pauses on visits alone.
- Everything while the workspace is suspended.
A rule on source objects judged only by visit measures is saved with a warning: anyone can type a source object’s key into a URL, so forged visits could move those numbers.
To undo an action, press undo on it: it unblocks the placement, resumes the path, campaign or source object, or writes back the bid or budget it changed. No rule acts on it again until you do.
A rule can be limited to hours of the week and dates it may run.
Auto-bidding and budgets
Section titled “Auto-bidding and budgets”Where a source’s template supports it (see each source’s page), you can set the source’s bids and daily budgets by hand, from reports, and from rules.
- Each value is read from the source before it is written, in the account’s currency, never converted. A value you set by hand holds against rules unless you let rules change it. A change that more than doubles a value, or cuts it below half, asks you to confirm.
- A value the source sets itself (its own bidding, rates by country, a shared budget) is not written.
- A bid rule moves bids by a step (a percentage, an amount, to an amount, or to a share of EPV or CPA) or toward a target: a CPA, an ROI or a share of what each paid click earns. A target step moves only as far as the data is sure; you set the confidence needed.
- Every value rule needs a floor and a ceiling, and a largest step. Values stay within them, in one unit and one currency, and all the rule’s campaigns buy from one connection. The rule judges the source’s own spend for each object and the networks’ conversions, bots left out.
- A rule that can raise a bid or budget runs for real only when the workspace’s owner has made it active. Any change by someone else puts it back in dry run. A bid rule with lower only can be made active by any buyer.
- Limits apply: by default a value rule changes 50 values a run and 500 a day, and Tallyray takes at most 5,000 value changes a day per workspace.
Rules and tuners read last click whatever model your reports use: see Attribution models.
Tuners
Section titled “Tuners”A tuner moves the weights of one weighted choice: a path’s landers or offers, a later step’s landers, or a rotation’s paths. It is a bandit (Thompson sampling): each step makes each arm’s share its probability of being the best under the measure you pick:
- EPV, earnings per visit (the default),
- CR, conversions per visit, or
- profit per visit.
You set the window (7 days by default), how often it steps (hourly by default), the visits an arm needs to be judged (500), the conversions the choice needs before anything moves (20), the floor every arm keeps (5% by default) and the largest step (10 points by default). A tuner:
- moves only entries in rotation; it never puts one in or takes one out, and never sets a weight to 0;
- runs dry until you make it active, and each step is recorded with what it read and why it moved what it did;
- pauses itself when a person changes the weights it tunes;
- for a sticky flow, moves weights only at 00:00 UTC, so a visitor’s picks never change within a day.
Source schedules
Section titled “Source schedules”A schedule pauses source objects outside the hours of the week you pick, in the zone you pick, and resumes them inside. It names up to 100 source objects, each on one schedule at most.
- It runs dry until you make it active, recording what each boundary would change.
- It resumes only what it paused itself. An object you paused, or changed at the source, stays as it is.
- Turning an active schedule off resumes its own pauses within a minute, unless you ask it to leave them paused.
Pausing and resuming source objects by hand
Section titled “Pausing and resuming source objects by hand”In the portal you can pause up to 100 of a source’s campaigns, ad groups or ads at once, and resume the ones Tallyray paused. Tallyray reads each object first, pauses only what runs, and resumes only what it holds paused and the source has not changed since. Anything else is yours to resume at the source.