​We understand that managing programmatic campaigns can be challenging. Trade desks, other teams, and individual users struggle to oversee multiple campaigns simultaneously, making campaign management slightly overwhelming.

To solve this challenge, we’ve developed Automation Rules – a powerful set of tools that automatically performs tasks for you so you can save time and increase the performance of your Outbrain DSP campaigns.

In this article, we’ll walk you through the basics of Automation Rules. To learn how to set them up and use them effectively, make sure to read the article about Automation Rules in Practice.

In principle, Automation Rules is a tool that enables you to create simple "if-then" rules that are periodically executed on your Outbrain DSP account. Rules are executed based on conditions that have to be met before a series of predetermined actions is performed.

Automation Rules allow you to make customized, scheduled actions on most aspects of your campaign management, from bid adjustments to daily budget management.
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Generally, you can automate 6 different actions with rules:

Rules are available for set up on every dashboard level: agency, account, campaign, ad group, and creative ad. You can choose to apply an automated rule to multiple entities at the same time.

Keep in mind that the rule is always executed within the context of one ad group. If you specify the rule to run on an account or campaign, the rule will run on all ad groups within that entity.

Furthermore, all additional breakdown dimensions are supported: Publishers, Placements, Media Sources, Country, State/Region, DMA, Device, Environment, Operating System, Connection Type, and Browser Targeting.

You can create a new rule directly in the grid actions or through the Automation Rules section in the Management console. To learn more about setting up a specific rule, please refer to the article Six Manual Actions To Automate With Automation Rules.

Adding a Rule on the Campaign Level

When setting up a rule, you’ll be prompted to define five sets of settings:

Run rule on: Define the set of accounts, campaigns, or ad groups on which the rule will run.

Action: Define what type of action you’d like to automate in what dimension. The actions might affect the status of the ad groups/ads/publishers, meaning they can pause them or adjust the bids. Any increase or decrease is defined as a percentage (in case of bid modifiers) or a fixed amount (in case of adjusting the ad group bid).

On the ad group level, you also have the possibility to send an email alert or set a daily budget cap, which is the maximum (in case of increase) or lowest (in case of decrease) amount that can be reached for each ad group managed by the rule.

Please refer to the next section of the article for a full list and descriptions of actions available for each dimension.

Action frequency: Determine the least amount of time that needs to pass since the action was applied to a particular item. This allows you to gather additional data before applying the action again.

Example: Consider running a rule that increases publisher bid modifier with action frequency set to 3 days. If the rule increases the publisher’s dailymotion.com bid modifier today, at least 3 days will need to pass before the bid modifier on dailymotion.com can increase again.

Conditions: Define performance criteria that must be reached before the rule runs. You can define multiple conditions for the same action. All conditions must match for the action to run.

Note: Behind the scenes, a report is made on the ad group dimension defined within the rule’s action. The conditions are applied to every item in the report, and if they apply, the action is executed. For instance, the dimension of the action Increase publisher bid modifier is publishers. The rule would increase the bid modifier on every publisher that matched all of the conditions.

Notification: Define whether you’d like to be notified when a rule runs or performs an action based on your criteria (keep in mind that all changes will be tracked in the Rule history by default independently of this setting).

Increase/decrease bid modifier: Defined in the form of a percentage. You can also set maximum and minimum bid percentage limits. Available on all dimensions.

Increase/decrease ad group bid: Defined in the form of an absolute value. You can set maximum or minimum bid value limits. Available on ad group dimension only.

Increase/decrease ad group daily budget: Defined in the form of an absolute value (depending on the currency of your account).

Increase/decrease ad group daily budget by a percentage: Defined in the form of a percentage value.

Pause/blocklist: Turn off active entities. Available on ad, ad group, media source, and publisher dimension.

Add publisher to publisher group: Add a publisher to an existing publisher group. Available on publisher and placements dimension.

Send email: Send an email alert whenever a specific condition occurs. Available on ad group dimension only.

Actions available depend on the dimension (full list available below). Generally, all manual optimisations that are available on each dimension can be automated.

Ad Group

Ad Group/Content Ad

Ad Group/Publishers

Ad Group/Placements

Ad Group/Devices

Ad Group/Regions

Ad Group/DMAs

Ad Group/Countries

Ad Group/Operating Systems

Ad Group/Environments

Ad Group/Media Sources

Ad Group/Browsers

Ad Group/Connection Types

All existing rules are accessible via the Automation Rules tab in the main menu (left side of the dashboard) or through the Automation Rules button in the grid action. The Automation Rules section consists of two parts: Library and History.

In the Library, you can find an overview of all Automation Rules set on a specific agency or account. Here, you can also manage the already configured rules or create new ones. The workflow of creating a new rule from the Management console is the same as creating it directly from the actions grid. To learn how to get started, please refer to the article Six Manual Actions To Automate With Automation Rules.

Managing Existing Rules

If you’ve identified a specific rule that hasn't been performing as expected or that you made a mistake when setting up, you can easily pause, archive, or adjust it in the Library.

Pausing/Resuming a Rule

To pause a rule, search for it in the list of existing rules and click on the toggle button in the Status column:

Conversely, clicking on the toggle button if a rule is paused will re-enable it. Keep in mind that resuming a paused rule won’t trigger the rule execution immediately. A resumed rule will continue to run at the same time as other rules (depending on what time of day you have enabled it).

Editing a Rule

Search for the rule you’d like to amend, and click on the following icon next to the rule name:

A dialogue window will open. You can edit all rule settings in the dialogue window.

Deleting a Rule

To archive an existing rule, click on the following icon:

Automation Rules History enables the user to review past actions performed by rules. You can use filtering to narrow down a specific rule, ad group, or date period. Keep in mind all rules will also be logged in the regular ad group history tab.