Automation

Automation repeats decisions you already know how to make. A rule states what has to be true, what it will change, and the boundary it may not cross.

What Automation is

Configured logic — your criteria, your limits, your Data Window, your scope. A rule does not do anything you could not do yourself in Ads Manager. It does it consistently, and it records why.

What Automation is not

It is not a black box. Every run produces a preview of what it would change, and not every protection is a setting — some are structural. See Negation and unnegate rule.

Where to start

1. Anatomy of a rule — the parts every rule has.
2. How a rule evaluates data — the order things happen in.
3. Negation and unnegate rule — what stays on regardless of configuration.
4. Trigger modes — how a rule decides its action is warranted.
5. Rule types — what each family of rule changes.

The workspaces

Automation is organised into three groups, plus an overview.

Scope and assignments — where rules are allowed to act:

Workspace	What it holds
Ad Group Assignments	Which ad groups a rule or Objective is attached to
Objectives	Reusable sets of rules that work together
Automated ASINs	Which products Automation may act on at all

Automation rules — the logic itself:

Workspace	What it holds
Dayparting	Time-based rules and the 168-hour schedule
Bidding	Bid decisions and their limits
Import	Harvesting search terms into targeting
Negation	Blocking and restoring search terms
Blacklist / Whitelist	Per-ASIN lists that create negatives directly or protect terms from negation

Monitoring — what happened:

Workspace	What it holds
Change History	Every execution, decision and recorded change

A reasonable way to adopt it

Enable one rule at a time. Before its first run, open Preview Changes to see what it would do. After it has run, read Change History to see what it did.

Then add the next one. Rules share targets, and two that are individually sensible can pull the same bid in opposite directions — so build the set up slowly enough that you can still tell which rule produced what.