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Turn on an automation

All automations live in Settings → Automations (/settings/automations). The page has three sections: recommended detector automations, recommended grammar automations, and custom automations you have composed yourself.

Every automation starts off. Click the toggle on any card to begin the enable flow.

The dry-run preview​

Every automation shows a preview modal before it activates. There is no way to skip the preview on first enable — you must read it and click "Turn on automation" to confirm.

The preview shows what would have happened over the last 30 days if the automation had been running with your current cap and brand token settings:

  • Candidates. The number of times the automation would have acted.
  • Blocked. The number of candidates stopped by a guard, and which guard stopped each one — brand allowlist, attribution lag, cooldown, smart bidding exclusion, and so on.
  • Estimated dollar impact. A rough estimate of the spend change if the automation had run.
  • Per-candidate list. Each entity — the search term, keyword, or campaign — with whether it would have fired or been blocked, and the specific block reason for blocked candidates.

The preview uses your current caps and brand tokens. If you change either before clicking "Turn on automation", close and reopen the preview modal to see the updated result — it does not refresh automatically.

Adjusting caps​

The two detector automations — block wasting search terms and lift the budget on profitable campaigns — have editable caps. Each card shows a plain-English sentence you can edit directly:

"Add at most 20 negatives per day. Do not touch the same term within 14 days."

Click any bold number to change it. Changes save automatically.

Caps for block wasting search terms:

  • Daily cap. Maximum negative keywords added per UTC day. Default: 20.
  • Cooldown. Days before the automation touches the same search term again. Default: 14 days.
  • Minimum ad group age. Minimum days old an ad group must be before the automation acts on it. Default: 60 days.

Caps for lift budget on profitable campaigns:

  • Maximum raise per execution. The largest single raise as a percentage of the current daily budget. Default: 25%.
  • Weekly cumulative cap. The most a single campaign's budget can grow in a rolling 7-day window. Default: 50%.
  • Cooldown per campaign. Days before the automation raises the same campaign again. Default: 7 days.

The three grammar automations — pause waste keywords, ease CPA targets, ease ROAS targets — have fixed caps that are not editable from the settings page.

Brand tokens​

The block wasting search terms and pause waste keywords automations have a brand protection section below the caps. Your product name is loaded automatically and is always protected. You can add additional terms — branded phrases, competitor names, anything you never want the automation to touch.

Each token is matched case-insensitively and word-boundary-aware: adding "acme" protects "buy acme" and "acme pricing" but not "nacme". The term does not need to be an exact match — any search term or keyword containing the token is protected.

To add a token: click the field and type. To remove one: click the X next to it. Changes save automatically and apply to all automations that use brand protection.

The trigger alert warning​

For the two detector automations, the card shows which alert type triggers it. If that alert type is turned off in your alert preferences, a yellow warning appears on the card: "Trigger alert off — this automation will not fire."

Turn the trigger alert back on in Settings → Alerts. The automation will start running on its next opportunity once the alert is active again.

Disabling an automation​

Toggle the switch at the top of any card to turn an automation off. Turning it off stops future executions immediately. Existing history is preserved. Cooldown state is preserved too, so if you re-enable later, the automation's memory of what it last touched is still intact.

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