Turn on an automation
Every automation lives in Settings → Automations (/settings/automations) as its own card, and every one starts off. To turn one on, find its card, click the toggle to begin, read the preview, and confirm. The preview is required the first time. There is no way to skip it.
Find the card and read the preview
Each card shows the automation's detection logic and action in plain English, its severity, and its safety caps. When you click the toggle, it opens a preview modal that you must review before the automation can act.
The preview shows what would have happened over the last 30 days if the automation had been running with your current settings:
- Candidates. The number of times the automation would have acted.
- Blocked. The number of candidate actions a guard would have stopped, and the reason for each: the brand allowlist, the conversion attribution delay, a cooldown, the Smart Bidding exclusion, or the existing target guard.
- Estimated dollar impact. A rough estimate of the spend change if the automation had run.
- Candidate list. Each entity, whether it would have acted or been blocked, and the specific block reason.
If nothing would have fired in the last 30 days, the preview says so. The automation will sit quietly until the underlying condition shows up. Click Turn on automation to confirm.
Which caps you can adjust
This is where the two kinds of recommended automation differ.
Detector automations expose adjustable caps. Block wasting search terms and Lift the budget on profitable campaigns being capped render their safety caps as a sentence in plain language with editable numbers. Click a number to change it. The change saves automatically. If you change a cap before you click Turn on automation, close and reopen the preview modal to see the updated result. It does not refresh on its own.
Block wasting search terms caps:
- Daily cap. The most negative keywords added per UTC day. Default 20.
- Cooldown. Days before the automation can add the same search term again. Default 14 days.
- Minimum age of an ad group. How old an ad group must be before the automation acts on it. Default 60 days.
Lift the budget caps:
- Largest single raise. The biggest raise as a percentage of the current daily budget. Default 25%.
- Largest weekly growth. The most a single campaign's budget can grow over any rolling 7 days. Default 50%.
- Cooldown. Days before the automation can raise the same campaign again. Default 7 days.
Grammar automations have fixed thresholds in this version. Pause pure waste keywords, Ease CPA targets on overperformers, and Ease ROAS targets on overperformers do not expose editable numbers. You enable or disable them, and their thresholds and caps are fixed: $50 of waste over 7 days for the keyword pause, baseline thresholds of 0.7× and 1.3× for the target nudges, plus their cooldowns and daily caps. If you want different numbers, compose a custom automation on the same signal.
Brand tokens
The two automations that act on a keyword or search term by text, Block wasting search terms and Pause pure waste keywords, protect your brand by name. Hero Marketer loads your product name automatically and always protects it. Below the caps, you can add more brand keywords or competitor terms. Hero Marketer never turns these into a negative keyword or pauses them.
Hero Marketer matches each token without regard to case and respects word boundaries. For example, "acme" protects "buy acme" and "acme pricing" but not "nacme". A token does not have to be an exact match. Hero Marketer protects any keyword or search term that contains it. To add one, click the field and type. To remove one, click the X next to it. Changes save automatically.
Excluded entities
Beyond brand tokens, an automation can carry a list of specific campaigns, ad groups, or keywords it should never touch. Hero Marketer skips an excluded entity even when it otherwise meets the automation's condition. This is useful for a campaign you manage by hand, or a keyword you want to leave active despite its numbers.
The trigger alert warning
Block wasting search terms and Lift the budget each depend on an alert, and the card names the alert that triggers it. If you turned that alert type off in your alert preferences, the card shows a warning: the trigger alert is off, so the automation will not act until you turn the alert back on. Turn the alert on again in Settings → Alerts and the automation resumes on its next opportunity. The three grammar automations watch their own metric rule and do not depend on a trigger alert.
Disable an automation
Toggle the switch at the top of a card to turn an automation off. Future actions stop immediately. Hero Marketer preserves existing history and cooldown state too, so if you re enable the automation later, it still remembers what it last touched.