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What automations do

Automations let Hero Marketer act on the issues it detects, not just flag them. Where an alert tells you something is wrong between logins, an automation closes the loop. It covers the narrow set of issues where the fix is safe, reversible, requires little judgment, and has meaningful financial impact. Every automation is off until you turn it on. None runs until you read a preview of what it would have done over the last 30 days and confirm.

Automations are not autonomous account management and not a replacement for strategy. They handle a small, deliberately scoped set of mechanical fixes, the ones most teams eventually do by hand every time the same condition recurs.

Hero Marketer ships five recommended automations, each shown as a card in Settings → Automations. An alert triggers two of them. The other three watch a metric rule of their own. Every one is disabled by default.

  • Block wasting search terms acts on a search terms wasting budget alert. It adds the wasting search term as an exact match negative keyword on the ad group that produced the waste.
  • Lift the budget on profitable campaigns being capped acts on a profitable campaign capped by budget alert. It raises that campaign's daily budget by a small percentage, so the cap no longer throttles a campaign that is already profitable.
  • Pause pure waste keywords pauses a keyword that spent more than $50 over the last 7 days with zero conversions.
  • Ease CPA targets on overperformers raises a campaign's Target CPA by 10% when its cost per conversion holds well below its average over the previous 28 days, so Smart Bidding can scale it.
  • Ease ROAS targets on overperformers lowers a campaign's Target ROAS by 10% when its return on ad spend holds well above its average over the previous 28 days, so Smart Bidding can scale it.

The exact triggers, actions, and safety caps for all five are in Recommended automations.

Custom automations​

Beyond the five recommended cards, you can compose your own automation from the same grammar: pick a money signal, set the condition, choose the action. A custom automation runs through the same guard pipeline and audit log as the recommended ones. You can revert it with one click. Only the recipe is yours. Custom automations are for variants the cards do not cover, for example a different dollar threshold or a second rule on the same signal. See Build a custom automation.

Where automations live​

  • Settings → Automations (/settings/automations) is where you enable, configure, and preview an automation before it runs. Each recommended automation is a card that shows its detection logic and action in plain English, and its safety caps. The composer for custom automations lives at the bottom of the same page.
  • Automations in the sidebar is the history page at /automations. Every action Hero Marketer took on your account appears here with its before and after values, a timestamp, and a revert button.

The safety model​

Every candidate action passes through a chain of guards before it runs. The guards apply to recommended and custom automations alike, no matter how you set the caps.

  • Disabled by default. Every automation ships off. You open its card in Settings → Automations, run the preview, and confirm before it can act.
  • Required preview before you enable it for the first time. The enable button only activates after you review what the automation would have done over the last 30 days.
  • Brand allowlist. Hero Marketer never touches any keyword or search term that contains your product name or a brand token you added. This guard applies to the automations that act on a keyword or search term by text: Block wasting search terms and Pause pure waste keywords.
  • Conversion attribution delay. An automation that acts when there are no conversions does not fire on an entity younger than 60 days, because a new ad group or campaign does not have time to accumulate conversion history. This gate protects Block wasting search terms and Pause pure waste keywords.
  • Smart Bidding exclusion. Hero Marketer skips Lift the budget and any custom automation that raises budgets on a campaign that uses a Target CPA or Target ROAS strategy. Smart bidding adjusts bids against the budget, and a direct budget raise undermines the strategy. The two automations that ease targets cover those campaigns instead.
  • Existing target guard. The automations that ease CPA and ROAS targets only act on a campaign that already uses that target. Hero Marketer skips a campaign on a different bid strategy.
  • Cooldown. Once an automation acts on a specific entity, it will not act on that same entity again for a set number of days.
  • Daily cap. Each automation acts at most a fixed number of times per UTC day across the account.

For the detector automations, you control the daily cap and cooldown from the card. For the three grammar automations, the thresholds and caps are fixed in this version. You enable or disable them. See Turn on an automation.

The preview​

Before any automation acts for the first time, a preview shows what would have happened over the last 30 days if it had been running. The preview reports how many candidate actions there were, how many a guard would have blocked and why, and an estimated dollar impact. You must click Turn on automation after you read the preview. There is no way to skip it.

Every action is reversible​

Hero Marketer records every action an automation takes in the history page at /automations. You can revert any action in one click. The history row shows the before and after values. A revert rolls the change back in Google Ads and writes a new row with Reverted status.

What a revert restores depends on the action. A revert removes a negative keyword, resets a raised budget to its prior amount, enables a paused keyword again, and restores an eased CPA or ROAS target to its prior value. You can revert actions in any order. For example, you can revert a budget raise from three weeks ago and not disturb anything that happened since. A revert also doubles the cooldown for that entity, so the automation will not act again on something you deliberately rolled back. See Automation history.

How automations triggered by alerts connect to alerts​

A specific alert triggers each of Block wasting search terms and Lift the budget on profitable campaigns being capped, so each reuses that alert's saved detection thresholds from your alert preferences. If you adjusted a threshold there, the automation that depends on that alert uses the same adjusted threshold.

When one of these automations acts on an alert, a banner appears in that alert's side drawer. It shows the action taken and a Revert button, so you can roll the change back right from the alert. You do not have to open the history page. If you turn the alert type off in alert preferences, that also silences the automation that depends on it. When a trigger alert is off, the automation's card in Settings → Automations shows a warning. The three grammar automations watch their own metric rule and do not depend on an enabled alert.

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