Last Updated: February 2, 2022

Maybe you are in a niche where advertising is not profitable for you during weekends or maybe you are a local business that does not want to run ads on weekends. 

At least in the case of our website, users just sort of completely switch off during weekends and therefore the overall website traffic drops like a rock by whooping 60 to 70%. 

And when you are running retargeting campaigns, such a sudden and big drop in the size of re-targeting audience means a dramatic increase in CPA during weekends. 

See Facebook needs to exhaust your daily budget at any cost, so it will try its best to get you conversions at any cost. Even if that means spending your entire daily budget to generate just one conversion.

Therefore we decided not to run any ads during weekends.

But unless you are using a lifetime budget, there is no straightforward way to automatically start and pause campaigns on certain days or times.

Here is where the Facebook automated rules come in handy. You can create a new rule which automatically pauses all active campaigns during the weekend.

Follow the steps below to automatically turn off Facebook ads on weekends.

Step-1: Navigate to your Facebook Ad Manager account and then click on the ‘All Tools‘ menu:

Step-2: Scroll down and then click on ‘Automated Rules‘ under ‘Advertise‘:

Step-3: Click on the ‘Create Rule‘ button:

Step-4: Make sure that the ‘Custom Rule‘ is selected and then click on the ‘Next‘ button:

Step-5: Name your new rule (give it a descriptive name like ‘Turn off all active campaigns during weekends‘):

Step-6: Change the ‘Apply rule to‘ setting to ‘All Active Campaigns‘:

Step-7: Make sure that the ‘Action‘ setting is set to ‘Turn off Campaigns‘:

Step-8: Scroll down and then select ‘Custom‘ under ‘Schedule‘:

Step-9: Click on the checkboxes next to ‘Sunday’ and ‘Saturday’. Keep the timings settings (12 am to 12 am) intact:

Step-10: Click on the ‘Create‘ button to create the new automated rule:

Now, whenever this rule runs, you should automatically get an email notification from Facebook like the one below:

You should also see a new notification in your Facebook Ads Manager regarding the campaign(s) being turned off because of your automated rule:

Now here is the tricky part.

You would need to create separate rules for each campaign that you want Facebook to automatically turn on during the workdays.

If you do not create such rules then your paused campaigns will remain paused and you would have to manually resume each campaign.

If you create just one rule to turn on all the campaigns on workdays, Facebook will turn on all the paused campaigns in your account, even the one which you don’t want to run again.

That’s why you need to create separate rules for each campaign that you want Facebook to automatically turn on during the workdays.

For automatically turning on a campaign during workdays follow the steps below:

Step-1: Navigate to your Facebook Ad Manager account and then select the campaign for which you want to create a new rule:

Step-2: Click on ‘create a new rule’ from the ‘Rules’ drop-down menu.

Step-3: Make sure that the ‘Custom Rule‘ is selected and then click on the ‘Next‘ button:

Step-4: Give your new rule a descriptive name like ‘Turn on the ebook promotion campaign during workdays’:

Step-5: Change the ‘Action‘ setting to ‘Turn on Campaign‘:

Step-6: Scroll down and then select ‘Custom‘ under ‘Schedule‘:

Step-7: Select all the days except ‘Saturday’ and ‘Sunday’. Keep the timings settings (12 am to 12 am) intact:

Step-8: Click on the ‘Create‘ button to create the new automated rule:

Now, whenever this rule runs, you should automatically get an email notification from Facebook as well as notification in your ad manager account like the one below:

Going forward all your active campaigns will automatically pause at 12:00 am Saturday and then will automatically resume at 12:00 am Monday. 

However, don’t use these rules on the campaigns which have not yet completed their learning phase. Turning off a campaign that is still in the learning phase can reset or prolong the learning phase.

These rules are meant for mature ongoing campaigns which you are planning to run for months or even years.

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