A **Campaign Rule** adjusts budgets or pauses whole campaigns based on performance. Where a Targeting Rule tunes individual bids, this one moves money between campaigns — or stops one outright.

Six recipes come with it, and one of them does something none of the others do: it moves budget *from* losers *to* winners in a single rule.

[Watch the walkthrough](https://kb.trackiq.com/kb-assets/kbvideo-campaign-rules-explainer-0d0fb5f9.mp4)

*Prefer to watch? Sixty-three seconds on the six recipes, and the one that finds capped campaigns.*

## **Two actions**

![The Campaign Rule chooser, with its recipes](/kb-assets/shot-auto-camp-view-651d68.png)

**Budget** — grow or cut the daily budget by a percentage.

**Pause campaign** — stop the whole campaign.

The example on the screen shows the shape:

> *Every day at 09:00 — if ROAS > 3 over the last 30 days, grow the budget 10%.*

Note it uses **ROAS** rather than ACoS. Both appear across these recipes, and they are the same relationship from opposite ends — ROAS above 3 is ACoS below 33%. Use whichever your team thinks in, but be consistent inside one account or the rules become hard to read.

## **The six recipes**

**Budget autopilot (scale + trim)** — a hands-off budget manager. Feeds campaigns returning strong ROAS, starves the ones bleeding at high ACoS.

**Defend margins (tiered budget)** — pulls budget from campaigns bleeding at high ACoS and pushes it toward efficient scalers, in one rule.

That second one is the interesting one. **Most budget rules only push in one direction**, so you end up running a “grow winners” rule and a “cut losers” rule and hoping they balance. This does both sides in a single decision, which is what an experienced manager actually does when budget is finite.

### **Growing**

**Uncap profitable campaigns** — gives budget room to small, highly profitable campaigns that may be capping out too early.

Worth naming what this catches. A campaign hitting its daily budget by lunchtime is **invisible in every performance report**, because its numbers look fine — it is simply not spending what it could. This is the rule that finds them.

**Scale winning campaigns** — more budget to campaigns returning strong ROAS on real order volume.

The *“on real order volume”* is the guard. Scaling a campaign with three orders and a flattering ROAS is how you turn a fluke into a spend problem.

### **Cutting**

**Trim over-spenders** — cuts budget on campaigns spending real money whose ACoS has drifted past your ceiling.

**Pause bleeding campaigns** — pauses campaigns that have spent heavily across many clicks with zero sales.

**Pause is the only irreversible-feeling action here**, so it is the one to be most careful with. A campaign paused by a rule stays paused until somebody notices — and a paused campaign disappears from the default view of every table, because tables show enabled entities by default.

## **Choosing between them**

| If you want to | Use |
|---|---|
| One rule that manages budget both ways | **Budget autopilot** or **Defend margins** |
| Find campaigns capping out too early | **Uncap profitable campaigns** |
| Grow proven performers | **Scale winning campaigns** |
| Rein in drift | **Trim over-spenders** |
| Stop clear waste | **Pause bleeding campaigns** |

## **Campaign rules and targeting rules do different jobs**

Run both. They are not alternatives:

| | Targeting Rule | Campaign Rule |
|---|---|---|
| Acts on | keywords and product targets | whole campaigns |
| Changes | bids | budgets |
| Answers | *am I paying the right price?* | *is this campaign worth funding?* |

A campaign can be efficient at the keyword level and still be the wrong place for your money — and no amount of bid tuning fixes that. Equally, a well-funded campaign full of bad keywords just spends the budget faster.

**Where they can conflict** is on pausing. A targeting rule pausing every keyword in a campaign leaves an active campaign with nothing to run. Check the Change log after your first week of running both.

## **The settings that matter**

**Look-back window** — longer than for bids. The example uses 30 days, and that is reasonable: budget is a bigger, slower decision than a bid, and you want it made on settled data.

**Adjustment frequency** — once a day is plenty. A budget changed more often than the data can respond is just noise with consequences.

## **Before you switch one on**

Budget rules move real money faster than bid rules do, so read [**Guardrails to Set Before You Automate Anything**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/guardrails-before-you-automate) first, and check [**The Change Log**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/the-change-log) after the first run.

## **Related**

- [**Targeting Rules: Adjusting Bids and Pausing Targets**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/targeting-rules-bids-and-pausing) — the other rule type.
- [**Prepare for Prime Day: Budget Rules and Inventory Cover**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/prepare-for-prime-day) — budget rules under load.