Every account has the same bad night: an ad set drifts, the cost per lead doubles, and nobody notices until the morning. A protective rule is the cheapest insurance against it.
What a rule actually does
You point it at a campaign or an ad set, name a cost per lead you refuse to exceed, and give it a window. If the CPL stays above your number for that long, Lia pauses the ads and the pause lands in Relay with the reason attached.
The rule watches cost per lead, not click-through rate. A creative can hold a great CTR while the leads it produces cost twice what they should.
Setting one up
- Type
/rulein the composer. The tool mounts in place, no dialogue required. - Pick the scope. The picker lists your real campaigns and ad sets, so the rule watches exactly what you point it at.
- Set the threshold in your account currency, and the window in days.
- Confirm. The rule is a change like any other: it appears in Relay, and you can undo it.
A sane starting point: your target CPL plus roughly forty percent, over three days. Tighter than that and normal variance will trip it; looser and it stops being insurance.
Choosing the window
One day is too noisy for most accounts, especially with small budgets, where a single expensive lead moves the average. Three days is usually the sweet spot: long enough to absorb a bad Tuesday, short enough that a genuine problem does not run all week.
If your budgets are large and the daily lead count is high, two days works. If you are spending fifteen a day, give it five.
What happens when it fires
Lia pauses the entity, writes the event to Relay with the CPL that triggered it, and leaves everything else alone. Nothing is deleted, nothing is restructured, and turning it back on is a separate confirm, because reactivation deserves your attention as much as the pause did.
Rules are not a strategy
A protective rule stops the bleeding; it does not tell you why the account started bleeding. When one fires, the useful next question is the one you would ask anyway: which creative moved, did the audience overlap change, did frequency climb. Ask it in the chat and the answer arrives with the numbers attached.
Used that way, rules buy you the one thing an ads account never gives you for free: the right to stop watching for a few hours.