NOTE: This article discusses the old version of Automated Post Boosting, which will stop working on September 22, 2020. We are moving to a new version fully integrated into Automated Ads, which has several benefits and new capabilities. For more information, read this Knowledge Base article.

Creating an Automated Post Boosting campaign works largely the same way as creating other types of campaigns in Smartly.io. The key areas you need to pay attention to are:

• Setting up filtering that picks up the posts you want to boost
• Selecting a campaign structure that matches your goal and use case

Next up, we'll go through the quick steps specific to creating an Automated Post Boosting campaign. Below you can find a campaign creation example with more detailed descriptions and examples.

Campaign creation steps

In these instructions, we’ll cover the steps specific to creating an Automated Post Boosting campaign. We won't go into the details of campaign settings, audiences, optimization, or tracking.

For an overview on those topics, see Introduction to Campaigns. For more detailed information, see Introduction to Campaign Details, Creating Audiences, Introduction to Optimization, and Introduction to Tracking.

To start creating a new Automated Post Boosting campaign:

1. Go to the Campaigns page
2. In the Create Campaign dropdown menu, select Automated Post Boosting

On the campaign creation page:

1. In the Filter Posts section, select a Facebook page you want to boost posts for
2. Set up post filtering rules and limit for number of posts
3. In the Campaign section, select a campaign structure
4. If you want to be notified when a new post is boosted, click Enable notifications
5. Tip: in Advanced Options on the Campaign tab, use the #POST_FB_ID# and #POST_MESSAGE# naming macros to distinguish between posts
6. Click Create Campaign

Example campaign

In this example, we'll create a campaign that boosts all posts that are less than 3 days old and have at least 1000 engaged users with 300 euros per post.

To start the campaign creation, we'll go to the Campaigns page and select Automated Boost Posting in the Create Campaign dropdown menu:

The campaign creation view will open.

In the Filter Posts section, select a Facebook page you want to boost posts for. We'll use our Smartly.io Facebook page.

Next, we'll define the filtering rules for our campaign. We want to to use posts that are less than 3 days old and have at least 1000 engaged users, so we'll use the following rules:

• Publish time | less than (hours ago) | 72 AND
• Engaged users | is greater or equal | 1000

We also want to limit the number of posts to 5 most recently published posts.

ℹ️ Note: The Instagram Account selector only indicates the account post boosting ads with Instagram placements will be served. Facebook does not support using existing Instagram posts for creating ads.

Next, in the Campaign section, we'll choose the Promote each post for a certain time, with its own dedicated budget campaign structure. This way, each new post that matches the filters will be boosted, and posts will be automatically archived after the ad set lifetime expires. In order to stay aware of when new posts are boosted and older posts archived, we'll select the Enable notifications option.

We'll use a lifetime budget of €300 for each post, and let the boosting run for 4 days.

As a best practice for differentiating ad sets and ads by name, we'll use the #ADSET_FB_ID#, #POST_FB_ID#, and #POST_MESSAGE# macros in naming them:

As with other types of campaigns, you can set up multiple audiences. In Automated Post Boosting campaigns, we'll boost the posts separately for each audience. In our example campaign, we'll define 2 audiences.

Since at the start we have 5 posts that match our filters and limits, this means that we'll create 10 ad sets: 2 for each post. Each ad set will have its own lifetime budget and start & end time. When new posts match the filters in the future, they will get their own budget, and their 96-hour lifetime will start from the moment we sync the posts (syncing is done hourly). In Campaigns, our example campaign will look like this: