Automated Ads is a beta feature in Smartly.io. You need to be granted access to be able to make use of the beta features. Contact your Customer Success Manager or Sales representative to enable Automated Ads for Snap to your account.

This article goes through automating campaigns in Snapchat based on a feed. Ad set automation and ad automation has their own articles, which follow similar steps.

Alongside with this information, see the basic steps for creating campaigns, and make sure you have set up your automation feeds:

• Create Snapchat campaigns
• [Beta] Introduction to campaign automation for Snapchat

Step 1: Set up automation

To enable automation for an ad:

1. In the Automation section of the campaign settings, enable automation with the toggle.
2. In Data source, select the automation feed that provides the feed data.

The campaign is now a 'template' that automation uses to create campaigns when you publish. Check the bottom of the Automation section: it shows how many ads automation will create for you.

Step 2: Limit how automation uses items from feed

You may want to control what feed data the automation uses so that you get the exact ads you want. By default, each row in the feed leads to its own campaign. You can filter the list down and group rows to produce fewer ads.

Use the additional automation settings in the Automation section for this:

1. In Filters, define a filter to limit which feed items are included in automation.
   • To add a condition:
     
     1. Click Add new condition.
     2. Select the feed field that the condition checks.
     3. Select the operation used to check the data.
     4. Enter the condition's value that is checked against the feed's value.
   • You can also group conditions. To add a group, click Add new group.
   • If you use multiple conditions or groups, define how the conditions are checked:
     • All: All the conditions must match.
     • Any: It's enough if one of the conditions matches.
2. In Group by feed field, group feed items to limit how automation uses items to create ads. Select the feed fields that you want to group together.
3. In Limit, limit how many ads are created based on the feed. For example, if you set the limit to 5, ads are created for the first five matching rows from the feed, and the rest of the rows are discarded.
4. In Sort, sort feed items for automation based a specific feed field: select a feed field and the sorting direction.

From the bottom of the panel, you can open the feed preview. It helps you inspect what kind of data is in your feed and view the results of your filters on the data.

In this example, there is a feed that has various locations in it. The feed rows are grouped based on the country column, which leaves for items, each with an unique country. Each campaign created of will have the country in it's name, for example "Sales campaign - Norway".

Step 3: Use feed data in input fields

Use data from the feed to automate the individual field inputs in the campaign settings.

Automating campaign fields

The fields that you can automate are:

• Status
• Campaign name
• Daily spend cap
• Lifetime spend cap
• Campaign start date
• Campaign end date

Campaign objective is not a automateable affects many of the settings on ad set and ad level,

In general, in text inputs, you refer to a feed field using the double curly braces notation: {{feed.fieldname}}. For example, {{feed.id}} pulls the field ID from the feed.

To refer to a feed field in an ad setting:

1. Click next to the field to enable using feed data.
2. Either click and select a feed field, or enter the reference to the feed field manually. Include the prefix feed anda full stop before the feed field's name.

You can also combine static text with data you have gotten from the feed.

In this example, the objective is shared for all the campaigns, while daily spend cap, start date and end date for the campaigns comes from the feed. Lifetime spend cap is not set.

Naming macros

On top of the feed values, you can also use naming macros with curly braces. Naming macros means taking a value from one field and putting it into another field, like for example adding the campaign name or objective into the ad set name. 

On campaign level, only the campaign objective, with {{campaign.objective}}, can be used in the Campaign name field. On ad set and ad level you have more naming macros available.