🔄 What Are Routines?
Routines are scheduled automations inside Meta Ads that watch, build, and ship content automatically, wired straight to the Atlas agent. Every routine runs on a schedule, targets one or more brands, and keeps a full run history you can drill into. Routines live in the Intelligence group, alongside Analytics and Discover.
📦 Six Routine Types, in Two Families
✨ CREATE — Make New On-Brand Ads on a Schedule
- Brand Watch — Track brands daily and recreate their best ads for your brand.
- Top-Ad Iterator — Generate fresh on-brand iterations of your best-performing ads.
- Competitor Watch — Track competitors' newest ads and landing pages, digested to your channel.
🛡️ PROTECT — Watch Spend & Performance, and Report Back
- Dayparting Audit — See which days and hours convert efficiently, a read-only CPA-by-time audit with schedule suggestions (recommend-only, does not change your campaigns automatically).
- Performance Recap — A scheduled digest of your account's KPIs, top and bottom ads, and week-over-week trends.
- Wasted Spend & Reallocation — Monitor live campaigns, flag wasted spend and metric spikes, and get budget reallocation advice.
⚙️ How to Set Up a Routine
Every routine is set up in four steps:
- About — pick the routine type.
- Setup — configure what it watches or builds.
- Approval — set whether output needs your review before it's finalized.
- Schedule — set how often it runs.
Once saved, the routine runs on its own on the schedule you set, and every run is saved to its history so you can review what it did.
📬 Where Routines Can Deliver
Depending on the routine, output can be delivered to Slack, email, or reviewed directly in the run history inside Creative Drive or Analytics.
✅ Things to Keep in Mind
- Your Meta ad account must be connected for a routine to have performance data to work from.
- A Brand Watch routine run typically completes in about 1–2 minutes.
- Assets a routine creates are tagged ROUTINE in Creative Drive, so you can tell them apart from manually built creatives.
- Dayparting Audit is recommend-only — it never changes your schedule automatically.
Have questions about setting up a routine? Open the chat widget in the bottom-right corner of the platform and type human teammate to be connected with a member of our team.