Off Hours now watches your account, not just your rules.

Dayparting, budget rules, and event rules answer one question: is Off Hours doing what you told it to do. That has always been true and it still is.

This week we shipped the answer to a different question: is something happening in your account that nobody told Off Hours about. A campaign someone paused by hand. A sudden spend spike with no rule behind it. A budget that quietly crept up over three weeks without any single day looking alarming. None of that is a rule violation. All of it is worth knowing about the moment it happens, not the next time you happen to look.

Spend alerts, on by default

Every account now gets a daily check comparing yesterday's spend against its own trailing 14-day normal, plus a weekly check on the trailing week against the prior month. Three things can trigger an alert:

• Spike. Spend ran 20 percent or more above normal. Could be a ranking win. Could be a campaign that shouldn't be running.
• Drop. Spend ran 20 percent or more below normal. A collapse is lost sales, and until now nothing in Off Hours was watching for it.
• Drift. The trailing week ran 20 percent or more above the prior three weeks. Catches the slow creep that never trips a daily check, because the daily normal quietly rises right along with it.

The 20 percent threshold is a default, not a fixed rule. Adjust it per account, from 5 to 500 percent, or turn it off entirely for accounts where you want a wider margin, in Settings → Notifications.

Diagnosis, not just detection

An alert that only says "something changed" makes you do the investigating yourself. Every spike or drop alert now tells you what to look at first: the specific campaigns driving the change with real dollar figures, whether sales kept pace with a spend increase or not, and for drops, how many normally-active campaigns recorded zero spend the day before.

Spend up with sales up is good news. Spend up with sales flat is the thing worth two minutes of your time. We wanted the alert to tell you which one you're looking at, not just that spend moved.

You'll get this in the bell menu, by email, and in your connected Slack workspace if you have one. If you run several accounts and more than one flags on the same day, you get a single combined email instead of a separate one for each account.

Event rules just got a lot more durable

Event rules already restored your budgets automatically when a Prime Day or Black Friday window closed. That part hasn't changed. What surrounds it has gotten considerably more solid.

• Campaign state restores too. When an event rule with Run 24hrs force-enables a campaign that was paused before the event, Off Hours now tracks that starting state the same way it tracks a baseline budget, and returns the campaign to paused when the event ends. Verified independently for every campaign the event touched.
• Manual changes are respected. Pause a campaign yourself in the middle of an event and Off Hours notices within about an hour and stops re-enabling it for the rest of the window. Your decision holds. You get a one-time notification confirming it.
• All campaigns, resolved live. Target an event rule at every campaign in the account instead of a fixed list, and it's evaluated fresh every time the rule runs. Launch a new campaign mid-event and it's covered automatically.
• The Coming Up preview. While an event window is active, the Event Rules page now shows exactly what happens when it ends: how many budgets and bids revert, how many campaigns return to paused, one concrete dollar example, and how many of your manual changes are being kept as-is.
• The wrap-up confirmation. After the window closes, Off Hours verifies every single tracked change has actually restored before sending anything. Once that's confirmed, you get one email and one notification: what restored, what was kept, and how the event performed against your normal pace.

None of this requires touching your existing event rules. It's live on every one you already have running.

A sharper Recommendations feed

Recommendations is not a weekly digest. It's a live, prioritized read of your account, computed fresh every time you load the page. It now surfaces everything above as first-class cards: an active spend alert, a manual override being honored during an event, or a budget and bid that should have restored and hasn't. That last one always ranks first. It means real money sitting at the wrong setting right now, and nothing else on the page is more urgent than that.

Full detail on how sources, priority, and the three-card cap work is in the Recommendations documentation.

Why we built this now

Off Hours has always drawn a hard line: we automate execution, not strategy. We said this on day one and it hasn't moved. What has changed is our answer to a narrower question: if the account does something that no rule caused, whose job is it to notice?

Until this week, that job was entirely yours. You had to know to check. Spend Alerts and the event rule hardening exist because that's not a reasonable thing to ask of anyone running more than one account, especially during the two weeks a year when a promotion is live and everything is moving faster than normal.

This is still not a strategy tool. It doesn't tell you what your ACOS target should be or which campaigns to launch. It tells you, immediately and without you having to ask, when something in your account stopped looking like your account.

New to Off Hours

If you haven't tried Off Hours yet: it's Amazon Ads scheduling and automation across four rule types, dayparting, budget rules, event rules, and performance rules, plus everything in this post watching quietly in the background. The 14-day trial takes about five minutes from signup to your first rule running. No credit card.