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Rule type 4 of 5 · Performance rules

Bad weeks start as quiet bad days.

Nobody re-reads every campaign every morning, so ACoS creep gets discovered at month-end, a full report cycle too late. Performance rules read yesterday's settled numbers every morning and speak up, or act, the day something crosses your line. Off Hours reads each account's prior-day ACoS and spend once every morning, then alerts you or acts on the thresholds you set.

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Two weeks · no rule ACoS: creeping

35% threshold

Day 1Day 4Day 7Day 11Day 14

Neverflagged 35%ACoS threshold Month-endwhen it gets caught

Setup time~90 seconds

ReadsYesterday's settled data

ActionsAlert, budget, or pause

Price$149/mo flat, per seller

1 The problem

Month-end reports are an expensive way to find out.

The data was there every single morning: yesterday's ACoS, sitting on the dashboard. But it's nobody's job to re-read 40 campaigns before coffee, so the creep compounds quietly until the monthly export makes it official.

Weeks

How long a creeping ACoS problem typically lives before a monthly report surfaces it. Every one of those mornings, the number was right there.

40+ campaigns

What a mid-size account runs. Nobody re-reads all of them every morning, so the campaign that slipped waits for whoever opens the export.

Hours late ≠ better

Intraday numbers whipsaw and Amazon's attribution lags. Reacting in real time punishes campaigns for sales that simply haven't attributed yet.

Rule condition IF: yesterday's ACoS > [35%] for [2 days running]
THEN: send a recommendation, or pause it, your call

2 How it works

You set the line. It never skips a morning.

Connect your account

One OAuth handshake through the official Amazon Ads API. Off Hours reads your campaigns and their daily performance. Nothing is guessed.

Set the threshold

Yesterday's ACoS, yesterday's spend, or spend measured against the campaign's own baseline. Your numbers, your line, not a preset someone else picked.

Choose the reaction

Recommendation, budget change, or pause: graduated, and entirely your choice. A rule can advise for weeks without ever touching the account.

Every morning, it reads yesterday

Settled numbers, checked daily, acted on the morning after, with the enforcement engine running every 15 minutes underneath. No whipsaw, no phantom problems.

Checked daily · enforced every 15 min

The morning-after check, automated.

A week of settled numbers, read the way the rule reads them. Thursday crossed the line, and Thursday got flagged the morning after with a recommendation, not a kill.

Within threshold Flagged

3 Why Off Hours

Real-time is noise. Yesterday is signal.

A $40 morning with no sales looks catastrophic at 10am and fine by dinner. Amazon attributes sales to clicks hours or days later. Off Hours reads the settled numbers on purpose. "No real-time noise" is the feature.

Settled data, not whipsaw

Daily granularity is a decision, not a shortcut. Hourly "performance" automation fires on phantom problems: sales that haven't attributed yet. Off Hours waits for the numbers to settle, then acts.

Your baseline, not a magic number

Spend-spike rules compare a campaign against its own recent normal: "50% above baseline," not "over $200." Growth isn't punished for being growth, and drift isn't missed because a fixed number sat too high.

Graduated, not trigger-happy

Recommendation first, budget cut second, pause last. You pick how much rope each rule gets. Recommendations land in the dashboard's Recommendations tab, and in Slack if you want them there.

Everything it does, it can undo

Every pause and every change is logged and reversible. Turn a rule off and your campaigns go back exactly as it found them. Your manual changes always win.

Layers with four more rule types

Performance rules act on results. Dayparting, budget, and event rules act on schedule: when campaigns run, how much they spend, what's special this week. Bid rules move the base bid on individual keywords. Same account, no conflicts.

A safety net under the rules

Free spend alerts watch every connected account for spikes, drops, and drift. Zero setup, on from the moment you connect. Rules act on your thresholds; alerts just tell you.

How spend alerts work →

Not ready to automate reactions?

Start with spend alerts, the zero-setup version that just tells you. Every connected account gets always-on watching for spikes, drops, and drift, free, before you write a single rule.

See spend alerts→

4 The alternative

The monthly report is not a monitoring system.

For most accounts, "performance monitoring" means an export, an average, and whoever remembers to read it. Averages hide creep, and discovery arrives after the budget's already spent.

Off Hours

Every campaign, every morning

✓Reads every campaign's settled numbers every morning: all of them, not a sample
✓Flags it the day after your threshold breaks, with a recommendation, not just a kill-switch
✓Graduated response: alert, budget change, or pause. Your call, per rule
✓Every action logged and timestamped. You can read exactly when it started and what was done

The monthly report

One export, thirty days late

✕Problems live for weeks inside monthly averages before anyone can see them
✕Discovery depends on someone opening the export and actually reading it
✕The fix arrives after the budget's already been spent
✕No record of when it started, only that it did

5 Questions

Performance rules, answered.

What are performance rules in Off Hours?

Performance rules watch your campaigns' daily metrics (yesterday's ACoS, yesterday's spend, and spend spikes against the campaign's own baseline) and act when a threshold you set is crossed. The action is your choice: send a recommendation, adjust the budget, or pause the campaign. Every action is logged and reversible.

Why daily instead of real-time?

Because intraday numbers lie. A campaign that spends $40 by mid-morning with no sales looks catastrophic at 10am and fine by dinner, and Amazon's attribution lags, so sales credit clicks hours or days after they happen. Automation that reacts hourly ends up punishing campaigns for sales that haven't attributed yet. Off Hours reads settled daily numbers and acts the morning after: fast enough to matter, slow enough to be right.

What actions can a performance rule take?

Three, graduated: send a recommendation to your dashboard's Recommendations tab (and to Slack, if connected), adjust the campaign's budget, or pause the campaign. Recommendations are first-class. A rule can watch and advise without ever touching the account. Whatever it does is logged and reversible, and your manual changes always win.

What is a spend-spike rule?

A rule that compares a campaign's spend against its own recent baseline instead of a fixed dollar amount. "Spend is 50% above normal" catches drift on a $30-a-day campaign and a $500-a-day campaign with the same rule. There is no magic number to guess, and growth isn't punished for being growth.

Can performance rules run alongside dayparting and budget rules?

Yes, that's the intended setup. Dayparting, budget, and event rules act on a schedule: they decide when campaigns run and how much they can spend. Performance rules watch the results and speak up when something crosses your line. They read the same account and don't conflict by design, and deactivating any rule restores what it changed.

Find out the morning after. Not the month after.

Set your first threshold in about 90 seconds. 14 days free, no credit card required.

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