The most frequent question we receive in chat - why the rule paused campaign, ad set or ad while it was actually a winner and should have stayed live. Why does this happen?
Let's consider possible reasons.
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Basically, this means you've set up 2 rules - Start and Pause with overlapping conditions and schedule, so they keep restarting and pausing the same campaign/ad set/ad continuously. Here is an example of conflict in pause and start tasks:

These 2 rules are running every 15 minutes throughout the day. And let's say we've got one ad with the following results at some point:

Spend (Last 3 days including today) = $250
​Website purchase ROAS (Last 3 days including today) = 1.05
​Website purchases (Last 3 days including today) = 10
​Cost per purchase (Last 3 days including today) = $25

These numbers match both rules' conditions so the ad can be restarted and turned off at the same time.

Note: To avoid this kind of conflict you need to insure Start conditions do not fall into Pause group of conditions. Set threshold values to differentiate pause and start actions. In this case, we can add cost threshold: Cost per website purchase (Last 3 days including today) < $20.

How to find out if Start and Pause tasks conflict took place?

On Activity page, you can troubleshoot and track the history of all actions taken by your automated rules. You can see what actually happened with a single ad, ad set or campaign in the last 30 days. 

Go to Activity, select Entity ID in filter type, paste the ID of the item you want to check, click Apply and get the list of actions applied to this object.

The fact that the same entity is frequently paused and restarted points to overlap between 2 rules' conditions (or 2 start and pause tasks in a single rule). Unfold each action to check timing and item parameters compared to rules conditions.

If you use rules to duplicate campaigns, ad sets or ads then they may create a copy and pause the original item at the same time given that you set the rule to do so. You can also add auto-generated number of the copy to the duplicate's name by enabling Append the number of duplicate option. Check out settings of Duplication task, you may have set the original item to be paused.

How to find out if duplication was the case?

Go to Activity, select Entity ID in filter type, click Apply and get the list of actions applied to this object. If you see the ad set was duplicated, check the task settings, whether it's pausing the original ad set or keeping it live. The logs of that specific rule would also tell you the story.

When comparing results, make sure you pulled out the data for the same time period in Ads Manager as set in automated rule conditions.

In the rules, we advise selecting "Use Ad set Attribution window" option. Check this article out to learn more about why there might be discrepancies between the data you see on Facebook and the data the rules are pulling from it.

In this article, we covered the 3 most common reasons of unexpectedly paused and restarted campaigns/ad sets/ads, but you may run into other cases. Drop us a message in the chat if you need help while reviewing automated rules results.