What automations do#
An automation is a rule of the shape when this condition is true, do this action — evaluated per product, every time the channel renders. It's the same automation engine used in Studio templates, applied to channel fields instead of template elements.
Automations live in the channel's Rules tab. Typical uses:
- Set a field to a different value when stock runs out.
- Populate a sale-price field only when the product is actually on sale.
- Flag a product's status so the ad network stops showing it, if required content is missing.
- Exclude sold-out or discontinued products from this channel's feed entirely.
The built-in automations#
Most channel types seed a starting set of automations so the channel works sensibly out of the box:
- Availability — sets the availability/quantity field to out-of-stock when a product's stock count is zero. (On a Google Shopping channel, this also triggers when required content is missing.)
- Sale price — sets the sale-price field whenever the current price is lower than the original price.
- Status (Meta and TikTok channels) — sets the status field to archived when required content is missing, and falls back the image field so the ad network isn't left with a broken reference.
The two supplementary types — Meta Advantage+ supplementary feed and Google Shopping supplementary feed — are the exception: they start with no stock/price/status fields at all, so they seed zero built-in automations. If you need those behaviors on a supplementary channel, add the fields and automations yourself.
These aren't locked — you can edit or delete them, and add your own.
Editing automations#
Click an automation to open its edit dialog: a trigger (the condition) and an action (what happens when it's true). Automations can be:
- Reordered by drag — order matters when multiple automations could affect the same field.
- Edited — change the trigger or action.
- Deleted — a delete button is available in the edit dialog. (You can't delete a field that an automation still references — remove or repoint the automation first.)
Marking and excluding products#
In channel mode, automations have two extra actions not available in Studio templates. They sound similar but do very different things:
- Mark product doesn't change any field — it just marks the product so you can find it. The product still ships in the feed. (Marked is a feed-rule concept; it is not the same as flagged content, which is content that failed an automatic quality check.) The channel's Preview tab has a "Show only marked products" switch that filters down to whatever an automation has marked, which is a fast way to spot-check, for example, every product an automation flagged as low-stock. See Channel events and troubleshooting for more on that filter.
- Exclude product removes the product's entry from this channel's exported feed entirely — the ad network never sees it. Use it to stop advertising products that match a condition (sold out, discontinued, a brand you can't advertise) on this channel only; other channels and your catalog are unaffected. The channel's run history shows how many products the rules excluded ("N excluded by rules"), and the per-product TRACE dialog reports "excluded by a rule" so an excluded product never looks like a rendering problem.
If you want products gone from every channel, add an exclude rule on the catalog instead; if the real question is which products the channel covers at all, change its product sets.
Date-triggered automations#
An automation can trigger on a date — for example, "sale ends on <date>." When that date arrives, Renable automatically re-renders the published channel so the automation takes effect right away, without waiting for the next scheduled refresh.
This only works once the automation is actually published. Adding or editing a date-triggered automation on a draft doesn't schedule anything — the reminder that fires the re-render is only created when you publish the draft it lives in. Until then, nothing is scheduled to trigger on that date.
Automations are draft-first#
Like fields and settings, automation changes save automatically to a draft. The live feed doesn't reflect them until you publish the channel.