Before you start
- A retargeting workspace. Marketing Automations is only available there — a UA (user acquisition) workspace does not offer it, so if you cannot see it under Marketing Tools, check which workspace you are in before anything else. Ad Flows is the mirror image: UA only, never retargeting.
- A connected Facebook page and an ad account with a campaign to send against.
- A Meta audience to target. The automation sends to an audience, not to a segment you build in Dynamo.
- 1
Open Marketing Automations
From the left sidebar, under Marketing Tools, click Marketing Automations. The count next to the title is how many you have.
Each automation is a card. The search box and the filter dropdown next to it narrow the list, and Refresh pulls the latest send data. The counter in the top corner, Users in reply window, shows how many people are currently inside the window where you are allowed to message them.
The Marketing Automations page, with one automation expanded. - 2
Read an automation card
A card is split into three columns. Scheduling is the timer — frequency, which days, the time and its timezone, the start date, and the Type, which is Loop or Stop.
Settings is everything the send is aimed at: the channel, the ad account and campaign it runs under, the target audience and any audience you are excluding, how many messages are in the sequence, and whether Auto retry is on.
Last Send Insights covers the most recent send only — when it went out, how many people were in the segment, how many were reachable, how many it actually sent to, and the open, click and CTR figures. Export CSV downloads that data, and the Active toggle in the corner pauses the automation without deleting it.
Tip: The note field under the card is free text for your team. Use it to record why an automation exists — the settings tell you what it does, not what it is for.
The Settings column of a card. Account identifiers are blurred here. - 3
Start a new automation
New Marketing Automation opens a two-pane dialog. Everything on the left configures when and to whom; the right pane is the messages themselves.
Give it a name first — this is what you will be scanning for on the list page later, so make it something you will recognise. Then pick the Facebook Page under Channel & Campaign, and the audience under Target Audience.
The question-mark icons next to Target Audience and Auto Retry explain each field in place, which is worth reading before you turn Auto Retry on.
The New Marketing Automation dialog before anything is filled in. - 4
Set the schedule
Frequency sets the rhythm. With Daily / Weekly you then pick the Days of Week — click a day to include it, and the selected days turn pink.
Time and Timezone decide when the send fires, and the timezone is explicit so an automation aimed at one market does not drift when you are working from another. Start Date is the first day it is allowed to run; before that date the automation sits idle even if it is active.
Tip: Check the timezone rather than assuming it — it is the setting most likely to send your message in the middle of someone else’s night.
Frequency, days of week, time, timezone and start date. - 5
Choose what happens at the end
Under Drip campaign Settings, When Drip campaign ends decides what the automation does once it has sent the last message in the list.
Loop restarts from the first message, so the sequence runs indefinitely — useful for evergreen content you are happy for people to see again. Stop ends the drip campaign after the last message, which is what you want for a finite onboarding or promotional run.
This is the Type shown on the card back on the list page, so you can tell at a glance which automations will keep going.
Loop restarts the sequence; Stop ends it after the last message. - 6
Build the message sequence
The right pane starts empty. Add Message opens the same composer used everywhere else in Dynamo, so the message types and their rules are the ones you already know. Load from library pulls in a message you have saved instead of writing a new one.
Each message you add becomes a numbered card — Reply 1, Reply 2 and so on — previewed as the recipient will see it, greeting and image and buttons included. The order of the cards is the order they will be sent in.
The four buttons on each card edit it, duplicate it, rework it with AI, or delete it. Test Message sends that single message to you so you can check it in Messenger before the automation goes anywhere near your audience.
Tip: The dialog calls these Replies while the button says Add Message — they are the same thing. What matters is the order, because that is the sequence your drip campaign follows.
Two messages added, each previewed with a Test Message button. - 7
Save it and check on it
Save as draft stores the automation without starting it — it stays greyed out until the dialog has enough to work with, so if it will not light up, something above is still unset.
Once saved, the automation appears as a card on the list page. Edit reopens this dialog, Duplicate clones the whole setup as a starting point for the next one, Insights opens the fuller reporting, and Archive takes it off the list.
Use the Active toggle to pause an automation you want to keep. Archiving is for the ones you are finished with.
Tip: Duplicate is the fastest way to run the same sequence against a second audience — clone it, then change only the Target Audience.
Edit, Duplicate, Insights and Archive on the card footer.
Your automation is on autopilot!
Once it is active, the card on the Marketing Automations page is where you check on it — Last Send Insights tells you how the most recent send performed, and the Active toggle pauses everything without deleting the setup. Add a note to the card so whoever looks at it next knows why it exists.
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