Automate Ad Ops with Scheduled Tasks

Once your project is set up, the real payoff is automation: the same agent, run unattended on a cadence. A Monday performance scorecard. A mid-month pacing check. An alert the moment a campaign’s CPA drifts past your target. You wake up to the answer instead of remembering to ask.

What your assistant calls it

Every client has this feature — the name and the reliability differ.

Assistant	Feature	Runs when your computer is off?
ChatGPT	Scheduled tasks	Yes — cloud-run, notifies by push + email
Codex	Scheduled tasks (automations)	Yes
Claude Cowork	Scheduled tasks, via the `/schedule` skill	Yes — they run remotely
Claude Code	Routines: a local task or a remote routine	Local: no. Remote: yes

On most hosts you create one just by asking — “every Monday at 9am, review my campaigns and post the three things worth my attention.” No UI hunting required.

The one that bites: a Claude Code local scheduled task only runs while the desktop app is open and your computer is awake. A laptop asleep at 9am silently skips the run (on wake it starts one catch-up for the most recently missed time and discards the rest). For anything that matters — budget pacing, spend spikes, disapprovals — create a remote routine instead: it runs on Anthropic’s infrastructure with the machine off. Cowork and ChatGPT scheduled tasks don’t have this problem.

Codex hooks (SessionStart, PostToolUse, …) are event handlers, not a scheduler — never use one for a recurring report.

Write a recurring prompt that behaves

A scheduled prompt is different from a chat message: no one is there to answer a follow-up, and it may fire hours late. Write for that.

Describe the result, not the steps

Say what you want to arrive — “a scorecard with spend, conversions, CPA, ROAS, and the three things worth my attention” — and let the agent plan the tool calls.

Goal · Context · Output · Boundaries

The four parts of a good work prompt: what to do, what to look at, the format and length, and what must stay unchanged.

Add a late-run guardrail

A 9am task might fire at 11pm after a sleep. Add: “Only look at today’s spend; if it’s past 6pm, just summarize what changed.”

Refine first, then schedule

Get the prompt producing a reliable result in a normal chat, then turn that into the scheduled version. Don’t schedule a prompt you haven’t seen run.

Keep it read-only unless you mean otherwise. A scheduled run that changes budgets or status spends real money with no one watching — say “propose, don’t change” unless you’ve built the full safety model for unattended writes.

What a schedule costs

Every scheduled run re-runs the work, which means it calls Adspirer tools again — each run draws on your monthly tool-call quota exactly like a live conversation. A daily review costs roughly thirty times a monthly one. Pick a cadence your plan can carry, and say what it should watch. Weekly is the right default for a review; daily is for accounts spending enough to justify it. Checking your usage is free — ask “what’s my usage this month?” any time.

Example task prompts

Weekly performance scorecard (read-only)

Every Monday at 9am, pull a cross-channel scorecard for my accounts — trailing 7d and 30d spend,
conversions, CPA, and ROAS per campaign — and post the three things worth my attention this week.
Read-only: propose changes, don't make any. If it runs late in the day, just summarize what
changed; don't start fresh analysis.

Mid-month pacing check

On the 15th, check month-to-date spend against my monthly budgets. For each budget pool, tell me:
projected end-of-month spend at the current pace, and whether I'm on track, under, or over. Flag
any campaign pacing to blow its cap. Don't change any budgets — just report.

CPA alert (a monitoring task)

Check my account once a day. If any campaign's CPA rises above my target, or spend pace projects
over budget for the month, tell me which campaign and by how much. Otherwise stay silent. Never
change budgets or status — only alert.

A monitoring task re-checks and stays quiet until there’s something worth saying — the right shape for “tell me if my CPA moves.”

Competitor landing-page watch

Every Monday, check <competitor URL> for changes to their offer, pricing, or hero message, and
tell me what's different from last week. Summary only.

Going further: unattended optimization

The examples above only read and propose. To let a scheduled task actually write changes — reallocate budget, pause dead campaigns — you need the full safety model: shadow mode, per-run change caps, one writer per portfolio, propose-vs-act, and a kill switch. That’s covered in depth here:

Cowork for Ad Ops

The seven-property safety model for a self-optimizing task you can trust.

Set up your project

Instructions, context, memory, and connectors — the foundation a schedule runs on.

​What your assistant calls it

​Write a recurring prompt that behaves