Before the routine: connect the server
This assumes MCP Ads is already added to Grok Bot as a plugin. If it is not, the setup guide covers it in ten minutes: an API key from Manage → Connect MCP, and a custom MCP server in Settings → Plugins with the URL https://mcp-ads.com/mcp-slim and an Authorization header. Confirm the Bot can list your ad accounts before going further; a routine that runs against a server the Bot cannot reach fails quietly.
The routine
Open the Bot, add a routine, set it to every weekday or every Monday at a time before you start work, and give it this as the task. The wording matters more than it looks; Bots follow their instructions literally.
- Using mcp-ads, pull the last 7 days of spend, clicks, conversions and cost per conversion for every connected ad account, and the same figures for the 7 days before.
- Flag any campaign with CTR under 0.5%, or with spend and zero conversions, or whose cost per conversion rose more than 30% week over week.
- Write a summary of at most 12 lines: one line per platform with the headline numbers, then the flags, then one recommendation per platform.
- Wait for my approval before sending anything or changing anything in any account.
Why those thresholds
A CTR under half a percent on a prospecting campaign usually means the creative has gone stale or the audience is wrong; on search it often means broad match has drifted. Spend with zero conversions over a full week is the clearest waste signal there is, and it is the one most often missed because each day’s number looks small. A 30% jump in cost per conversion is large enough to be real and small enough to catch before it becomes a month.
These are starting points, not rules. Change them to match your accounts once you have read a few reports. The point of putting them in the routine is that the Bot applies them the same way every week, which a person rarely does.
The two guardrails
The last line of the routine — wait for approval — is the first guardrail. It keeps the Bot from acting on its own recommendations. MCP Ads is the second: every write tool it exposes goes through confirmation and workspace policy, so even a Bot that ignored the instruction could prepare a change but not ship it. Keep both. The value of a Monday report is that it is safe to receive without reading it immediately; a report that might have already paused something is not.
Test run, then schedule
Grok Bot routines have a Test run. Use it. Read the output as if a new hire had written it: are the numbers plausible, did it cover every platform, did it stop where it was told to. Adjust the wording, run it again. Only then set the schedule. From that point the report arrives before you do, and Monday’s hour goes to the recommendations rather than the spreadsheet.
