Is It Bad To Pause My Google Ads Campaigns?
by Megan Horrocks
As a digital marketing agency, we often get asked if pausing your PPC campaign on Google is going to affect your campaign's overall performance when you choose to return to advertising.
There are many different reasons that businesses might want to pause their Google Ads campaigns, but is doing so going to affect how they regain traction?
This article will discuss the effects that pausing your Google Ads campaigns can have on the performance of your ads, as well as outline some other options that may be better suited for your Google advertising needs.
Why Do People Pause Their Ad Campaigns?
There are many different circumstances as to why businesses advertising on Google Ads might want to pause their ads. For example, some people choose to pause their PPC campaigns for a few days if they are planning on going on holiday and are going to be unable to answer the phone or fulfil the service that their business offers while they are away.
Another reason why some businesses may consider pausing their Google Ads campaigns is if they have too much work, also making them unable to fulfil their service.
The benefits of doing this mean that you will save money and waste on ad spend when you are not able to take on the jobs and receive a return on that ad spend.
Lastly, in some cases, you might find that your PPC campaigns are just not bringing in the results you are looking for at that particular moment. Whether that be the number of leads, traffic or sales. For this reason, you might make the decision to pause your Google Ads campaign, maybe to explore other marketing methods.
Can Pausing Your Google Ads Effect Performance?
Pausing your Google Ads campaign can cause mixed results depending on various different aspects of your campaign.
In some cases, especially if you are running an automated bid strategy, pausing your google ads for longer periods of time can affect how your ads perform when re-enabled, specifically in the short term. This is due to these machine-learning strategies relying on historical data, such as historical CTR (click-through rate) and landing page experience, to be able to effectively show your ads. When the ads are paused for long periods of time the historical data becomes outdated and can lead to gaps. The gaps in this data which can be caused by pausing your ads can impact how your ads are shown once unpaused.
For this reason, you might find that your ads take a few days to fully pick up momentum once they have been re-enabled.
How To Pause Your Campaign Within Google Ads?
Within your Google Ads account you may be running more than one campaign, maybe for different services you offer. When it comes to pausing your ads you can choose to pause a single campaign or all of them.
If you are pausing more than one campaign you can tick multiple campaigns. You will then see a blue banner appear above the campaigns where you can click 'edit' and select 'pause.' If you have a well-organised campaign that has different ad groups for different services, you can use the same process at the ad group level to pause a select few or a single ad group.
If you are pausing a single campaign you can simply press the green dot which indicates the ad is live and change this to paused.
You can also use automated rules not only to pause your ads but also to set them to resume. This is great if you are going on holiday and risk forgetting to switch your ads back on.
Alternatives to Pausing Your Google Ads
If you are concerned about pausing your Google Ads campaign for an extended period and the effect that this might have on your Google Ads strategy, you could consider one of the following options:
Ad Schedule
In some cases you might decide that you want to reduce the hours for which you are advertising your service, for example, maybe you are a locksmith that wants to work shorter hours. Instead of pausing your ads when you do not want to receive enquiries, you should utilise the ad schedule feature of your Google Ads campaign.
With an ad schedule, you can set your ads to run for days and times that are most convenient for you. If you have a specific ad schedule in place, even though your ads will appear as enabled, they will only be running, spending your budget and gathering data at the times you have set.
Decrease Your Daily Budget
If you are in general just wanting to reduce the amount of money your campaign is spending for any reason, but still want to gather statistically significant data and hold a presence on Google Ads, one option you have is to reduce the daily budget of the campaign. Decreasing your budget will not only reduce your overall spending, but it can also significantly reduce the number of conversions you will receive.
Identify Optimisations
If due to poor performance you are looking to stop running ads, there are a few factors of the campaign that can be analysed to ensure you are getting the most out of your budget.
It would be prudent to analyse the keywords you are targeting and identify which keywords are working and which ones are wasting your budget. You have the option to pause a certain keyword or even multiple keywords if they are producing a large amount of traffic and spending, yet not giving you your desired result.
Something which is often overlooked and is key to a well-organised campaign is the use of negative keywords. It's advisable to ensure that you are making good use of negative keywords to further reduce wasting of your budget.
Factors that are outside of Google Ads, such as the experience a user has on any of your landing pages as well as any competitors you may have can also affect the overall performance of your ads. So these aspects should also be considered.
Conclusion
To conclude, even though there are many valid reasons why your business might want to pause your PPC campaigns, doing so can have an effect on how the ads run when you decide to resume advertising. Although this does not mean that pausing your PPC campaign is a bad thing, it is important to know what to expect from your ads when you choose to resume.
If you are thinking of pausing your PPC campaign due to underperformance, why not enquire about our Google Ads Management service? We offer a free review on your Google Ads account outlining how we can add value to your campaign's performance.
