Should I Pause My Google Ads Campaign?

When it comes to pausing a Google Ads campaign a common solution that I hear is just plain wrong!

The solution is that rather than pausing your campaign you should just:

“Set a budget that low is far, far below the average competitive bid because in 99% of the cases will not spend a single cent.”

In this video I talk about:

• Why this is recommended
• Why it is the wrong approach
• What is the best option when it comes to pausing a campaign

The common situation for why people would to pause a campaign that is performing well is usually because the business may want to reduce costs for a period of time or the business is closing for an extended holiday period.

The reasoning people give for reducing the budget to $1 a day $0.50 a day is: 

“Because all campaigns have trial periods where Google does a lot of machine learning behind the scenes as it launches and optimizes the campaigns, and that learning and data goes away and resets to zero when you pause or turn off a campaign.”

The first part of that is true Google does complete a learning phase and collects lots of data about your campaign. 

But this second part is what I don’t agree with and this is because your data does NOT go away when you pause the campaign, your data is still in the campaign BUT what is added to that data is that the fact that you have paused your campaign.

I agree that this is bad… because you have to remember that a core part of Google’s algorithm is that is rewards accounts with a high CTR because:

•  Google gets paid when ads get clicked on
•  So if you have a high CTR your ads are far more likely to be shown by Google over your competitors ads

This is where the solution of just lowering your budget to $1 or $0.50 is wrong. BECAUSE you are now giving the Google Algorithm new data that you want your account to operate at $1 day.

Let’s look at an example:

•  You have an account that is running on $50 a day and getting you between 5 conversions a day at $10 a conversion
•  Because of this you have set your account to the bidding strategy of “Maximise Conversions with a CPA target of between $8-10 a day”

By using this solution of lowering your budget to $1 a day - even if you remove the CPA target - you are telling the Google algorithm to focus on conversions but only spend $1 day when the algorithm knows that it takes around $10 a day.

Or if you remove the “Maximise Conversions” goal as well you are the completing changing the whole campaign. 

This where I have never understood this solution of just lowering your budget to a level where are likely yo get no clicks anyway.

My view is that this solution comes from people who don’t understand that your budget is one of the core inputs that Google takes when it comes to working out things like:

•  The best times to show your ads
•  The best people to show your ads too 

Think of it like this you have 2 campaigns that are exactly the same:

•  But one has a budget of $10 a day
•  And the other has budget of $1000 a day

They are two very different campaigns and the Google algorithm will treat these very differently.

It the same reason for why people when they have a successful campaign rapidly increase the budget from $10 a day to $100 a day and wonder why their account performance has tanked. 

This is a principle that I have spoken about with Google HQ in Australia and it is all about term called “priming”.

The key feature is that the best practice is to increase or decrease Google ads budgets in stages. As any massive increases or decreasing in budgets is going to push your campaign back into a learning phase and reset the Google Algorithm

Which is the exact thing people came up with the “lower your campaign to $1” are trying to avoid. 

So the solution to this problem is to reduce your budget in stages by no more than 20% at a time, only going down to the level where you are generating on average 1 conversion a day.

So if your current Cost/Conversion is $5 you can reduce your budget to $5 while if it is $10 you should only reduce it to $10 a day.

This then preserves your current account learning so that you can then rescale your account when you are ready to increase your budgets again.