You should pause your paid search ads for several reasons. This may be due to the holidays or another digital marketing strategy. However, there are better options than pausing your PPC campaign. It can actually damage your campaigns. Fortunately, there are alternatives to pausing your paid search ads.

How does PPC work? Will pausing your paid search ads affect your performance? Let me tell you how to plan better campaigns.

During The Holiday Season

The holidays are a busy time for people. People spend money on gifts, entertainment, and other things they want. While paused PPC campaigns may have made sense 20 or 10 years ago, it does not make sense today. For example, if you’re a healthcare business, pausing your paid search advertising now will have the opposite effect.

While pausing ads is convenient, you must remember that pausing them too frequently can damage your best PPC strategies and campaign momentum. You can also end up losing important data from your campaigns.

During Other Digital Marketing Efforts

Paid search platforms use complex algorithms that can be affected by paused campaigns. This may affect the performance of your ad campaigns, which can take weeks or months to level out. Additionally, pausing your PPC campaign can cause your metrics to become stale, requiring you to re-establish them.

Pausing your ad campaign is not ideal and can do more harm than good. Instead, consider alternative solutions or PPC campaign management services to keep your ad campaigns running smoothly. This is especially beneficial for service-oriented businesses.

Alternatives To Pausing Paid Search Ads

There are several alternatives to pausing paid search ads and lowering ad spend. PPC specialists do this by modifying the ad campaign and deleting non-converting keywords. A second method involves dropping your bids and lowering the impression share of your ads.

Less is More

Pausing your paid search ads is not the best strategy. This can hurt your performance. You can use the best PPC strategies to make your ad more effective without reducing the budget. One of these is to adjust the ad schedule so that your ads don’t run on certain days. This option will only work for a few weeks, and you’ll need to change it back after that period of time.

While completely pausing your paid search advertising doesn’t affect your quality score or historical data, it can hurt your overall performance. Successful PPC campaigns don’t have “ON” and “OFF” buttons. They’re more like landing a helicopter. If you land poorly, you will not likely take off again.

Lowering Your Ad Budget Instead of Pausing

Another option is to lower your budget. Instead of pausing your ad campaigns when you go on vacation, you can reduce your budget and let it run. This will allow your ad campaigns to gather data and generate sales or leads while you’re away. Moreover, you’ll be able to combine the data from your cheaper ads with those from more expensive ads. You can resume your PPC campaign when you return.

When you have difficulty making your monthly budget work for your business, consider lowering your budget for your Paid Search ads. However, this tactic can actually hurt your performance. The first thing to remember is that temporarily lowering your budget does not mean you should turn off your campaign. Instead, it would be best to consider other options, like PPC campaign management services.

Optimizing Your “Bad” Ad Groups

The first problem with pausing your Paid Search Ads is that you will have to rebuild the momentum of your campaign. It may take even the best PPC agency weeks or even months for your metrics to level out. If you pause your campaign completely, you risk destroying your past performance and causing harm to your future. This problem is compounded by the fact that you will lose any valuable information you may have collected from the campaign.

If your ad campaign is not producing leads or sales, it is time to review your advertising metrics. One of the best PPC strategies is to check the click-assisted conversions (CAS), which is the total number of conversions for which your ad group or keyword contributed to the conversion. This metric takes into account activity from the Google Search Network thirty days prior to the conversion. If you are using conversion tracking, you’ll need to ensure you’ve recorded at least one conversion before pausing your Paid Search Ads.

Setting Up Automatic Pauses

While automatic pauses can save you a lot of time, they can also harm your performance. While some PPC specialists might find it beneficial to pause a paid search ad campaign every now and then, this practice will hurt your overall efficiency and performance.

There are times when you need to pause a campaign, whether it’s a life situation or a business experiment. The worst time to halt an ad campaign is when you launch a new product or launch a blog. Moreover, paused ads can also affect your market experiments and A/B tests. Without noticing it, you could compromise statistically significant data that you could have otherwise used to improve your PPC campaign.

Pausing Your Paid Search Ads Can Hurt Your Performance

If you’re considering pausing your paid search ads completely, you may be surprised to learn that it can hurt your performance. This is because paid search advertising platforms use complex algorithms, and pausing your ad campaigns can cause data to become stale. This means you may have to start over with new data, which can take weeks or months. Furthermore, the performance of your ad campaign is highly dependent on the keywords you’re bidding on and your competition’s bids. So the only option is to learn how to plan better.

Author Bio:

Maggie Simmons writes insanely helpful marketing insights. She works as a Marketing Manager at Max Effect Marketing, a leading digital agency located in Denver, Colorado.