Know When To Pause Your Google Ads, Not Delete Them

First thing’s first, Google Adwords has now been renamed to “Google Ads“. Google Ads can definitely be seen as a gamble, even for people who have years of experience managing PPC campaigns. We’re taking the words right out of Kenny Rogers’ mouth, “Know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em”. With Google Ads, we need to know when to keep them running, or when to pause them, but notice we didn’t when to delete them.

Don’t Delete Your Google Ads

You can never access your deleted keywords

We’ll give you two prime examples. Let’s say you’re setting up a special holiday campaign and you’re wondering if a keyword you used last year performed well during the season. If that keyword was deleted, you can never go back and pull it’s performance report. The same concept figures with a bad performing keyword. You can avoid the mistake of trying out that keyword, only because of the fact that you know it didn’t work in the past. Don’t doom yourself by repeating past mistakes.

Pinpoint causes of performance changes in the past

As we mentioned earlier, let’s say you’d like to know why CPC’s dropped in March, would you be able to pull data from removed keywords during that time period. No, definitely not. It’s about fully dissecting an issue and getting to the root of the problem. Perhaps, a keyword wasn’t performing well during a certain time period because of the ad copy, the bid, the time of day; we’ll never know if it’s been deleted.

When To Pause ThemOk, we’ve established the fact that it’s better to pause than to delete, but how exactly do you know when to pause them. Well, some of it is left to chance and gut-feelings, but a big chunk of it is left on statistics; what exactly are the numbers telling you?For one, testing is a huge part of Google Ads and having the patience to let a keyword try to pull through, but there’s definitely a limit of when to pause them. If there is enough data to use the ad success equation, the ad with the lowest number should be pause.

Now, what numbers should we be looking for to determine a weak link? This ultimately depends on what your goals are for your company (Take a look at our SEO Goals post). Let’s say sales are important to the end result; we see an ad getting a lot of impressions and clicks but no conversions, this ad should be paused. It’s time to take a look at this ad and see what’s causing the low conversion rate and how can you improve it.

Again, take caution and reevaluate your goals for each keyword. We might see some keywords specifically created for impressions. It’s purpose to catch a customer in a certain place of the sales funnel.

Then, there’s the cases that just don’t make sense to continue with Google Ads for the time being and the project should be paused for the time being. For example, there can be a time when you’re getting too much volume and too many clients that your company is not big enough to handle it all, it’s time to pause it. Google Ads can sometimes outgrow our ambition and it can overwhelm us.

We can list a number of scenarios of when to pause Google Ads but in the end, look at the data over a large enough period of time and go with your instincts. If you’re looking for a professional Google Ads expert, be sure to visit our PPC management page to learn more and give contact us. We’d be more than happy to answer any questions and manage your PPC campaigns.