How to Cancel Facebook Ad

Need to pull the plug on a Facebook ad campaign right now? Whether it’s underperforming, the budget has changed, or you’ve spotted an error, stopping an ad is a routine task for every marketer. This guide will walk you through exactly how to cancel your Facebook ads, distinguish between pausing and permanently deleting, and explain what you should do next to learn from your data.

Pausing vs. Deleting: What’s the Right Move for Your Ad?

Before you go clicking buttons in Ads Manager, it’s important to understand a key distinction. What most people call “canceling” an ad, Facebook refers to in two different ways: turning it off (pausing) or deleting it. They have very different outcomes.

When to Turn Off (Pause) Your Ad

Turning off an ad is the most common and recommended action. It’s like hitting a pause button. Your ad stops running and accruing charges immediately, but all of its data, settings, and creative are preserved in your account. You can turn it back on with a single click at any time.

You should turn off an ad when:

• It’s underperforming: The Cost Per Result is too high or the Click-Through Rate is too low. Pause it to analyze what went wrong without losing the historical data.
• You’re running A/B tests: Once you have a clear winner, turn off the losing ad set or ads to reallocate the budget to the top performer.
• You need to adjust your budget: If you need to temporarily reduce ad spend, you can turn off lower-priority campaigns or ad sets.
• There are external factors: Your ad creative might suddenly feel tone-deaf due to a news event or holiday. Pausing it allows you to temporarily halt the campaign.

When to Permanently Delete Your Ad

Deleting is a permanent action. Once an ad, ad set, or campaign is deleted, it’s gone from your main Ads Manager view for good and cannot be reactivated. While Facebook still retains the raw performance data, it becomes much harder to see it within the context of your other campaigns. Deleting is mostly a clean-up activity to remove clutter from your account.

You should only delete an ad when:

• You made a significant setup error: For example, you created a test campaign you no longer need or chose the wrong campaign objective entirely.
• It's a very old, irrelevant campaign: If its data is no longer relevant to your current strategy and it's clogging up your view, deleting can help keep your account organized.
• You’re absolutely sure you’ll never use it or its data again.

Bottom line: For 99% of situations, turning off your ad is the best choice. You achieve the same immediate result — stopping your ad and your spending — without losing valuable data or the option to restart it later.

How to Turn Off a Facebook Ad: The Step-by-Step Guide

Turning off an ad is quick and painless once you know where to look. The process is nearly identical whether you're pausing a whole campaign, a specific ad set, or a single ad.

First, a Quick Primer on Campaign Structure

Facebook Ads Manager is organized in a three-level hierarchy. Pausing something at a higher level will automatically pause everything beneath it.

• Campaign: This is the highest level, where you set your overall advertising objective (e.g., Sales, Leads, Traffic). Turning off a Campaign pauses all the ad sets and ads within it.
• Ad Set: This is the middle level, where you define your targeting, budget, schedule, and ad placements. Turning off an Ad Set pauses all the ads within it, but other ad sets in the campaign will keep running.
• Ad: This is where your actual creative — the images, videos, and text — lives. You can turn off a single ad without impacting any others in the same ad set.

A Step-by-Step Guide to Turning Off Your Ad

Follow these steps to safely pause your ad, ad set, or campaign.

Step 1: Navigate to Facebook Ads Manager

You can get there by visiting https://business.facebook.com/adsmanager or a similar URL depending on your account structure. You can also find it in the menu of your Facebook Business Suite.

Step 2: Go to the Correct Tab

Inside the Ads Manager, you'll see tabs for Campaigns, Ad Sets, and Ads. Click on the tab that corresponds to what you want to turn off.

Step 3: Locate the Toggle Switch

Find the campaign, ad set, or ad you want to stop. To the left of its name, you'll see a blue or grey toggle switch located under a heading called "Delivery" or "On/Off".

• If the switch is blue, it means the item is active and running.
• If the switch is grey, it's already inactive.

Step 4: Click the Toggle to Turn It Off

Simply click the blue toggle. It will immediately turn grey, and the status of your item will change to "Off" in the "Delivery" column. That’s it! Your ad has stopped running and will no longer spend any money.

How to Permanently Delete a Facebook Ad

If you've decided that permanent deletion is the right step for decluttering your account, the process is just as straightforward. Remember, this is an irreversible action.

Step 1: Turn Off the Item First

First, you must turn off the campaign, ad set, or ad using the toggle switch method described above. Facebook does not allow you to delete active items.

Step 2: Select the Item to Delete

Check the box located to the very left of the toggle switch for the item(s) you want to remove.

Step 3: Click the Trash Icon

Once you’ve selected an item, a menu bar will appear above your list of campaigns. Look for the trash can icon labeled "Delete" and click it.

Step 4: Confirm Your Decision

A pop-up window will appear asking you to confirm that you want to permanently delete the item. Click the "Delete" button one more time to finalize it. Your ad is now permanently removed from your active dashboard.

You've Turned Off Your Ad - Now What?

Stopping a bad ad is only half the battle. The next step is to understand why you needed to stop it. This is where you can turn a failed ad into a valuable lesson that improves your future campaigns.

1. Analyze the Performance Data

Don't just turn off an ad and forget about it. Dive into the numbers. Ask yourself:

• Was the Cost Per Result (CPA, CPL) too high? If so, look at other metrics. Was the click-through rate low, suggesting your ad creative wasn't compelling? Or was the CTR high, but your landing page conversion rate was low, pointing to a problem outside the ad itself?
• Who was seeing the ad? Use the "Breakdown" feature in Ads Manager to see performance by age, gender, placement (e.g., Facebook Feed vs. Instagram Stories), or device. You might find that your ad performed well with a specific segment but failed with another.
• Did the ad experience fatigue? Look at the "Frequency" metric. If it’s too high, it means the same people saw your ad over and over, causing them to tune it out.

2. Review Your Funnel

Sometimes, the ad isn’t the problem at all. A user’s journey doesn’t end at the click. Consider if the issue lies further down the funnel:

• Landing Page Experience: Does your landing page deliver on the promise of your ad? Is the messaging consistent? Does it load quickly on mobile devices? A confusing or slow page will kill conversions, no matter how great your ad is.
• The Offer: Is your offer compelling enough? Perhaps the discount isn't deep enough, the lead magnet isn't valuable, or the product-market fit is just not there for the audience you were targeting.

3. Document Your Learnings

To avoid repeating the same mistakes, keep a simple log or spreadsheet documenting your campaign results. Note down the audience you targeted, the creative style you used, and a brief summary of why it succeeded or failed. This will become an invaluable playbook for building more profitable campaigns in the future.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will I still be charged after I turn off an ad?

No. Once you turn off an ad, spending stops immediately. However, you will still be billed for any costs that were accrued before you turned it off. Facebook's billing can sometimes be delayed, so you might see a charge a day or so later, but it will only be for activity that happened while the ad was active.

How can I find my ads that I've turned off or deleted?

By default, Ads Manager often hides inactive campaigns. To see them, simply go to the search and filter bar above your campaign list, click on the "Filters" dropdown, and select "Campaign Delivery," "Ad Set Delivery," or "Ad Delivery." From there, you can choose to view "Inactive" or "Deleted" items.

Can I turn off a Facebook Ad from the mobile app?

Yes. The Meta Ads Manager app makes it easy to manage campaigns on the go. Simply open the app, navigate to the ad, ad set, or campaign you wish to stop, and you'll find a similar toggle switch to turn it off.

My ad is "In Review" or "Processing." Can I still cancel it?

Absolutely. You can turn off or delete an ad at any stage, even if it's still being reviewed by Facebook's ad policy team. The process is exactly the same.

Final Thoughts

Turning off a Facebook ad is a simple mechanical process, but doing it with a clear strategy is what separates amateur advertisers from professional marketers. By knowing when to pause versus when to delete and by committing to analyzing the data from every campaign - both good and bad - you can ensure that every dollar you spend is teaching you something valuable.

Analyzing campaign success (or failure) across different platforms can feel overwhelming. Instead of spending hours cross-referencing reports in Ads Manager and beyond, we built our tool, https://www.graphed.com/register, to speed up this process. Connect your ad accounts like Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and your sales data from Shopify or Salesforce. Then, simply ask questions in plain English like, “Show me the Return On Ad Spend for all my active campaigns last week,” and get an answer and visualization in seconds. We help you skip the manual data wrangling so you can get right to the insights you need to build better campaigns.