How to Pause a Google Ad Campaign

Sometimes your best-performing ad campaign needs a time-out, and that's perfectly fine. Knowing how to efficiently pause and restart your Google Ads campaigns is a fundamental skill for managing your budget, refining your strategy, and responding to real-world events. This article will walk you through exactly how to pause (and re-enable) campaigns, why you'd want to, and the key differences between pausing and removing one altogether.

When to Pause a Google Ad Campaign

Pausing ads isn't a sign of failure, it's a strategic move. While every advertiser’s situation is unique, here are a few common scenarios where hitting the pause button makes perfect sense:

• Budget Constraints: One of the most common reasons. If you need to temporarily cut back on spending or reallocate your budget to other marketing channels, pausing high-spend campaigns is an immediate way to stop the clock on costs.
• Poor Performance: If a campaign is burning through your budget with a low click-through rate (CTR), a high cost-per-acquisition (CPA), or a negative return on ad spend (ROAS), it's wise to pause it. This gives you time to diagnose the problem, rework your creative, tighten your keyword targeting, or adjust your landing page without wasting more money.
• Going on Vacation or Holiday: If you run a small business and you’re the only person who can handle new leads or orders, you might pause your campaigns while you’re out of office to avoid frustrating potential customers.
• Website Maintenance: Planning on taking your site down for updates or redesigns? The last thing you want is to pay for clicks that lead to a broken or offline page. Pause all your campaigns until the site is back up and fully functional.
• Inventory Issues: If you sell physical products and a popular item is out of stock, it’s smart to pause the specific campaigns or ad groups promoting that product until you’ve restocked.
• Strategic Pivots: You might be A/B testing a completely new marketing message or launching a major new product. Pausing older, less relevant campaigns ensures your budget goes entirely toward the new initiative and prevents confusing or conflicting messages.
• Seasonality: If you sell Christmas decorations, it doesn’t make sense to run your campaigns in July. Pausing them during the off-season preserves their performance history and allows for a quick reactivation when the holidays are approaching.

Pause vs. Remove vs. Enable: Understanding the Difference

In Google Ads, every campaign, ad group, ad, and keyword has a status. The three you'll use most often are Paused, Enabled, and Removed. It’s critical to understand the difference because choosing the wrong one can have permanent consequences.

• A Paused ad is temporarily inactive. It won't be shown to users and won't accrue any costs. All of its data, settings, performance history, and Quality Score are preserved. You can re-enable it at any time with a single click. Think of this as putting your campaign on hold.
• An Enabled ad is active and running. Google is eligible to show your ads to users based on your targeting settings, and you will be charged for any interactions like clicks or impressions. This is the default status for a live campaign.
• A Removed ad is permanently deleted. You cannot edit, reactivate, or undo this action. While you can still see its historical performance data in your reports, the campaign itself is gone for good. Always be 100% sure you want to remove a campaign, as this action cannot be reversed. In almost all cases, pausing is a safer and better option.

How to Pause a Single Google Ad Campaign (Step-by-Step)

Pausing an individual campaign is straightforward. The iconic green dot next to your campaign name is your control button.

1. Sign in to your Google Ads account.
2. From the main navigation menu on the left, click on Campaigns. This will take you to a table showing all of your campaigns.
3. Locate the campaign you wish to pause. To the left of the campaign name, you will see a colored dot indicating its status (it will be green if the campaign is active).
4. Hover your mouse over the green dot. A small dropdown arrow will appear.
5. Click the dot to open the status menu, and then select Pause.

That's it! The dot will change from green to a gray pause symbol. Your campaign is now paused, and its ads will no longer be delivered.

How to Pause Multiple Google Ad Campaigns at Once

If you're managing several campaigns, pausing them one by one is tedious. Fortunately, Google Ads makes it easy to update campaigns in bulk.

1. Navigate to your Campaigns list.
2. Click the checkbox to the left of each campaign you want to pause. Selecting these checkboxes will cause a blue menu bar to appear at the top of the campaign table.
3. Click on the Edit button in that blue bar.
4. From the dropdown menu that appears, select Pause.

All of the campaigns you selected will now be paused simultaneously.

Pausing at Different Levels: Ad Groups, Keywords, and Ads

Sometimes you don't need to pause an entire campaign. Maybe just one ad group isn't performing well, or a specific keyword is costing too much. You have the same level of control over every element within your campaign.

Pausing Ad Groups

• In the left navigation menu, select the campaign containing the ad group.
• Below the campaign name, click on Ad groups.
• Find the ad group you want to pause and click the green status dot next to its name. Select Pause from the dropdown menu.

Pausing Individual Ads

• Select the correct Campaign and Ad Group from the left navigation.
• Click on Ads.
• Find the specific ad and use the green status dot to pause it, just like you would for a campaign or ad group.

Pausing Keywords

• Select the correct Campaign and Ad Group.
• In the sub-menu, click on Search keywords.
• Find the keyword(s) you want to stop and use the checkboxes and the 'Edit' menu to pause them in bulk, or use the status dot to pause them one by one.

What Happens After You Pause a Campaign?

Once you pause something in Google Ads, here’s what you can expect:

• Ad Delivery Stops: Ads from the paused campaign, ad group, or keyword will stop showing almost immediately.
• Billing Continues Briefly: Don't be alarmed if you see a few more charges trickle in. Google's billing system can have a slight delay, so you may be charged for clicks that occurred just moments before you hit pause.
• History is Preserved: All your performance metrics, Quality Score, and change history are perfectly safe.
• Learning Stops: Smart Bidding strategies rely on recent data to optimize performance. When a campaign is paused for a significant period, it may enter a "learning phase" again when you re-enable it, as it needs to gather fresh data. This is normal and usually only lasts a few days.

How to Re-enable a Paused Campaign

Ready to start your ads again? Re-enabling is just as easy as pausing.

Simply navigate back to the same list - whether for Campaigns, Ad Groups, or Keywords - and find the paused item. Click on the gray pause symbol next to its name and select Enable from the dropdown menu. The status indicator will turn green, and your ads will once again be eligible to run.

Final Thoughts

Pausing your assets in Google Ads isn’t just about stopping spending, it's a key tool for strategic account management, giving you precise control over your budget and messaging. Mastering this simple function allows you to be nimble, reacting quickly to performance data, business changes, or inventory updates without losing valuable historical data.

Of course, knowing when to pause a campaign all comes down to having clear, accessible performance data. We built Graphed because we were tired of jumping between Google Ads, Google Analytics, and our CRM just to figure out which campaigns were actually driving revenue. We connect all those data sources in one place so we can ask simple questions in plain English - like "create a dashboard comparing Facebook Ads spend vs Google Ads ROAS for the last 30 days" - and get a live, interactive dashboard in seconds. It allows us to move much faster from data to decision, making it easy to spot underperformers that need to be paused.