Are you looking for an answer to one of the most asked questions by digital marketers—when you should or shouldn’t pause your ad campaign you are skeptical about? And if you should, what are the metrics that you need to analyze before putting it on hold?
Well, we have the answer to all your questions. In fact, we have painted a clear picture in this blog of what you should check twice before you decide to pause your ad campaign.
Unfortunately, a successful ad campaign does not have an ON/OFF switch. An ad campaign is essentially more like taking off and landing an aircraft. No matter how well you land your aircraft [pause your ad campaign], you cannot expect an immediate jump in the air once the rotor stops spinning. And an uneven landing might mean never taking off again.
Whether you are running an ad campaign on Google, Facebook, or LinkedIn, or you are creating an email post-click landing page campaign, if you do not track the metrics regularly, it essentially means you are running a campaign with no profitable prospects.
Advertising metrics help you ascertain what needs to change, and the overall progress of your ad campaign. Many times, it may occur that an ad campaign is not generating leads, and you might rush into the decision of pausing it. This is where you should recheck certain metrics just to be sure about your decision.
Top 4 Metrics You Should Analyze Before You Pause Your Ad Campaign
1. Click-Assisted Conversions
Click-assisted conversions are the total number of conversions for which a particular keyword, ad, or ad group contributed in one or more clicks. These particular statistics reflect only the activity on Google Search Network 30 days prior to the conversion. To view the data, you must be using conversion tracking and have at least one conversion.
This metric is important to review to know that your campaign is part of the bigger buyer journey. In the last-click attribution model, the campaign is in the middle of the journey to help the user get closer and complete the final conversion.
2. Impression-Assisted Conversions
Impression-assisted conversions are the total number of conversions that helped in conversion but not with a triggered click. It is somewhat similar to the click-assisted conversions but definitely trickier than that.
These are those conversions for which a particular keyword, ad, or ad group assisted with an impression before getting to the last click. With this particular metric, you can see how many conversions were assisted with each campaign or ad group.
You can see google search network activity 30 days prior to a conversion. Again, to view this data, you must be using conversion tracking and have at least one conversion.
3. Average Session Duration
The average session duration is used to measure visitor quality. If you are running your ad campaign on the Google platform, the numbers for average session duration can be imported from Google Analytics account, and the average duration is calculated only from sessions that originated from AdWords click. The column will show you the average time in seconds from people who searched for a particular keyword in your ad and clicked through to the website from your ad.
You might be wondering the importance of this metric. Well, it can actually help you make better decisions as you can look past the lack of conversions and analyze other factors like landing page visits.
Therefore, understand where they are lacking, whether they are missing a strong CTA or your offer is not easy to understand, which is making people leave without clicking.
4. Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is defined as the percentage of single-page visitors on the website. Or, in other words, the users who never made it past the first landing page of the website. These numbers are imported from analytics accounts and are calculated based only on visits that originated from ad clicks.
This is one of the most important metrics to review as sometimes everything in your ad campaign might be perfect except the landing page, which might have not been optimized.
To fix this problem, reviewing keywords systematically could be the first step. Also, you can check for any errors in the landing pages or review your ad copy before pausing that ad campaign.
Metrics aren’t the only thing!
There are other things that hold equal importance, the solutions to which can help you plan your course of action accordingly.
Best Ad Campaign Strategies You Should Follow in 2021
Expect Slow Ramping After You Resume Your Ad Campaign
Pausing and resuming a campaign does not hamper the quality score or the historical data but will surely affect the performance of your campaign.
This kind of performance delay happens because the rest of the world did not stop their ad campaign when you did. Paid search platforms like Google AdWords and Bing Ads use complex algorithms to determine which ads to be shown to which set of particular users. Pausing an ad campaign for too long could mean that your data is stale and might even need data re-establishment.
This means that it could be anywhere between weeks and months for your metrics to level out depending upon the budget and also the click volume. And even if everything goes in the right direction, where your campaign’s performance levels out may depend on other factors in the market, such as keyword trends and competitor bids.
Use Automated Rules to Schedule Campaign Pause
Almost all ad campaign platforms including AdWords have various tools that can automate almost every aspect of a campaign. You can set up complex rules to trigger functions on campaigns and keywords, which might become overwhelming at some point. But those same automated tools can be used to set up simple automatic functions such as pausing and resuming an ad campaign on a specific date and time.
Plan Ahead As Much As You Can
This is a good piece of advice for your life situation and also for certain situations when you decide to pause your ad campaign. The most common issue you may come across with clients is realizing the need to pause a campaign just after putting some other digital marketing efforts. For example, after launching a blog or releasing a new product.
One thing that can suffer the most when you pause or resume your ads is the results from A/B tests and other market experiments. Gathering relevant and statistically significant data from the tests is no piece of cake, and it becomes easy to compromise that data without even realizing it.
In such cases, one of the best ad campaign strategies is to either wrap up all the tests before you pause a campaign or get ready to bid goodbye to whatever data you have gathered with the resuming of the ad campaign.
Consider Business Reality More Significant Than Marketing Metrics
Running their businesses efficiently is more important to small business owners than facing the day-to-day realities of running a business. On the other hand, marketing teams of larger companies or external marketing agencies remain unaffected by budgeting priorities. Their job is to get maximum impressions, clicks, and conversions in a particular month than they did in the past. And honestly, pausing an ad campaign for, say, three weeks is quite the opposite of it.
Seeing that drop in the leads hurts not only the data analysts, but us too. Therefore, we at Growth Natives put our client’s needs first and aim to drive their lead generation forward and ROI growth further.
If you are looking for an agency that prioritizes your budget along with leads, talk to us here.
Conclusion
Often the last click before the conversion swoops away all the credit. But in reality, there are other impressions and clicks that might have guided those leads to conversions. So, do not jump to the conclusion of pausing your campaign right away; do the research and understand the full impact of a particular keyword in your ad campaign.
The best-case scenario is that you will never have to pause your ad campaign and may continue getting those clicks and customers forever. But the reality is, we do not live in a world of best cases, and so we must accept that sometimes it might be necessary to pause a campaign for a while.
And if you do find yourself stuck in such a situation, Growth Natives’ experience will help make your ad campaign experience as smooth as possible.
Share your ad campaign experience with us and let us find if you really need to pause your ad campaign.