When Should You Pause Your Pay Per click Campaigns?

Writing by Pay Per Click Journal on Wednesday, February 6, 2008 Leave a comment

(Source) You need to check your campaigns constantly, and you certainly don’t want to be losing money in your advertising attempts. In my experience, it’s imperative to know when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em, so to speak. If something’s wrong with your campaign, sometimes the right thing to do is pause your ads and figure out what’s causing the problem, then make those changes and resume for testing.

This could be an expensive lesson. If you are spending thousands of dollars on pay per click every month, you’d better know when to pause your campaigns. But how do you know?

There is no sure fire way to know when to pause your pay per click campaigns, but I can give you some food for thought. Certain things are a no-brainer. Other things just may be a matter of preference. Either way, you should have a policy in place that says you’ll pause your pay per click campaigns under certain circumstances. Here are a few recommendations, but keep in mind that only you can set the policy for your company:

• Any time you are losing more than 10% of your budget. That could be a lot of money depending on your budget. Many tweaks can take place as you develop your pay per click campaigns and most of them will yield immediate or near immediate results such that you can know within a reasonable amount of time whether your tweaks helped you or not. But if you are losing more than 10% of your budget each month then you should pause your campaigns and figure out why you are losing money.
• You have experienced a shortfall for three months in a row. Don’t go too long losing money. You may not be losing 10%. But 2% or 3% every month will add up over time. If you are consistently losing money, pause your pay per click  campaigns and find out what’s wrong.
• A major industry event causes you to refocus your marketing strategy. If you are faced with sweeping changes in your industry that will affect how you market your business then you’d better pause your campaigns before you get too deep.
• Your keywords change drastically. If a change in your targeted keywords is more than a few tweaks here and there then you need to pause your campaign until you narrow down the keywords you want to use.
• If your website or landing page goes down for an extended period of time. If you lose your server, your web page is hijacked, or something happens to your landing page to cause it to be off line for too long then pause your PPC campaigns. If we’re talking about just a couple of hours then it may not be necessary to shut off your campaigns. But if you’re down for more than that then pause your campaigns until you get them back up.
• Personnel transitions. If you are making personnel transitions that affect who is running your PPC campaign, you don’t necessarily have to pause your PPC for that, but if the transition is causing a breakdown in communication or your personnel are having a difficult time getting together to pass the baton then you may want to pause your campaigns until the situation is ironed out.
• Seasonal changes. If your business operates on seasonal highs and lows then you may time your pay per click  campaigns to coincide with those. That could require pausing your campaigns momentarily in between your seasons.

There may be other reasons you’d want to pause your pay per click  advertising for a brief period. It is something you need to think about and for every business there will inevitably come a time when pausing your pay per click  campaigns is a must. It’s best that you think about it before the time is necessary.

Leave a comment                      Category: PPC Management                      

Read similar posts in PPC Management

• Mother's Day Optimization For PPC
• How To Organize Your PPC Campaigns
• Is Click Fraud Getting Lower?
• How Does 24% Equate To Effective PPC?
• The Best Keyword Trick In The Book

Subscribe to our RSS feed

No comments yet.