Turning off your paid advertising, such as Google Ads, Bing Ads, or paid social media advertising, can have significant and far-reaching impacts on your business.
The point is that you can pause or turn off paid ads, but should you?
Those Impacts in Detail
First, let’s look at the consequences of pausing a paid advertising campaign or even coming to a complete stop!
The Immediate Traffic and Engagement Drop
Pausing paid ads can lead to an immediate and drastic drop in website traffic and customer engagement. For example, if you’re driving 60% of your website visitors and engagements using Google Ads and you switch off the entire campaign, it doesn’t take a genius to point out that you’ll see both metrics drop by… er… 60%.
Similarly, pausing Amazon PPC campaigns can result in a significant loss of product page traffic, let alone conversions and sales.
Impact on Organic Channels
The reduction in visibility and engagement from paid ads can also negatively affect organic search rankings and social media interactions. Whilst paid channel traffic can be turned off at the flick of a switch (literally), the indirect and less obviously tangible effects of brand awareness can drop too. So fundamentally, turning off paid ads will also impact your brand’s organic visibility and traffic levels.
Competitor Advantage
Pausing your ads will give your competitors, who continue to advertise, a significant advantage. This can lead to a loss of market share and customer attention, as your competitors can capture the traffic and conversions that your paused ads would have generated. That was YOUR traffic, now it’s theirs!
Algorithmic and Performance Disruptions
Another issue often overlooked and misunderstood: pausing ad campaigns disrupts the algorithmic learning and momentum built up by the ad system. When campaigns are reactivated, the Google Ads algorithm, for example, needs to readjust, which can lead to temporary inefficiencies and higher cost per click (CPC) as the algorithm experiments to find the new optimal performance levels.
Long-Term Consequences
Consistent paid advertising is crucial for long-term business success, especially when part of an integrated marketing approach. Pausing your ad campaigns can break the momentum and what some call the “flywheel effect” that continuous advertising builds, leading to reduced brand awareness, lower sales, and decreased customer engagement over time.
Multi-Channel Impact
The impact of pausing paid ads is not limited to the paid channel itself or organic, as we mentioned previously, but can ripple out across all your marketing channels. This underscores the critical importance of your company using a multi-channel strategy where no single channel is neglected, as the performance of one channel can affect others.
Why do Paid Ad campaigns Get Paused?
Now that you know what can happen when ads are paused, why do businesses do it? Hopefully, it doesn’t happen often, if at all, but when it does it’s for the usual reasons:
Not Getting the Results You Want or Expect
It’s understandably disappointing when a paid ad campaign doesn’t achieve the results you either wanted or expected, but that’s not a good reason to simply stop the advertising. Just as with the ad platform itself – there is a learning curve to any campaign.
Patience is definitely a virtue when it comes to any marketing campaign, but with paid it’s a slightly different matter, when it’s so easy to see the budget being spent.
A competent and agile agency will quickly dig into the data to find the cause and then adjust the campaign to address the issue, all the while keeping a close eye on things until they improve.
Whichever of the myriad factors is impeding your success, having the expertise of an ad agency like Clever Marketing will help you get back on track.
Budgetary Issues
Budget constraints are a key reason for hitting the pause button on paid advertising campaigns. Running out of budget is something we see every so often with legacy accounts that we pick up here at Clever Marketing. It’s quite common that an earlier agency or paid media account manager has neither asked for nor been given sufficient budget.
Sometimes, there may be a general economic downturn, or a drop in revenue, that puts a squeeze on the marketing department.
The solution is to have proper budgetary management in place.
Seasonal Promotions
Paid ads for seasonal products or services have a comparatively short shelf life next to those that are advertised all year round. Whether it’s Easter, Summer, back to school, Black Friday, Cyber Monday or Christmas, these ads will get turned off and won’t be reactivated until next year when you have to start again with revised budgets and competitors.
Of course, whilst seasonal campaigns are in motion, your regular ads may need to go on pause. After all, you can’t display ads for both regular prices and the discounted seasonal price – that causes confusion for users and can put you in legal hot water too.
Strategic Repositioning
A strategic shift in focus may mean pausing paid ads for some specific products and services whilst redeploying resource towards others.
This is entirely natural as advertisers adapt to changing market dynamics such as competition, consumer preferences, new markets, or even repositioning the brand.
Campaign Optimisation
And then, of course, there can be changes in campaign activity as advertisers optimise accounts, adjusting targeting, bidding strategy or switching ad creatives.
It’s best practice for a good paid ad agency to pause underperforming ads and introduce improved creative, be it images, copy, or audio visual.
Unintentional Pauses
Another reason for pausing ads may be for unforeseen circumstances such as the credit card on the account has expired, a policy violation, or even a technical or account level issue.
Whatever, the reason, you’ll want an experienced PPC team, like us here at Clever Marketing, to be on point to deal with such issues swiftly and professionally.
Alternative Strategies
Instead of completely pausing ads, it’s often better to adjust your budget or use ad scheduling to manage periods when you need to reduce or stop advertising. Reducing the budget or setting an ad schedule blackout can help maintain campaign momentum and avoid the negative impacts associated with pausing ads entirely.
Alternatively, you can secure the services of the paid advertising experts at Clever Marketing who have nearly forty years’ experience between them.
Conclusion
To sum it all up, turning off paid advertising can lead to immediate and significant drops in traffic and engagement, disrupt algorithmic performance, give competitors an advantage, and have long-term negative consequences for your business. It is generally advisable to maintain a consistent advertising strategy and consider alternative adjustments when necessary.
If you’re struggling to manage your own paid campaigns or you need an experienced PPC agency to take up the slack, call Clever Marketing on 01276 402 381 or fill in our easy contact form.