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Have you ever logged into adCenter to find that your account is on ‘budget pause’ and wondered “WHY?! Why does this keep happening”? Well read on to find out why!
adCenter has two ways to put campaigns on pause. With manual pause, you can pause the campaign by checking the box to the left of the campaign name and then selecting “Pause campaign” from the Actions drop down menu:
In this case, you’re in control. When you would like the campaign to resume, simply check the box to the left of the campaign again, but this time you’ll select “Resume campaign” from the Actions drop down menu. Your campaign will go back to an ‘Active’ status and your ads will begin to display again.
The other way for a campaign to be paused is what’s called “Budget pause”. In this case, adCenter has automatically placed your campaign on pause due to budget restraints. For example, let’s say you have a monthly budget of $1,500.00. If you have chosen to ‘spend until depleted’ and you have spent your entire budget by the 25th of that month, adCenter will put that campaign on budget pause since you have no more money to spend for the month.
Your campaign can also go on budget pause on a daily basis, if you have chosen ‘divide across the month’ as your budgeting option. Using the $1,500.00 per month example, if you are spending $50.00 a day, adCenter will put your campaign into budget pause for the rest of the day so you will not overspend your monthly budget. If you find that your daily spend* is averaging more than your monthly budget divided by 30, adCenter will not refund you that amount. On the other hand, if your monthly budget has overspent by the end of the month, then adCenter will automatically refund you for the overage. For example, the monthly budget below is $1,876.93 and the campaign spent a total of $1,896.69. adCenter will refund the account $19.76.
Understanding the different pause features in adCenter can help you keep your campaigns running smoothly. Good luck with your campaigns!
*If you find that your campaign is going over the daily spend frequently, consider lowering your daily spend amount by 15% and it should average out to be pretty accurate so you don’t deplete your monthly budget prematurely.
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Thanks! That was a big help, and easily explained - something you don't find a lot of when it comes to explanations of paid search ;)
I've had two campaigns go on Budget Pause today and both times increasing spend, save the change and then "resume" the campaign failed to bring the campaign off budget pause. This should happen immediately but doesn't. This morning I had to call Ad Center Support on this and the nice lady who helped me was able to get it off budget pause, but it has occurred again this evening on another campaign. I also suggest that AdCenter provide some feedback on the budget pause such as "increase spend to $xx.xx per month" to move this process along.
My Campaign is Budget Paused after spending $1.49 after one day with $5 daily budget. There's nothing to restart the campaign even if I bump up the daily budget to $10. adCenter is so inferior compared to AdWords. It's a very frustrating product.
Hello Sam,
Without looking into your account. I am unable give you a full detailed answer. If you could Contact Support we can look into why you are going into Budget Pause before your Daily Targetted Spend.
Thank you,
Microsoft Advertising Support
By the way, how can we activate back those ad groups that is budget paused? We have 3 ad groups which budget are paused. All of them are on a daily budget of $2.00 and with an average of $62 per month. I increased one ad group to $3.00 per day, so it should activate again but it didn't. Am I missing something here?
Budget Pause is the worst feature ever. Adcenter is terrible - we are all so spoiled with Google, who has their program together. AdCenter is like a 79 Pinto and Adwords is like a Ferrari. A VERY long way to go - the most frustrating system by far - especially when search engine advertising is the sole revenue generator. Google needs to buy Microsoft and put an end to the junky code and features (or lack thereof).