Should you pause your Google Ads over Christmas?

Every year clients ask us whether they should turn off their paid ads over the Christmas period. It’s not an easy yes or no answer – it depends on your setup and your audience.

Reasons to pause your ads:

• If you have no staff to respond to enquiries, you could be wasting clicks. People may want to speak to someone within 24 hours so if you are keeping ads on, make sure someone is actively picking the enquires up. This is particularly important if you’re closed for longer than just a few days over the Christmas period.
• It’s also not a good idea to leave ads running for an extended period if no one’s around to monitor them – that’s how you end up overspending.
• How’s your workload looking for January? Would that extra few days (or even a couple of weeks) of demand from additional paid ad leads be more than you could handle on your return? If you don’t need the leads for the new year, there’s not much point in running ads.
• Search intent may weaken over the festive period – if your target audience are on their holidays, they may not commit to enquiring or buying, and you may get more top-of-funnel searches, resulting in lower conversion rates. That said, if you do keep ads on, remarketing campaigns targeting the users in the new year could help!

Reasons not to pause your ads:

• For B2B businesses, it’s highly likely that at least some of your competitors will be pausing their ads for the reasons listed above. It could lead to cheaper Cost Per Clicks and Cost Per Conversions while there’s less competition.
• However, for B2C companies, it could be a good time for more sales and demand – people on holiday have more free time to browse and spend.
• Learning phase and ad rank could be impacted if you turn your ads off – if you want to avoid campaigns going back into learning phase and slowing you down once the new year begins, you can instead just lower your budgets – but try and keep the changes less than 20%.
• If you have a Grant account, it’s best to keep them running – otherwise, you’ll lose out on that grant allocation.

Our verdict:

Every account is different but hopefully the above will help provide a little guidance on your decision. In short:

– B2C account? Keep your Ads running and take advantage of potential reduced competition and increased demand.

– B2B account? If users are unable to get in touch with your team, consider turning your ads off to avoid wasting ad spend. Otherwise, it could be a good opportunity for reduced competition and avoiding the campaign learning phases.

We wish you a lovely festive break – Splitpixel offices are closed from the 23^rd to the 2^nd for 2023/24, so get in touch before then with any questions!