Should you pause PPC campaigns while on holiday?
From Friday I’m on holiday for a couple of weeks and being a one-man-band I wondered whether I should keep my AdWords ads running. There are a few options such as pausing the ads during this time, using a reduced budget, pausing individual campaigns or leaving everything exactly the same, maybe even selling leads to competitors. I don’t think there is a right or wrong answer for this as it really depends on the type of website/business, how leads/sales can be managed while being away, the likelihood of losing sales because of the increased response time and also how quickly the workload can be overcome once returning. Some advertisers may be worried about having affected their quality score due to the inactivity in the accounts history, but when pausing for a short period of time I personally wouldn’t see this as a major concern.
I’m interested in seeing the actions normally used in these situations so I’ve created a poll, I haven’t used these before so have no idea what level of votes to expect.
If you have any other ideas please leave a comment, it’s likely that I’ll run a reduced budget and place a message on the confirmation page to notify people that I’m away when enquiries are made. During this time I’ll try and keep posting the weekly PPC news but otherwise posting will be light as I’ll be pretty busy travelling to Alice Spings/Ayers Rock, Melbourne, back to Sydney and then to Santa Monica before returning to the UK!
This is a problem that I face, as I am the only PPC account manager in our SEM company.
There are four main reasons that I would leave the campaigns running.
Firstly, if the campaign were to have a very bad day or two, I wouldn’t normally make a knee-jerk reaction anyway. Unless something dramatic were to happen to a website (e.g. it goes down, or the checkout process stops working), the damage is very unlikely to be that great.
Secondly, pausing our clients’ campaigns would reflect very badly on our business.
Thirdly, I’m not very rich, and would only go away for a week.
Finally, I have a laptop, and can check in about 10 minutes that nothing bad’s happened.
Perhaps this last point offers a solution?
Comment by Steve — March 22, 2007 @ 4:31 pm