To improve your advertising experience, Google Ads automatically pauses ad groups that haven't served after a set period of time. This helps to simplify your account, speed up your account access, and lets you focus on ad groups that drive results for your campaigns. This article explains how Google defines low activity ad groups, and how you can find or re-enable those ad groups.
On this page
Benefits
- Streamlined workflow: Eliminate the manual task of finding and pausing low activity ad groups, giving you time back to focus on strategic work.
- Simplified account: Focus on ad groups that drive results.
- Flexibility without limits: Unpause any ad groups you still need, if they’re still expected to perform.
How it works
Ad groups are considered low activity and may be automatically paused if they were created over 13 months ago and have 0 impressions over the past 13 months.
If you decide that a paused ad group is necessary to your campaign, you can re-enable it using the steps below. However, it’s strongly recommended that you only unpause ad groups that you believe will receive impressions in the coming weeks. Unpaused ad groups will be automatically paused again if they don’t receive any impressions for 3 months.
Instructions
You can view and re-enable automatically paused ad groups from the “Notifications” icon on the top bar of your Google Ads account, from the “Ad groups” page, or in Google Ads Editor.
From your Notifications
- Click the Notifications icon
at the top bar of your Google Ads account. Select the notification about low activity ad groups and click View.
- The “Ad groups” page shows a list of paused ad groups. You can filter paused ad groups based on “Status reason”.
- Low activity ad groups will have the status “Paused (due to low activity)”.
- To turn on paused ad groups again, follow the instructions to Pause or enable your ad groups.
From the "Ad groups" page
- In your Google Ads account, click the Campaigns icon
.
- Click the Campaigns drop down in the section menu.
- Click Ad groups.
- Click the filter icon
and input “Status reason”.
- Check “Ad group paused due to low activity” and click Apply.
- To turn on paused ad groups again, follow the instructions to Pause or enable your ad groups.
and input “Status reason”.In Google Ads Editor
Ad groups that are paused due to low activity are visible in Google Ads Editor. To view your paused ad groups, filter by “Paused by system reason” and select Low activity, then click Apply.
