Google rolls out a permanent change that automatically pauses ad groups that were created at least 13 months ago and have not had impressions in the past 13 months. The rollout is starting March 11, 2024 and is expected to be complete for all production Google Ads accounts by April 30, 2024.
Google says this is being done to improve Google Ads experience for advertisers.
Advertisers who are affected by this change will be able to unpause ad groups if they still need them. However, Google recommend that advertisers review their ad groups and only unpause the ones you expect to get impressions in the coming weeks. Unpaused ad groups will be automatically paused again if they don’t receive any impressions over the next 3 months.
What do you need to change?
No code changes are necessary, but Google Ads API developers can make changes to improve the transparency to their advertisers as to why the ad_group.status is set to PAUSED. If you keep local copies of Google Ads information in your database, you can keep them in sync by querying change history.
You can query the change event to see if the ad group status has changed with the following query for all API versions. If the change_event.changed_fields contains status, then this is an ad group that Google paused. Make sure to replace INSERT_YYYY-MMM-DD with your own date range.
Starting with v16, the API returns the reason as to why the ad group was paused with new fields. You can adjust the change history query to include these fields.
You will still be able to update your ad groups and make changes while they are in a paused state.
More details you can find here.
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