How to Pause a Boosted Post on Facebook

You hit the Boost Post button on Facebook with high hopes, but now something's wrong. Maybe the ad isn't performing, your budget needs to go elsewhere, or you spotted a glaring typo right after it went live. In this guide, we’ll walk you through exactly how to pause a boosted post, explaining when and why you should, and how to do it without losing your data. We'll cover the step-by-step process using Meta's Ads Manager for complete control.

Why Pause a Boosted Post Instead of Deleting It?

Before getting into the "how," let's quickly cover the "why." Pausing an ad is a powerful, reversible action, while deleting is permanent. Every marketer, freelancer, or business owner has run into a situation where they need to stop an ad mid-campaign. Understanding your options is the first step.

Here are the most common scenarios where pausing is the right move:

• Underperformance: The ad creative or copy just isn't resonating with your audience. The click-through rate (CTR) is low, engagement is non-existent, and you're not seeing the results you expected. Pausing gives you time to step back, analyze the data, and create a better version without completely scrapping the old campaign's learning.
• Budget Reallocation: You might have another ad that's performing exceptionally well and you want to shift your budget to the winner. Instead of letting a weaker ad eat up valuable marketing dollars, you can pause it and double down on what’s working.
• Inaccurate Information: Oops. You boosted a post advertising a sale that ends tomorrow, but you typed "next week." Or perhaps the call-to-action link is broken. If the core post has a mistake, you'll need to pause the promotion to stop sending people to incorrect information. Unlike the ad settings (like audience or budget), you can't edit the original post once it has been boosted without stopping the ad.
• Monitoring Comments: Sometimes, a post can attract negative comments or spark an unintended, off-brand conversation. Pausing the boost gives your team breathing room to manage the community aspect without pouring more money into amplifying a difficult situation.
• External Events: A major news event or a shift in cultural conversation can make a previously harmless ad seem tone-deaf or inappropriate. The ability to quickly pause promotions allows your brand to pivot with sensitivity and avoid a potential PR headache.

Pausing vs. Deleting: A Critical Distinction

This is an important concept for anyone managing Facebook ads. The two options sound similar, but their consequences are vastly different.

When you pause a boosted post:

• Your ad stops running deliveries and you stop being charged.
• All the performance data, audience insights, and metrics are preserved in your Ads Manager.
• The engagement (both paid and organic) that the post already received remains.
• You can resume the ad at any time, picking up right where you left off.

When you delete a boosted post:

• The ad campaign is permanently removed from your Ads Manager.
• All performance data associated with that specific ad is gone for good. You can’t recover it.
• The original organic Facebook post remains on your page, but the promotion itself disappears forever.

The golden rule is this: almost always choose to pause. It provides flexibility without losing the valuable data history you might need for future reporting or strategic pivots. Deleting should be reserved for cleaning up draft campaigns that never ran or removing absolute clutter, but it’s rarely the right choice for an active ad.

How to Pause a Boosted Post: A Step-by-Step Guide

While Facebook makes it easy to boost a post with a single click, the controls for managing it are best found inside Meta Ads Manager. This dashboard gives you granular control over all your advertising activities, not just boosts. Here is the most reliable way to find and pause your ad.

Step 1: Go to Meta Ads Manager

Boosting a page post creates a real ad campaign behind the scenes. You can find this campaign in Ads Manager. You can get there by navigating directly to facebook.com/adsmanager or by going to your Facebook page, clicking "Meta Business Suite" on the left-hand menu, and then selecting "Ads" from there.

Step 2: Locate Your Boosted Post Campaign

Once you’re in Ads Manager, you'll see a dashboard with tabs for Campaigns, Ad Sets, and Ads. Stick to the Campaigns tab for now.

You need to find the specific campaign that corresponds to your boosted post. Facebook’s naming conventions can make this tricky, but here’s how to spot it:

• The campaign name will typically be "Boosted post" or it will use the first few words of your post’s text. For example, if your post started with “Huge summer sale this weekend!,” the campaign might be named “Huge summer sale this weekend!”
• Under the "Campaign Name" column, you’ll also notice performance metrics. If you recently boosted the post, you can sort by the "Last edited" or "Created" columns to bring recent activity to the top.

If you're managing multiple ads, it might be a bit harder to find the right campaign. You can usually identify it by checking the campaign date, spend, or by clicking into the campaign and then the "Ads" tab to preview the ad creative to confirm that it is the correct post you’re looking to edit.

Step 3: Pause the Campaign Using the Toggle Switch

This is the quickest and easiest part of the process. To the left of your campaign's name, you'll see a blue toggle switch. When the switch is blue, it means the campaign is active.

Simply click this toggle. It will turn gray, and the status under the "Delivery" column will change from "Active" to "Off."

That's it! Your boosted post is now paused. Facebook will stop distributing it to users, and your ad spend for this promotion will halt immediately.

To resume the boosted post later, you can come back to the same view in Ads Manager and click the gray toggle switch again to turn it back on. The status will flick back to "Active," though it may briefly show a status like "In Review" while Facebook checks it.

Can You Pause a Boost from Your Facebook Page Directly?

Sometimes, but it’s not the most reliable method. Facebook frequently changes the user interface, but you can often find a shortcut to manage your boost directly from the original post on your business page. Here's how to try it:

1. Navigate to your business page and find the post you boosted.
2. Below the post, you should see a button that says either "View Results" or "Manage Ad." Click it.
3. A pane or pop-up window will appear with performance metrics. Look for a settings icon (usually a gear or three dots) or a button that explicitly says "Pause Ad" or "Pause Promotion."

While this method works in a pinch, learning to use Ads Manager is a better practice. Ads Manager provides a centralized view of all your ads and offers much more control than the on-page shortcuts, which are designed for simplicity over functionality.

Pro Tips for Managing Boosted Posts

Now that you know how to pause an ad, here are a few best practices to ensure you're managing your boosted content effectively. These tips will help you save money, improve your results, and avoid common mistakes.

1. Don't Be Too Quick to Pause

When you first launch a boosted post, Meta's algorithm enters a "learning phase." During this period, which can last a few days or until the ad receives about 50 key results, the system is actively experimenting to find the best people in your audience to show the ad to. Performance might seem unstable or poor during this phase.

Unless there’s a critical error (like a typo or a broken link), give your ad at least 24-48 hours to collect data before judging its performance. Pausing an ad too early prevents the algorithm from optimizing, and you may be cutting off a campaign just before it was about to start delivering great results.

2. Understand Your "Objective"

When you boost a post, Facebook asks you to choose an objective, such as "Get more engagement," "Get more messages," or "Get more website visitors." The objective you set determines how Meta finds an audience and what it optimizes for. If you boosted a post to drive website traffic but are disappointed by the lack of likes and comments, you might not have a performance problem, you might have a problem with your objective. The ad is still succeeding - it’s sending people to your site.

Always align your expectations with your campaign objective. Pausing a successfully running ad because you judged it based on the wrong metrics will impact your return on ad spend.

3. Use Ads Manager for Real Control

Relying solely on the "Boost Post" button on your brand's page is limiting. It only gives you access to a smaller selection of the powerful tools Meta Ads Manager has available. The "Boost Post" button is perfect for beginner advertisers looking to get started as it uses a simplified version of Facebook's objective goals and targeting features. By using Ads Manager's power, you may improve the results from your campaign. Consider graduating from boosting to creating "dark posts" or unpublished page posts within Ads Manager. It takes a little bit of extra time but opens more options, allowing you to A/B test different ad visuals and ad copy headlines to help you find what resonates with clients on Facebook.

Final Thoughts

Pausing a boosted post on Facebook is a simple way to maintain total control of your ad. Use Meta Ad Manager to easily find and pause campaigns without losing valuable performance data. Whether you're dealing with underperformance, a low return on ad spend, a major mistake in the ad creative, or a shift in your company's strategy, stopping an ad is easy.

Knowing exactly how to manage ad campaigns once they're live is only one part of building a great social presence. Staying organized across platforms - planning your content, scheduling it consistently, and analyzing what works - is a challenge for every marketer. At Postbase, we eliminate that chaos with a modern, visual-first platform. Our content calendar lets you see your entire organic strategy at a glance, drag and drop posts to reschedule, and ensure every piece of content is perfectly planned before you ever think about putting ad spend behind it.