How to Pause Facebook Ads

Need to take a breather from your Facebook ads without deleting all your hard work? Pausing your ads is a simple, strategic move that every marketer should know how to do. This guide walks you through exactly how to pause ads at the campaign, ad set, and individual ad levels, clarifies the differences, and explains a few common scenarios where hitting pause is the smartest play you can make.

Why You Should Pause Ads Instead of Deleting Them

In the world of Facebook Ads, the delete button is scarier than it looks. Clicking it is permanent, and once you do, you lose everything associated with that campaign, ad set, or ad. Your performance data, engagement metrics (likes, comments, shares), and all the valuable insights from Meta's learning phase are gone for good. It's like tearing a page out of your marketing playbook - you can never get it back.

Pausing, on the other hand, is like putting a bookmark in that page. It’s a temporary stop that preserves all your hard-earned data and settings. Here’s why it’s almost always the better choice:

• Keep Your Data Intact: Your ad's history - impressions, click-through rates, conversion data, and comments - all remain. This data is priceless for future analysis and decision-making.
• Retain Social Proof: If an ad has accumulated a healthy amount of likes and positive comments, pausing keeps that social proof attached to the ad. If you delete it, all that engagement vanishes.
• Easy to Restart: When you're ready to go live again, restarting a paused ad takes a single click. Launching a new one from scratch means going through the entire setup and learning phase all over again.
• Maintain Your Campaign Structure: Deleting one part of a campaign can mess up your organization. Pausing keeps your Ads Manager clean and your historical campaign structures visible for reference.

Bottom line: Almost never delete. Unless you’ve made a major setup error and the campaign has zero data you need to keep, pausing is the way to go.

A Quick Refresher: The Structure of Facebook Ads

Before you start flipping switches, it’s good to have a clear picture of the hierarchy inside Facebook Ads Manager. Every ad exists within a three-level structure. Pausing happens at each of these levels, and what you pause determines the impact.

• Campaign Level: This is the top level. Here, you set your main advertising objective - like driving website traffic, generating leads, or increasing brand awareness. A campaign holds one or more ad sets.
• Ad Set Level: This is the middle level. This is where you define your targeting strategy. You set the audience (demographics, interests, behaviors), budget, schedule, and ad placements (e.g., Facebook Feed, Instagram Stories). An ad set holds one or more ads.
• Ad Level: This is the bottom level. It’s the creative part - the image, video, carousel, and text copy that people actually see.

Understanding this structure helps you make the right choice. Do you want to stop everything related to one big goal? Pause the campaign. Want to stop targeting a specific audience? Pause the ad set. Need to pull an underperforming video? Pause the individual ad.

How to Pause Your Facebook Ads: A Step-by-Step Guide

Alright, let’s get into the practical steps. The process is similar at all three levels and revolves around a simple toggle switch. It’s one of the most user-friendly features in the otherwise complex Ads Manager.

Step 1: Get into Facebook Ads Manager

First things first, you need to navigate to your Ads Manager. You can get there directly by going to facebook.com/adsmanager or by clicking the checkerboard-style icon in your Facebook menu and selecting "Ads Manager." Once you're in, make sure you’ve selected the correct ad account from the dropdown menu in the top left if you manage more than one.

Step 2: Pausing on the Campaign Level

When you pause at the campaign level, you shut down everything inside it - all of its ad sets and all of their ads. This is your go-to move when you want to stop an entire marketing initiative at once.

1. Navigate to the "Campaigns" tab. You'll see a list of all your campaigns.
2. Find the campaign you want to pause.
3. To the left of the campaign name, you will see a blue toggle switch in the "On/Off" column.
4. Click the blue toggle. It will turn grey, and the status will update to "Off."

That’s it. Your campaign, along with every ad set and ad within it, is now paused. No more money will be spent, and your ads will no longer be delivered to anyone.

Step 3: Pausing on the Ad Set Level

Pausing an ad set is useful when you want to stop targeting a specific audience but keep other tests running within the same campaign. For example, if you're testing an audience of "young entrepreneurs" against an audience of "corporate marketing managers" and the entrepreneur group isn't performing, you can pause just that ad set.

1. Click into the campaign that contains the ad set, then navigate to the "Ad Sets" tab.
2. Find the specific ad set you want to pause in the list.
3. Just like before, find the blue toggle switch to the left of its name.
4. Click the toggle to turn it grey and switch the ad set to "Off."

Now, only that specific audience will stop seeing your ads. Your other ad sets within the same campaign will continue to run and spend their budgets as scheduled.

Step 4: Pausing on the Ad Level

This is the most granular level of control. You pause an individual ad when a specific creative isn't working, but the targeting (the ad set) is still doing well. It's a common tactic during A/B testing where you're comparing multiple images or videos within the same ad set.

1. Navigate into the right campaign and ad set, then click on the "Ads" tab.
2. You'll now see a list of all individual ad creatives within that ad set.
3. Find the ad you want to stop and click the blue toggle next to its name.
4. The toggle will turn grey, and that specific creative will be paused.

The rest of the ads in that ad set will continue to run, and Meta will automatically shift the budget towards the remaining active creatives.

When Should You Pause Your Facebook Ads? (4 Common Scenarios)

Knowing how to pause is only half the battle. Knowing when is what makes you a savvy marketer. Here are a few common situations where pausing is the right call.

You Need to Freeze Spending Immediately

Maybe cash flow is tight, or a campaign is spending faster than you anticipated. Pausing lets you hit the emergency brake on your budget without wrecking the car. You can stop all ad spend in seconds and resume when you’re financially ready, right where you left off.

You're Seeing Ad Fatigue

If your campaign's performance metrics (like frequency, ROAS, or CTR) are starting to drop, your audience might be tired of seeing the same creative. This is a perfect time to pause the campaign or underperforming ads. Take a step back, analyze the data, refresh your creative, and relaunch when you have a better strategy.

You're Running a Test

A/B testing is all about finding a winner. Once you have enough data to determine that one ad creative, headline, or audience is clearly outperforming another, you can pause the loser. This ensures your budget is entirely dedicated to the element that drives the best results.

External Events Have Interrupted Business

Life happens. Maybe your website is down for maintenance, a product you’re advertising just went out of stock, a big storm has closed your physical store, or a public relations crisis makes advertising feel tone-deaf. In these moments, pausing all your campaigns allows you to respond to the situation and avoid wasting money or damaging your brand's reputation.

Final Thoughts

Pausing your Facebook ads is a straightforward tactic that gives you complete control over your ad spend and strategy. Whether you're making a quick budget adjustment or doing a full performance review, knowing how to pause at the campaign, ad set, and ad level allows you to be nimble and efficient without losing valuable performance data or social proof.

While carefully managing ad campaigns is a key part of the social media puzzle, we've found that a strong organic strategy helps our ads perform even better when they are running. Keeping our feeds updated with consistent, high-quality content builds trust and keeps our audience engaged between promotions. To streamline this process, we use our own tool, Postbase, which lets us visually plan and schedule everything in one calendar, ensuring our organic presence never misses a beat, even when our ads are on pause.