Why You Should Not Pause Your Facebook and Instagram Advertising Spend

“I think we’re going to pause spend.”

These are common and dangerous words that are more frequently coming from clients these days. People see it as a way to save money, but in reality, shows mostly a fundamental misunderstanding of how Facebook works with delayed attribution and changes in reporting. The reality is that this tactic will likely do more to hurt than help, for a number of reasons. Here’s why:

It resets learnings on that ad set, losing all optimization you once had.

If you pause an ad set and then try to restart it, all the progress you’ve made is lost. It’s basically starting over completely. If there are even signs of hope, small signs things could be okay, then pausing and thinking that will improve things isn’t a viable option. Learning and optimizing will be impacted in that what is/isn't working in May/June may be completely different than what is/isn't working when we resume ads. When relaunching ads, it could take weeks/months to get back to where we were, success-wise

Facebook and Instagram are doing more than you think.

Facebook reporting is off, so what looks to be a failure on Facebook might actually be going really well. The overall lift from Facebook and Instagram is incredibly high, with multiple sources usually showing post-purchase data that proves social does way more than what’s being reported. Plus, in many cases, your customers might be taking longer to consider a purchase than you thought.

In 99% of cases, you will have decreased total revenue

By turning off one of your biggest spigots to traffic and growth, you will have a loss in revenue to your shop. The only area where this might not be true is if your client or brand already has a lot of organic SEO traffic and you have other channels running at a greater level than what the Facebook ads are.

What’s a valid alternative option? You can reduce spend and see what happens first.

You don’t have to go nuclear, you can just reduce spend and look at your blended data first!