Archive vs. pause a Google Ads campaign

Pace gives you two ways to stop a campaign from serving. Pause is reversible. Archive is permanent.

Pause

Pausing tells Google Ads to stop serving the ads. The campaign and all its data stay intact, and you can flip it live again any time.

Pause when:

• You're testing a different campaign and want to take this one offline for a bit.
• The product or promotion is out of stock or out of season.
• You want to keep the structure around as a template you might restart later.

To pause, click the status badge on the campaign row and switch it from Live to Stopped. To resume, switch it back.

Archive

Archiving tells Google Ads to retire the campaign for good. The campaign moves out of your active list and won't ever serve again. Google Ads doesn't allow archived campaigns to be restored.

Pace mirrors that behaviour. When you archive a campaign, it disappears from the campaign table, and any pacing groups or pacing inclusions that referenced it are cleaned up automatically.

Archive when:

• You're confident the campaign is finished and you won't need to bring it back.
• You want to declutter your active campaign list.
• You're hitting Google Ads' per-account campaign limit and need to retire old ones.

The typed-name safety check

Archiving is permanent, so Pace asks you to type the campaign's exact name into a confirmation field before the action goes through. That extra step prevents an accidental archive. There's no undo, and Google won't let us bring the campaign back.

If you might want a campaign back later, pause it instead. Paused campaigns are fully reversible.

What Pace cleans up on archive

When you archive a campaign, Pace also:

• Removes it from the account's pacing inclusion list so the AI pacer won't try to act on it.
• Removes it from any pacing groups that contained it.
• Refreshes the campaign table and performance caches so you see the updated state immediately.

Reports and audit history that mention the campaign keep their reference. Archived campaigns appear with an "Archived" label rather than disappearing from past records.