Skip to content
bidsmith

Pause everything for the holidays

You want every paid-search campaign off during the company shutdown (or a quiet quarter, or a budget freeze). And you want the same state back, exactly, when the shutdown ends.

This is the perfect bidsmith workflow: one PR pauses everything, one PR resumes everything, and the Git history records the exact date and reason.

The pause

  1. Make a branch:

    Terminal window
    git checkout -b pause-for-holidays-2026

  2. Flip the status in every campaign block. In each .bid file with a google_ads_campaign, find:

    status = "ENABLED"

    and change it to:

    status = "PAUSED"

    If your editor has find-and-replace across files, use it. Otherwise:

    Terminal window
    # Linux / macOS
    sed -i '' 's/status = "ENABLED"/status = "PAUSED"/g' *.bid

  3. Plan to verify:

    Terminal window
    bidsmith plan .

    Expected: one ~ update per campaign, all showing status: "ENABLED" → "PAUSED". Nothing else should change.

  4. Commit + PR:

    Terminal window
    git add .
    git commit -m "Pause all campaigns for the 2026 holiday shutdown"
    git push -u origin pause-for-holidays-2026

    Open the PR. Reviewers can confirm the plan output in the PR description matches what they expect.

  5. Apply after merge:

    Terminal window
    git checkout main && git pull
    bidsmith apply .

    Every campaign is now paused.

The resume

When you’re ready to come back:

Terminal window
git revert <the pause commit>
git push

…and apply. git revert produces the exact inverse change of the pause commit, so every campaign flips from PAUSED back to ENABLED — to its previous state, whatever that was per-campaign.

That’s the magic: you don’t have to remember which campaigns were enabled and which were already paused before the holiday. Git knows.

Variations

  • Pause a specific campaign type only — change status only on campaigns where advertising_channel_type = "DISPLAY" (or whatever filter applies).
  • Pause a specific market — if you use the one-file-per-market pattern, the find-and-replace only needs to touch one file.
  • Pause a budget instead — set amount_micros = 0 on a shared budget. Cleaner if many campaigns share the same budget.

What this doesn’t do

PAUSED campaigns still exist in Google Ads — they just stop serving and stop spending. Their quality scores and learning state are preserved, which is what you want for a temporary shutdown.

To actually delete campaigns, set status = "REMOVED" instead. That’s irreversible (Google doesn’t restore removed campaigns), so do it deliberately and not as part of a holiday pause.

See also