Going on Vacation

Leaving Adwords unattended

[James in Vancouver]

I'm going on vacation for 3 weeks. Probably will have very little access to the internet over that time.

I'm trying to decide whether to disable my adwords campaigns or leave them running. Leaving someone else in charge of it isn't feasible.

What do others do?

I know when I'm around I probably check on my campaigns daily and every few days do a little tweaking.

James

[buckworks]

When I've been in that situation I leave Adwords running but I turn down the bids and for some campaigns I lower my daily maximum too. That will keep a bit of activity going, but things won't run out of control when I'm not around to keep my usual watch on things.

[Robsp]

I leave them running and make sure the daily budget is OK. I'm in Europe so we have lenghty holidays here :-)

[eWhisper]

If you have a site that you can leave without worries of something needing tending to in the next 3 weeks (i.e. someone else does the shipping, its an affiliate site where you don't answer questions, etc), then I'd think of the following.

First look at how often your competitors and you change bids. If it's not very often, and your comfortable with your current max spend, why bother changing it?

If you bid above what you'd like to spend because of the way the bidding process works, you'd want to lower your bids to the max you'd actually want to spend just in case someone else moves in.

The next thing to consider is your CTR. If you have a great CTR on a few niche ads which have gotten you premium position, and you're worried about losing that spot because of lower bids and it could take a while to regain because the term just isnt searched often, then pausing particular campaigns could be in your best interest.

If you have an established account where you tweak bids/ads on occasion, but don't need to - it's because you want to be the best - not because you're reacting to others - then you could very well just leave an account running the entire time without much cause for alarm.

Just be comfortable with the total amount you could spend while you're away.