How to Stop Facebook Ad Campaign
Need to turn off a Facebook ad campaign? Whether it’s underperforming, draining your budget, or you simply need to hit the brakes, stopping a campaign is a straightforward process. This guide will walk you through exactly how to pause or delete your ads in Meta Ads Manager, explain the crucial difference between the two, and help you know when it’s the right time to make the call.
Pausing vs. Deleting: What’s the Difference?
Before you click anything, it’s important to understand the two main options you have for stopping ads: pausing and deleting. While they both stop your ads from running and spending money, their long-term impact on your ad account is very different.
In almost every situation, pausing is the better option.
What Happens When You Pause (aka “Turn Off”) an Ad?
Pausing is a temporary "off switch." When you pause a campaign, ad set, or ad:
Your ad stops running and accruing costs immediately.
All of your historical performance data, audience insights, engagement (likes, comments, shares), and campaign learnings are preserved.
You can reactivate it at any time with a single click, allowing it to start running again.
When to pause: This is your go-to option 99% of the time. Pause campaigns when results are poor, you need to reallocate the budget, the promotion has ended, or you want to test new creative without losing your original data.
What Happens When You Delete an Ad?
Deleting is a permanent action. When you delete a campaign, ad set, or ad:
The item is permanently removed from your main Ads Manager view.
It cannot be reactivated, restored, or edited. It’s gone for good.
While Meta still keeps the raw data on their servers, it becomes difficult to find and analyze within your standard reports. You lose the context and structure.
When to delete: You should only delete campaigns to clean up your account. For example, deleting draft campaigns you never launched, campaigns created by mistake, or expired test ads you have no intention of ever analyzing again.
The takeaway is simple: Pause ads to manage your account. Delete ads to tidy it up. If you're unsure, always choose to pause.
How to Stop a Facebook Campaign in 5 Simple Steps
The quickest and most common way to stop your advertising efforts is to pause the entire campaign. This will immediately stop all the ad sets and ads contained within it from spending. Here’s how to do it.
Step 1: Open Meta Ads Manager
First, navigate to your Ads Manager. You can typically find it by going to https://business.facebook.com/adsmanager or by navigating through your Meta Business Suite.
Step 2: Select the “Campaigns” Tab
At the top of the Ads Manager dashboard, you’ll see L-shaped navigation with three main tabs: Campaigns, Ad Sets, and Ads. Make sure you are on the Campaigns tab to see a list of all your campaigns.
Step 3: Find the Campaign You Want to Stop
Scroll through the list to find the specific campaign you want to stop. If you have a lot of campaigns, you can use the search bar or filter options at the top of the list to narrow down your selection.
Step 4: Use the Toggle Switch
To the left of your campaign name, you’ll see a blue toggle switch. This is your on/off switch. Simply click this toggle.
When the toggle is blue, your campaign is On (active). When you click it and it turns gray, your campaign is now Off (paused).
Step 5: Check the Status
After clicking the toggle, watch the ‘Delivery’ column. The status should promptly change from “Active” or “Learning” to “Off.” Once you see this, you can be confident your campaign has stopped spending money.
That's it! In just a few seconds, you've successfully paused your campaign.
How to Stop a Specific Ad Set or Individual Ad
Sometimes you don’t want to stop an entire campaign. You might have one underperforming audience or a single ad creative that isn’t getting results. In these cases, you can dive deeper and pause only specific ad sets or ads, allowing the rest of the campaign to continue running.
Pausing an Ad Set
An ad set controls a specific audience, placement, and budget within a campaign. Pausing an ad set is ideal when a particular audience isn't responding well, but others are.
Navigate to the Ad Sets tab in Ads Manager.
Find the ad set you want to pause. You can use the campaign filter to first select the campaign it belongs to, making it easier to find.
Just like with campaigns, click the blue toggle switch to the left of the ad set’s name to turn it Off.
The other ad sets within that campaign will continue to run as normal.
Pausing an Individual Ad
Pausing an individual ad is perfect when a particular creative (an image or video) isn’t performing well, but you want to keep the audience targeting (the ad set) active with other, better-performing ads.
Navigate to the Ads tab in Ads Manager.
Filter by campaign and ad set to quickly locate the ad you want to stop.
Find your ad in the list and click the blue toggle switch to turn it Off.
The other ads in that ad set will now receive more of the budget, while the paused ad stops spending immediately.
How to Permanently Delete a Facebook Campaign
Again, a strong word of caution: deleting is permanent and should be done sparingly. It's an irreversible step, but if you're certain you want to remove an old draft or a mistake from your account, here’s how.
From the Campaigns, Ad Sets, or Ads tab, find the item you wish to permanently delete.
Click the checkbox to the left of its name to select it. This will make a toolbar appear above the list.
In the toolbar, click on the trash can icon (Delete).
A pop-up window will appear asking you to confirm. Click the Delete button to finalize the action.
The selected item will disappear from your main dashboard view and cannot be restored.
Common Reasons to Stop a Facebook Campaign
Knowing how to stop a campaign is easy. Knowing when is what makes you a smart advertiser. Here are some of the most common signals that it's time to pause your campaign and re-evaluate.
1. Your Key Metrics Are Underperforming
This is the most obvious reason. If a campaign isn’t delivering on its goals, it’s time to pause it. Look for signs like:
High Cost per Acquisition (CPA) or Cost per Lead (CPL): The campaign costs more to generate a sale or lead than is profitable for your business.
Low Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): You're spending more on ads than you’re generating in revenue.
Low Click-Through-Rate (CTR): Your ad isn’t compelling enough to make people click, indicating a disconnect with your audience or creative.
Pausing a campaign with poor KPIs gives you the space to analyze what went wrong - the audience, the creative, the offer - without continuing to waste money.
2. Severe Ad Fatigue
Ad fatigue happens when your audience has seen your ad too many times. They start ignoring it, and performance declines sharply. You can spot this by watching your "Frequency" metric. If that number gets too high (often above 3-4, but it varies by industry) and you see a corresponding drop in CTR or a rise in CPA, your audience is tired of your ad. Pause it and introduce fresh creative.
3. The Promotion or Offer Is Over
Never forget to turn off campaigns linked to time-sensitive events. If you’re running ads for a Black Friday sale, a webinar on a specific date, or a limited-time discount code, make sure you pause them as soon as the event ends. Running outdated promotions looks unprofessional and wastes money on clicks for an offer that’s no longer valid.
4. You Need to Make Major Changes
Facebook's algorithm optimizes based on your existing setup. If you need to make significant changes - like altering the campaign objective, overhauling the targeting, or testing a completely different budget strategy - it’s often best to pause the current campaign and duplicate it or create a new one. This allows the algorithm to start fresh with a new learning phase for your revised strategy.
5. Your Business Strategy Has Changed
Your business goals aren't static. You might shift focus from generating website traffic to capturing leads, or from acquiring new customers to re-engaging past buyers. When your overall marketing strategy changes, revisit your active campaigns. Pause anything that no longer aligns with your new objectives and reallocate that budget toward campaigns that do.
Final Thoughts
Stopping a Facebook ad campaign is quick and easy using the toggle switches in your Ads Manager. For most advertisers, pausing is the best practice, as it preserves your valuable performance data and gives you the flexibility to reactivate campaigns later. Deleting should only be reserved for housekeeping and clearing out unnecessary drafts.
Deciding when to stop a campaign comes down to analyzing performance, but that takes time when your data is spread across Facebook Ads, Google Analytics, Shopify, and your CRM. We built Graphed to solve this challenge. Instead of wasting an afternoon piecing reports together, you can just ask, "Show me my Facebook ROAS vs. Shopify sales for active campaigns over the last 7 days." We give you the answers in seconds, putting all your crucial marketing data in one place so you know exactly which campaigns to stop, scale, or edit.