Why did my campaign stop delivering overnight?

Diagnose whether your campaign truly “stopped overnight” (or just looks like it did)

When a campaign stops delivering suddenly, the fastest way to get to the root cause is to separate “hard stops” (something is blocking serving) from “soft stops” (the campaign is technically eligible, but it isn’t winning auctions or it’s being paced).

A hard stop is usually caused by a status change (paused, ended, removed, not eligible), a billing/payment restriction, an account-level budget/spending limit being reached, or policy-related disapprovals. These tend to feel like “everything was fine yesterday, then zero impressions today.”

A soft stop is usually caused by budget pacing, bids/targets that are now too aggressive or too restrictive, keyword eligibility issues (for example, very low search volume), or downstream measurement changes that destabilize automated bidding. These tend to show up as “Eligible” but impressions drop sharply.

Also keep in mind that some systems update on a delay (for example, certain auction diagnostics and impression share reporting commonly lag), so you want to check statuses first, then interpret performance metrics.

10-minute triage checklist (in the exact order I use on accounts)

1) Confirm account-level blockers first (because they can shut off everything at once)

• Look for an account alert banner related to billing, payment verification, suspicious payment activity, or account suspension/pausing. If the account is restricted, individual campaign tweaks won’t matter until the account is cleared.
• Check for an account-level budget / spending limit (common with invoicing setups and some managed billing arrangements). If that budget is exhausted or ended, campaigns can stop even if each campaign still has its own daily budget set.
• Check if a temporary spend limit was applied (this often presents as your account being paused and requiring you to answer questions, verify a payment method, confirm a small code-based charge, or make a payment).

If you find anything here, fix it before you touch bids, keywords, or creatives. Otherwise you’ll burn time and potentially introduce more variables.

2) Read the campaign status like a machine (it’s telling you the “why”)

Go straight to the campaign’s Status and hover for details. In practice, most overnight stops come down to one of these:

Paused / Removed happens when someone (or an automated rule) changed it. Removed is especially painful because it’s designed to be permanent, while paused is reversible.

Ended is very common when an end date was set and forgotten. Campaigns end at 11:59 p.m. in the account time zone on the selected end date. That creates the classic “it stopped overnight” experience.

Pending is less common for an overnight stop, but it can happen if a campaign was duplicated and the start date was set in the future, or if settings were changed in a way that triggered a scheduled state.

Not eligible usually means the campaign has no runnable components (no ad groups, all ad groups paused, all ads paused, all keywords paused/removed, or the campaign setup is incomplete). This is often the result of bulk edits or “cleanup” work someone did after hours.

3) Check ad and asset approval status (policy and review delays can look like a delivery crash)

Even if the campaign is eligible, your ads/assets can be under review, disapproved, or not eligible due to an upstream status (for example, ad group ended or campaign paused). Most reviews finish within about one business day, but some take longer, and more complex reviews can extend beyond that.

If you’re seeing disapprovals, turn on deeper policy detail visibility in your tables so you can see exactly what’s limiting or blocking serving. If you fixed an issue or believe the decision was incorrect, you can appeal directly from within the account (and appeals have limits and timing rules, so don’t spam them).

4) Confirm the destination is accessible, crawlable, and consistent

Destination problems are a top cause of “it died overnight,” especially if your site had a deployment, firewall/CDN change, hosting incident, or a redirect update.

Focus on these failure modes:

Destination not working can occur if the landing page fails on common devices/browsers or returns errors to ad crawlers.

Destination not crawlable can occur if the crawler can’t access the page content (blocked resources, robots, gated content, unusual redirects).

Destination not accessible can occur if your page blocks users (or crawlers) by geography, permissions, age gates, or “you don’t have access” style restrictions in the locations you target.

Destination mismatch can occur if your display URL domain doesn’t match the final URL domain, or your tracking template/redirects send users to a different domain than expected.

5) Check keywords for “Eligible (limited)” and inactivity drivers

In Search, keyword status can quietly shut down volume. Two common culprits:

Low search volume means the keyword has very little to no recent search history and can become inactive until traffic increases. This can happen after you switched to very long-tail phrases, added misspellings, or narrowed match types.

Below first page bid estimate means your bid is likely too low to consistently appear on the first page. If competition increased, your bids didn’t change but your ability to win auctions did.

6) Validate budget mechanics (campaign daily budget vs true spend behavior)

If your campaign is “Limited by budget,” it can still serve, but it may not show as often as it could. This can feel like a stop when demand spikes (for example, seasonality or competitor changes) and your budget no longer covers the available traffic.

Also remember that an average daily budget doesn’t mean perfectly even hourly delivery. Some campaigns can spend more earlier in the day to capture traffic, and then slow later. If you’re only checking at one time of day, “it’s off” may actually be “it already spent what it could today.”

7) Review the last 24–72 hours of changes and measurement signals

Performance can swing hard after changes to bidding strategy, budgets, keywords, audiences, demographics, or ad scheduling. Conversion-based bidding can also fluctuate when conversion tracking changes, conversion delays shift, or the system receives fewer (or noisier) conversion signals than before.

If your campaign stopped “overnight” and you made changes “yesterday,” assume cause-and-effect until proven otherwise.

How to revive delivery safely (and avoid making things worse)

When it’s a status/end-date issue

If the campaign (or ad group) is paused, re-enable it and watch impressions for a short window. If it’s ended, extend the end date (or remove the end date if appropriate) and remember the account time zone is what matters, not your local time or your client’s time.

If something was removed, treat it carefully: removal is meant to be permanent, and “bringing it back” may not behave like a simple pause/resume workflow. In many cases, rebuilding cleanly is safer than trying to resurrect a structure that was intentionally removed.

When it’s billing, payment verification, or suspicious payment restrictions

Don’t touch bids or creatives first. Complete the requested steps (answer questions, verify payment method via code or documents, and/or make the requested payment). If the account is suspended, follow the formal appeal process and provide clear, consistent ownership and billing details.

From a risk standpoint, avoid repeatedly adding/removing cards, rotating payment profiles, or creating new accounts to “get around it.” Those patterns can escalate restrictions rather than fix them.

When it’s policy or disapprovals

Fix the root policy issue (ad text, claims, destination content, redirects, tracking, accessibility) and then request review/appeal from inside the platform. If you’re dealing with destination policies, verify your landing page works reliably across devices and doesn’t block crawlers or users in targeted locations.

If your business falls into a restricted category that requires eligibility or certification, you’ll need to complete that requirement before expecting consistent serving. “Eligible (limited)” can be normal in regulated categories, but “Disapproved” will stop impressions entirely for affected ads.

When it’s “Eligible, but not serving” (auction/bid pressure)

This is where many advertisers panic and overreact. Start by checking whether your keywords are limited by low search volume or below first-page estimates. Then look at impression share and “lost due to budget” vs “lost due to rank” to decide whether you have a budget problem, an Ad Rank problem, or both.

If you confirm it’s rank pressure, you generally have three levers: improve ad relevance/quality, increase bids (or loosen bid targets), and tighten targeting to higher-intent queries so you’re not spreading budget thin across auctions you can’t win.

When it’s Smart Bidding or conversion-based bidding instability

If conversions suddenly dropped because tracking broke, consent mode settings changed, tagging was removed, or your conversion action set changed, automated bidding can respond by reducing aggressiveness. The fix isn’t “raise budget” first; it’s to restore clean, consistent conversion measurement and then give the strategy time to re-stabilize.

If you must intervene quickly, do it in controlled steps: avoid multiple bid strategy changes in a short span, and avoid stacking major edits (new creative, new landing page, new audience, new conversion goal) all at once. One variable at a time is how you get predictable recovery.

Prevention: simple guardrails that stop most “overnight outages”

• Set an alerting routine for disapprovals, destination errors, and billing/payment notifications so you see issues immediately rather than the next morning.
• Document account time zone and keep a habit of verifying start/end dates whenever you clone or rebuild campaigns.
• Control change velocity (especially with automated bidding): fewer, more deliberate edits reduce the chance of a sudden performance cliff.
• Keep landing pages stable: avoid surprise redirects, aggressive bot-blocking, and geo/permission restrictions that can block users or crawlers.

If your Google Ads campaign stopped delivering overnight, the cause is often an account-level blocker (billing/verification/suspension), a status change (paused/ended/pending), a policy or approval issue, or a destination problem after a site or tracking change—so it helps to have something watching those signals continuously; Blobr plugs into your Google Ads and uses specialized AI agents to monitor performance and detect sudden delivery drops, then turns what it finds (from disapprovals and URL errors to bid/budget shifts and Smart Bidding instability) into a clear, prioritized set of actions you can review and apply while staying fully in control.