Bulk pausing and re-enabling campaigns, ad groups, and keywords

The cleanest way to stop spend without losing data

Sometimes the right action isn't a bid adjustment or a negative keyword — it's just turning the entity off. Pausing stops impressions without deleting the entity, which means you keep the historical performance data and can re-enable later. It's the most common "I'm not sure what to do here, but I don't want this spending right now" action. Doing it in bulk is straightforward.

This article walks through bulk pausing: which entity types can be paused, the State field that controls it, when to pause vs. archive vs. lower the bid to minimum, and a few common use cases.

What "paused" actually means

The State column on every entity has three possible values:

• enabled: The entity is active and serving (or, for negatives, blocking).
• paused: The entity exists but is not active. No impressions, no clicks, no spend. Historical data is preserved. Can be re-enabled at any time.
• archived: The entity exists but is marked as deleted. Cannot be re-enabled — you'd need to create a new entity to bring it back. Historical data is preserved for reporting purposes.

Pausing is the reversible "off" state. Archiving is the irreversible "off" state. Use pause when you might come back; use archive when you're certain you won't.

What can be paused

Most entity types in a bulk sheet have a State column and accept the paused value:

• Campaigns: Pausing a campaign stops everything inside it — no ad groups serve, no keywords or product targets fire.
• Ad Groups: Pausing an ad group stops only that ad group within an otherwise-active campaign.
• Keywords: Pausing a keyword stops just that keyword. Other keywords in the same ad group continue.
• Product Targets: Same — pause just the specific target.
• Product Ads (SKUs): Pause a SKU's ad so it stops serving even though the campaign continues for other SKUs.
• Negative Keywords: Less common but supported. A paused negative is a negative that's currently not blocking anything. Equivalent to removing it, but easier to re-enable later.

What can't be paused: portfolios and bidding adjustments. Portfolios don't have a State; bidding adjustments are part of the campaign and don't pause independently.

The bulk sheet structure for pausing

Pausing is the simplest bulk operation. For each entity you want to pause:

1. Find the existing row in your downloaded bulk sheet.
2. Change its State cell from enabled to paused.
3. Set Operation to Update.
4. Leave everything else as-is. The IDs, the names, the bids — all preserved.
5. Upload.

That's it. No new rows, no complex syntax, no required fields beyond what's already in the row. The State change cascades through Amazon's system; within 5–30 minutes, the entity stops serving.

Try it: build a pause / re-enable bulk sheet

The builder below generates pause (or re-enable, or archive) rows from a list of Keyword IDs or Product Targeting IDs. Useful for the simple update cases. Campaign and Ad Group pauses still need a downloaded sheet — those entities require additional fields the widget can't infer.

The four common pause scenarios

1. Pausing a non-performing entity. A keyword with 30 clicks and 0 orders, ACoS > 100% across multiple cycles, even after bid adjustments. You've concluded it's not going to convert. Pause it. Two months later, after a product photo change or seasonal shift, you can reconsider.

2. Temporarily pausing during inventory issues. Your SKU is out of stock for two weeks. You don't want to spend on ads for it during that period. Pause the Product Ad (or the whole campaign if it's a single-SKU campaign). When inventory comes back, re-enable.

3. Pausing during seasonal downturns. A summer product in November. You don't want to delete the campaign — you'll re-launch it in May — but you don't want it spending money in winter. Pause the campaign. Re-enable in spring.

4. Pausing for testing. You want to A/B compare two ad groups. Pause Group A for a week, observe Group B's standalone performance, then pause B and observe A's. Bulk pause/re-enable makes this fast.

The pause vs. archive vs. min-bid decision

Three options for stopping spend on an underperforming entity. Which to use:

• Pause when you're not sure whether to permanently stop. Easy to reverse. Use as the default for "this isn't working but I might come back."
• Archive when you're certain you'll never use this entity again. Cleans up your campaign manager view. Can't be undone (you'd need to recreate). Use for things like deprecated products or campaigns from old strategies.
• Drop bid to $0.02 when you want the entity to remain technically active but rarely serve. Useful for keeping a keyword "alive" in your campaign for tracking purposes without paying much for impressions. The downside is that even at $0.02, you'll occasionally win impressions, accumulating small amounts of spend over time. Cleaner to just pause.

The pragmatic default: pause first, archive after you've gone 6+ months without re-enabling.

Mass-pausing workflows

The pause operation shines for bulk scenarios:

Pause all keywords below a threshold. Filter your bulk sheet to Keyword rows where the performance columns show, say, less than 5 clicks in 30 days. These are essentially-dormant keywords accumulating no signal. Mass-pause them to clean up the account. They can be re-enabled if you want to retest.

Pause an entire campaign and its children. Setting a campaign's State to paused automatically prevents all its ad groups, keywords, and ads from serving. You don't need to pause each child entity individually — the parent's state cascades. However, the children's State columns will still say "enabled" in the bulk sheet (their own enabled state is preserved); they're just blocked by the parent campaign's pause. When you re-enable the campaign, the children resume without further action.

Pause SKU-specific Product Ads across many campaigns. If a SKU goes out of stock, find every Product Ad row referencing that SKU (filter the SKU column) and pause all of them. The SKU might appear in 5–10 campaigns; mass-pausing in one upload is faster than per-campaign UI work.

Pause during a budget freeze. If you need to immediately stop all ad spend (budget reasons, a PR concern, etc.), the fastest path is to pause every campaign. Filter to Entity = Campaign, change all State cells to paused, set Operation to Update, upload. Within 30 minutes, no campaigns are spending. Re-enable when ready by reversing the operation.

Re-enabling: just reverse the operation

To bring a paused entity back, set State to enabled and Operation to Update. Same row, same Bid (unchanged from before), same everything else. Upload. Within minutes, the entity is serving again.

One quirk: a re-enabled entity doesn't immediately resume at full performance. There's a "warm-up" period of usually a few days where Amazon re-builds its relevance signals. For long-paused entities (60+ days), the warm-up can be longer. Don't expect the entity to behave exactly as it did before the pause until at least a week of fresh data has accumulated.

Common mistakes when pausing in bulk

• Forgetting to set Operation to Update. The State cell changes but the upload ignores it. Same trap as bid adjustment.
• Pausing the parent expecting child changes to propagate. Pausing a campaign correctly blocks all its children from serving — but the children's State values themselves don't change. If you later re-enable the campaign, every previously-enabled child resumes. This is usually what you want, but be aware: pausing a campaign doesn't "remember" which children were already paused before — they'll come back paused, which is also fine.
• Pausing then forgetting. Paused entities are easy to forget about. They sit there forever, accumulating no signal, but cluttering your campaign manager and your bulk sheets. Quarterly audit: review paused entities, archive the ones you're sure you won't re-enable.
• Pausing instead of fixing. If a keyword is spending too much, pausing stops the spend but doesn't teach you anything. Sometimes the right move is a lower bid plus a watch period to see what changes. Pause is the right answer when you've concluded the entity doesn't fit; it's the wrong answer when you haven't yet tested adjustments.
• Pausing campaigns to "reset" them. Pausing and re-enabling doesn't clear historical performance or reset Amazon's optimization signals — it just stops and resumes serving. If you want a true reset, archive and recreate instead.

Pausing as part of a larger workflow

Pausing rarely happens in isolation. Common combinations:

• Pause + harvest: Pause an Auto campaign once you've extracted enough search terms into Keyword campaigns. The Auto served its discovery purpose; let the Keyword campaigns handle the proven converters.
• Pause + bid down: Lower the bid AND pause specific keywords in a campaign you're winding down. Reduces immediate spend while leaving the option to revisit specific entities.
• Pause + negative: Pause a campaign that was bringing in many unrelated search terms, AND add negatives to your remaining active campaigns to block those same terms from triggering them.

How quickly pausing takes effect

Within 5–30 minutes of a successful bulk upload, the paused entity stops serving. Impressions that were already in flight (Amazon's ad serving has a brief lookahead) may complete; new impressions don't trigger. Spend cuts off effectively within an hour.

Re-enabling has similar latency. A re-enabled keyword starts being eligible to serve within 30 minutes; whether it actually wins impressions depends on its bid relative to competitors and Amazon's relevance ranking.

Next steps

Pausing connects to other operations:

• Bid adjustments — often the alternative to pausing. Try a bid drop first; pause only if the bid drop doesn't fix the issue.
• Negative keywords — sometimes the issue isn't the keyword you're targeting but the search terms it's triggering. Pause the keyword if all its search terms are bad; add negatives if only some are.
• Placement multipliers — coming up next. Useful for shaping which placements your ad serves in, sometimes a better tool than pausing.

And BulkSheet Pro's recommendations engine flags entities that should be paused based on your decision rules — clicks accumulated without orders, sustained high ACoS, etc. Saves you the per-entity analysis. Try it free →