: How to autopause Google Adwords if server is down? Should I write my own monitoring script and use Adwords API to pause the campaigns if my server is down, or there is a simple way to do

@Eichhorn148

It should be possible to do, but would take some implementation. You would need:


A monitoring service that knows when your site is down
The ability to trigger a program to run when the monitoring service detects that your site is down
Access to the Google Adwords API
A program that would use the API to list your campaigns and loop through them and pause all of them.


Here is a question on the Google product forums asking for a simple code to use the Adwords API to pause an account. There is a link that points to some example code that could be adapted:


This code example demonstrates updating a campaign's Budget using VB DotNet: code.google.com/p/google-api-adwords-dotnet/source/browse/trunk/examples/adwords/vb/v201109/BasicOperations/UpdateCampaign.vb You could adapt this code example to update the Campaign's status to paused: developers.google.com/adwords/api/docs/reference/latest/CampaignService.Campaign#status

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@Nimeshi995

Return of Investment

I don't believe that using an Adwords API to adapt to downtime on your hosting is the way forward. Instead you should be adjusting your Adword budget and budgeting for reliable hosting, that in some ways is fail proof. A server with greater uptime can be a better return of an investment than a adwords since well you could lose a sale.. Never mind being changed by Google for not even receiving the traffic.

You raised concerns about hardware fail in your comments which I'll now address.

Cloud Hosting

Hosting in this day and age is extremely safe and hardware fails do not happen on services that you pay for. With good VPS hosting on a Cloud such as provided from Rackspace you don't get hard drive fails or power issues since your files are hosted on fail proof raids and redundant power supplies. When a node or hard drive fails your files are shifted to new nodes since your instance is hosted on multiple servers while not relying on one server. So it is my honest opinion if you are concerned about downtime then simply your hosting is not good and you should consider using a almost fail proof system.

Good DNS Hosting

DNS can also go down but again there is many DNS providers that provide better up times and fail proof systems that ensure that your website is always online. For max up-time you want DNS that has DNSSEC and Active Fail-over, Again things like this pretty much remove the downtime possibility.

But this isn't what I asked

Please note I know that I haven't addressed your question with a way of using the API but it will be useful to tell you that I've worked with many clients with adword campaigns and I have never come across the issue with clients being concerned about being charged during down time, Clients never fact in downtime because DOWNTIME Is not an option for them and since your paying for traffic I'd also consider it being vital that making downtime non optional buy interments better practices to ensure that downtime does not happen.

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