How would you know if your Google Ads had stopped running? Often you would not, until the enquiries dried up or the monthly report arrived. Ads stop for dull reasons: a campaign end date passes, a payment fails, a tag breaks after a site update. Most of those send you nothing. The reliable way to know is a check that reads the account every day, and a person whose job is to read the result.
How ads go dark without anyone deciding they should
There is no big red switch. Campaigns stop because of small settings that made sense on the day someone set them.
An end date passes. Someone set the campaign to run until a certain date, for a good reason at the time. The date arrives and the campaign stops. Google does not treat that as a problem, because from its side it is not one. The campaign did what it was told.
A payment fails. Cards expire and banks decline charges. Google's own help page on billing suspensions says a payment problem can pause or suspend the account until it is sorted out, and that the account's admin is emailed. The catch is who the admin is. If the account was set up years ago, that email may go to an inbox nobody reads any more.
A tag breaks after a website update. This one is worse, because the ads keep running. A plugin update, a new theme or a rebuilt form moves something the tracking depended on. The ads still spend, but the account stops seeing results, so it starts optimizing toward nothing. I wrote up how that happens in why conversion tracking dies after a website update.
Somebody changed something. An automatic recommendation left switched on, a rule someone added and forgot, a bulk edit that caught the wrong campaign. Accounts drift.
Why the owner is often the last to know
An ad account is built to be looked at. It does not come looking for you. The notifications Google sends cover what Google counts as a problem: billing, policy, a disapproved ad. "This campaign has spent nothing all week" is not on that list, and neither is "you spent a thousand dollars and recorded no enquiries."
If an agency runs the account, the next scheduled look may be the monthly report. A campaign that stopped early in the month can sit dark for most of it and still produce a report that reads like a quiet month.
What it looked like on an account I run
The account belongs to a vacation-rental company in Ontario. I got access to its Google Ads account on 2 June 2026.
I found the problem on 10 June. An end date set before I had access had passed at the end of May, and the campaign had served nothing since 1 June. Zero impressions and zero spend, heading into summer. I cleared the end date that day and the campaign served again the same day: 192 impressions and $36.45 of spend on 10 June, according to the account's own daily delivery report.
The honest numbers: the campaign was dark for nine complete days, 1 June through 9 June. I had access for eight of them before I noticed. I found it by reading the account, which is a habit, not a system, and habits miss things. That gap is why the rest of this article exists. The longer version is in the case study on that account.
What a daily check actually looks at
The day after that catch, a check started running against that account every day. I am listing what it does because "we monitor your ads" is a sentence a lot of agencies say, and it can mean someone glances at a dashboard when they remember. Compare this to whatever you are being told.
Every day it reads the account through Google's API and asks a fixed set of questions:
- Is the campaign serving? Not "enabled", serving. An ended, suspended or empty campaign fails.
- Is it spending normally? A campaign that is serving but has spent nothing for two days is flagged, and so is one spending far past its budget.
- Is it still showing up? If the share of searches where the ad appears collapses for three days running, that is flagged.
- Is the conversion tracking still firing, at a sensible value? An enquiry that stops arriving, or starts arriving at $0 or $1, is flagged.
- Are the ads and extensions still approved? A sitelink whose end date is about to pass is flagged before it passes.
- Is the account in good standing? A suspension or billing problem stops everything, so it is checked every run.
- Did anyone change the account outside my own tools? Any edit made in the interface, by a rule or by a script is listed with who and when.
- Are automatic recommendations switched off? Standing permission for Google to change the account by itself is flagged as a problem on its own.
Two more things, because a check that can fail silently is worth nothing. If the check itself crashes, it sends an alert saying the account is unwatched instead of staying quiet. And a separate service outside the system expects to hear from the check every day and raises an alarm if it does not.
What the log shows, and what I will not claim
When I pulled the run history on 20 October 2026, the check had run on all 131 scheduled days since 11 June 2026, without a missed day. Two of those runs ended red. On 25 September, Google's analytics service was briefly unavailable, so part of the check could not read it and said so. On 4 October, it raised an alert about booking values. A log that shows its red days is the point: it is a record you can read, not a promise.
What the record does not prove: that nothing went wrong in that time, only that the check was running. It does not let me promise an alert within any set window. And I will not tell you it would have caught the nine dark days above, because it did not exist yet.
If you run ads and nobody runs a check like this, that is what the website monitoring service is: a scheduled check, and a person whose job is to read it. If you would rather look at your own account first, start with the five checks in the setup checklist.
All writing · Related: What server-side tracking is, and when you need it