Campaign pause and archive — the clean-shutdown checklist

Campaign pause and archive — the clean-shutdown checklist

Killing a campaign sloppily corrupts your historical data and leaves orphan postbacks firing for weeks. Shut it down in order.

— Stop the traffic source first, not the tracker. Pausing the tracker while the source still spends sends live traffic to a dead path and burns budget on a 404.
— Wait out the conversion window before archiving. Conversions and postbacks arrive for hours or days after the last click. Archive too early and you lose late attribution.
— Reconcile final numbers. Pull tracker against network one last time so the campaign's lifetime ROI is correct in your records.
— Note the kill reason in the campaign log: capped, banned, unprofitable, or expired offer. Future-you needs to know why, not just that, it died.
— Free the tracking domain back to your pool if it is clean, or quarantine it if it was flagged.
— Archive, do not delete. Deleted campaigns destroy the historical data you need for cohort analysis and source benchmarking.

Validation:
— Confirm the source shows zero spend before you archive.
— Confirm no postbacks have arrived for the full conversion window before final reconciliation.

A clean shutdown preserves the data; a sloppy one rewrites your history with gaps.

Save this SOP. Run it before archiving any campaign.