Automations

Ads stopped running alert

Tell you when an account has gone quiet, before a declined card costs you a day of traffic.

An account can stop serving without anything looking wrong. A card is declined, a billing threshold is hit, someone pauses the last enabled campaign, a conversion tracking change trips a policy check. Google does not phone you. The first sign is usually a quiet day in your own reporting, noticed the morning after.

This automation checks whether the account recorded any activity at all in the last few hours, and tells you when it did not.

It is a reporting automation. It never changes your account.

How it decides

Each run reads account level performance split by hour, in the account's own timezone, and looks at the last Hours to check completed hours. If the account had zero impressions in every one of those hours, it counts as offline.

The current hour is deliberately excluded. Google Ads reporting lags by a few minutes, so an hour that has only just started legitimately shows zero and would raise a false alarm every run.

Because the test is "zero in every hour", a single impression anywhere in the window means the account is serving and no alert is raised. This is a check for an account that has stopped, not a check for an account that is underperforming.

Settings

Hours to check is how long the account has to be silent before it counts as offline. Anything from 1 to 168 hours. The default of 6 is long enough to survive a quiet night on a low volume account without waiting so long that a real outage runs all day.

The check always looks at impressions. They are the first thing to disappear when serving stops, and they are there even in an hour that earned no clicks, so a quiet night on a small account does not count as an outage.

Hours are counted in the Google Ads account's own timezone, the same one the schedule on the General step uses, so an hour here means an hour where the account actually lives.

When it emails you

You get an alert on the run that finds the account offline. While it stays down, Flowboost does not email about it again for seven days, even on an hourly schedule. If a run in between finds the account serving again, the next outage emails you straight away.

Choosing a schedule

Match the schedule to how much a silent hour costs you. Hourly is the shortest useful cadence and means you hear about an outage within an hour of the window closing. Daily is enough on a small account, but a daily run with a 6 hour window can miss an outage that started and ended between runs.

A window shorter than the gap between runs leaves blind spots. If you run every 6 hours, check at least 6 hours.

Reading a run

Select the status button in the automation's card or row (it shows the latest run status, for example Finished). The report shows whether the account was judged offline and the window used, with the impressions recorded in each hour checked, so you can see whether the account went quiet gradually or all at once.

What to do when it fires

Check in this order: billing (a declined card or a reached spending limit is the most common cause), then campaign status (someone may have paused the last enabled campaign), then policy (an account level suspension stops everything at once). All three are visible in the Google Ads interface within a minute.