Account went dark

Emails you when an account's spend and impressions both suddenly collapse to near zero during a time it's normally active. This is your fastest signal that serving has stopped account-wide - whether it's a billing failure or a suspension - so you can jump on it straight away and get the account back live.

Why both signals?

Requiring spend and impressions to collapse together is what makes this reliable. Impressions alone can dip on a quiet day; spend alone can dip when CPCs fall. Both hitting near zero at a normally-active hour means serving has actually stopped.

Defaults & settings

• Counts as dark when below - how close to zero both must drop, versus what the account would normally have done by this time of day. Default 5% of normal, adjustable 1-25%.

• Baseline window (days) - how many trailing complete days build the median daily baseline. Default 14d, adjustable 3-30.

• Checks every 30 minutes; 12-hour cooldown - so a continuing outage resurfaces.

Example. A card on file expires overnight. By 8am the account has spent nothing and served nothing against a baseline that says it should have. You get the email while the client is still on their first coffee.

Good to know. Expected spend is the daily median prorated to the time of day, with two protections against false alarms: the check skips the small hours of the morning, and it skips entirely when Google hasn't reported today's data yet (reporting lag can run hours) - so a slow data feed never reads as a dark account.