What is a temporary hold?
Each time you launch a campaign, unpause a campaign, or increase the budget for an existing campaign, AdRoll initiates a temporary hold. This temporary hold is an essential step to ensure that your payment method is valid and has sufficient funds to support the weekly budget across the campaigns within your billing account that will be spending.
Note: The temporary hold amount is voided immediately and it is not a charge. That is why you will not be able to find an invoice for this amount in your billing history.
How Does a Temporary Hold Work?
When you launch or modify a campaign budget, AdRoll processes a temporary hold equal to the weekly budget of all active campaigns. When you unpause a campaign, AdRoll places a temporary hold on the weekly budget of the campaign being unpaused. This ensures the payment method can cover the maximum amount that might be invoiced for during that week.
After a successful processing, the system immediately releases the funds, but depending on your financial institution, those funds may be held for a few days. Some banks may show temporary holds as pending transactions, while others display them similarly to actual charges. In some cases, you may not see the temporary hold at all.
How you can identify a temporary hold: If you see a 'transaction' from AdRoll in your credit/debit card statement that does not correspond to an AdRoll weekly invoice amount, but you have recently launched, unpaused, or increased a campaign budget, then it is likely a temporary hold. You can check with our support team or your financial provider to confirm this.
What Happens if the Temporary Hold Fails?
If the temporary hold fails, it is similar to a credit card decline. Your campaign change will not go into effect. The system will attempt to process the temporary hold once a day for five consecutive days, during which you'll receive email notifications. If the processing of temporary hold continues to fail, the campaign status will change to Not Running, and the system will no longer retry the temporary hold.
To resolve this, you can:
- Verify or update your payment information: Check the Billing Information page in AdRoll and update your payment method.
- Contact your financial provider: Reach out to your bank or credit card provider to address any issues.
- Lower your weekly budget: Reduce your campaign budgets to an amount that your payment method has the available funds to cover.
How to Restart the Temporary Hold Process
If you've resolved any issues with your payment method and wish to reattempt launching a campaign or increasing a budget, contact AdRoll's Customer Support team here to restart the temporary hold process. They can help process the temporary hold on your payment method and get your campaigns back on track.