Google Ads suspended me and turned a deaf ear

The biggest indicator of a monopoly is when they can treat customers like garbage and keep doing business anyway.<p>Google suspended the Ads account of our largest agency client ($20,000 per day) with no explanation other than a vague “policy violation”. They steadfastly refused to explain how the policy was violated or what we could do to come into compliance.<p>We contacted attorneys, wrote letters to Google executives, begged, pleaded. In the end our client fired us and they went back to their old agency.<p>Later we learned their old agency paid off a Google insider to flag our client’s account resulting in suspension.<p>Of course, we could never speak to a human being at Google and explain this. One day, the truth about Google Ads (and Facebook) will come out, which is that it is all 85% fraud anyway. Save your money.<p>Today, we no longer do business with Google Ads or Facebook. Given these companies make up 95% of digital ad spending, it’s fair to say we are no longer a digital ad agency. We’ve adapted to market around big tech, whether they like it or not.<p>With “partners” like Google and Facebook, who needs enemies?

If your business relies heavily on Google to get customers (Adwords) or for generating revenue (Adsense, youtube, extensions, search, …) You are doomed. Google will&#x2F;has terminated accounts on a whim with no recourse: one day you wake up and your business is destroyed, all you have is a vague, automated email and no way to contact a human being.<p>&quot;Oh you spent 4 years working on this extension and have thousands of paying customers? We removed it because, well… we can&#x27;t tell you! And, no we won&#x27;t bring it back.&quot;<p>&quot;Oh sorry we have to suspend your Adsense account AND keep all the money because… well, we can&#x27;t tell you!&quot;<p>&quot;Oh you composed an original song for your youtube video? we&#x27;re going to suspend your channel with 3 million subscribers because our system wrongly flagged your song as copyright infringement. And, no, we won&#x27;t bring your channel back! ever!&quot;<p>&quot;Oh you use our PAID email service for your company paying us thousands every month? Oops, you&#x27;re locked out because we falsely flagged you. We might give you access again in 2 months, we&#x27;ll see… In the meantime use pigeons to send messages&quot;<p>To Google you are just a number, a statistic. They absolutely don&#x27;t care about you or your business because they have market power.<p>This company is the worst partner you can ask for, a true monopoly abusing customers and users alike.<p>STAY AWAY from Alphabet!

This has been my experience with Google too.<p>I have a suspended Google Merchant Center account for an ecommerce site. That&#x27;s Google&#x27;s service to list products for their &quot;shopping&quot; search tab, which you also need to run shopping ads. I sell some home decor items I hand make in my home workshop with a laser cutter and paint. Nothing weird, just like &quot;welcome to our home&quot; type signs. It&#x27;s a standard Shopify-hosted store with flat rate shipping, a posted shipping policy, return policy, privacy policy, and contact page with a contact form, my address and my phone number on it. That should check off all of Google&#x27;s requirements for a merchant center account. But, it was immediately suspended and multiple requests to reconsider the suspension just get me a form letter back saying my site violates their policies. No human at Google will ever give me any specific reason why.<p>Every month or so, one of my Google Ads for another site gets suspended for violating the policy &quot;Certificate required: free desktop software&quot;. This policy is about ads that link to downloadable .exe&#x2F;.zip desktop software. My ads, which have been largely running without change for 9-10 years, are for a SaaS analytics service for marketers. There is no desktop software or downloadable files on the website. Just your typical pricing&#x2F;signup&#x2F;login pages like any web app. There is no rhyme or reason as to what ad in my account they will suspend each month. I can create the same ad again and it&#x27;ll be approved since there is no actual policy violation.<p>Like OP, I can easily reach a human to sell me more ads. No matter how many times I click the unsubscribe links in their emails or ask to opt out, they actually hound me, at every email of mine they can find, and all my personal and business phone numbers, to take &quot;account review&quot; calls where they can try to talk me into spending more on Google Ads. But when it comes to getting support for policy issues, nobody will talk to you.

Good luck getting a straight, specific answer from anyone at Google regarding supposed problems that violate one of their vaguely worded policies. Some of the stuff flagged by their automated systems are laughable - one that comes to mind is an ad promoting genealogy research that was blocked for promoting birth control.<p>Not that the other platforms are much better. A nonfiction book publisher once told me her Amazon detail page on a book about surviving breast cancer was rejected for promoting sexual content. Besides the description containing the word &quot;breast&quot;, the word &quot;therapist&quot; in the description was interpreted by Amazon&#x27;s &quot;AI&quot; as being about rape.

Hmm. If I understand correctly, the website is a play to get money from Wolt by getting other people to sign up via OPs referral code. Seems kind of arbitragey - OP is not actually selling something, and Google would probably rather get the advertising $ from Wolt directly. So I see where Google&#x27;s coming from, and think it can reasonably be classified as &quot;Engaging in practices that circumvent or interfere with Google&#x27;s advertising systems and processes, or attempts to do so&quot; - the examples given are non-exhaustive. Why OPs and not other promo &#x2F; coupon sites? Who knows - maybe the others add some more value, or maybe G will come for them eventually. (Edit - corrected assumption of OPs gender)

Our company Adwords got banned a year ago, hours after our creatives got approved. The reason was our site was &quot;phishing&quot; and trying to steal people&#x27;s data.<p>After appealing the ban multiple times with no luck, we weren&#x27;t getting anywhere. I talked to a couple of people I know who work at Google (one works in Adwords) and basically said there&#x27;s nothing you can do.<p>What we did find out is that the ban was completely automatic, and the most likely reason was that it couldn&#x27;t render the content on the Angular (wonder what company created that) site we were pushing the ads to.<p>Since we have all our emails on GSuite, we&#x27;ve tried getting a few different people in the office to signup, and they get instantly banned after they signup.<p>We try every few months to appeal but get the same old &quot;policy violation&quot;.<p>Looking on the bright side, I now don&#x27;t get random calls from angry people in India demanding I need to &quot;optimise&quot; my ad campaigns.

Welcome to the world of blackhat SEO. If someone starts driving up the price of ads for a targeted keyword, you generate a massive amount of abuse and pay people to write complaints to Google.<p>From Google&#x27;s perspective, they look at your account and see activity that indicates you are doing terrible things.<p>Coupons are an extremely competitive and hostile market to be in. Not saying what happened to OP is fair or acceptable, but things aren&#x27;t always as obvious looking at them from the other side.

I&#x27;m in the cannabis space; but don&#x27;t touch green-product. Google doesn&#x27;t like cannabis business. Some of my competitors (somehow) are able to advertise on the Google platform. And I almost got my whole company kicked out of our Google eco-system (Workplace, Cloud) for even trying to put an ad for our business in there.<p>But we have a contact there, cause we&#x27;re paying clients on Workspace (Email, Drive, etc). So, didn&#x27;t get kicked off hooray -- but then asked about how&#x2F;why can others advertise their cannabis-related businesses but we cannot. &quot;We&#x27;ll get back to you...&quot;<p>And I know, from at least one competitor (cause we&#x27;re friendly, small industry), their ad-spend was not very much (ie: USD $2500&#x2F;mo). Another friendly competior got their account banned (but it was a throw-away gmail account).<p>It&#x27;s frustrating when the algo picks&#x2F;chooses winners&#x2F;losers and it still seems pretty ad-hoc&#x2F;random. What permits one cannabis-related business but blocks another? Shouldn&#x27;t an algo be consistent?

Was just pondering if you could unionize (in a very loose way).<p>Come up with your own set of rules that come within google&#x27;s, peer review each other to ensure that you meet your own rules - then if google pulls one of you, the rest of you walk.<p>Don&#x27;t have to shift how google works, just present to google as a large enough mass of money that you get promoted to a service rep, rather than templated rules and emails.<p>There&#x27;s also a benefit on the google side - that if you&#x27;re a self-moderating group, what gets escalated to them is likely to be a valid issue.

Stories like this seem to pop up semi-frequently on HN.<p>So I&#x27;m wondering -- has anyone tried to sue Google, perhaps in small claims court (for U.S. residents)? Surely that would at least compel an actual human to address the account closure, ban, etc. I am assuming there are legal or financial reasons this approach is unwise?

Google is not your friend and must be treated as an adversary.

Come on, in this case it’s pretty obvious, your website was not doing anything of value. Just a random middle man expecting to be paid for existing. Put your promo code on your website fine, but then wanting to advertise on it? That just seems like a dodgy thing to do.

I think you are violated Google&#x27;s Circumventing systems rule. I noticed your affiliate site is using woltcode.de as domain name but &quot;wolt&quot; is maybe registered trademark of wolt.com. Google cannot allow this kind of similar domain name in generall.

I had a similar, but opposite experience recently.<p>I created a Google My Business profile for my business. The business is about 5 years old, but the profile is new.<p>About one week after creation it was suspended for a &quot;policy violation&quot;, but I could appeal.<p>I sent a single email saying, &quot;I don&#x27;t know what this was suspended&quot;.<p>4 days later I got an email informing me the suspension had been recinded

There are only a handful of companies that have crossed the $1 Trillion USD market cap threshold.<p>Tgese are some of the richest entities in all of human history and their direct customers cannot even get a reply to an inquiry that has destroyed their livelihood - and there is no law or regulatory body that requires them to.<p>This is embarrassing as an American citizen but moreover as a human in our current society - what exactly do we value&#x2F;reward that this gets barely any attention?

The whole can&#x27;t talk to a human and no meaningful way of appealing (a charge they won&#x27;t tell you) seems to be a recurring theme with google.<p>Untrustworthy

You are not allowed to promote websites with someone else&#x27;s brand name. The site you were promoting was a trademark violation and Google Ads took it down correctly. The trigger may also be the food delivery company complaining legally about your ads to Google.<p>Create your own site eg my-free-food-coupons.de and then run the ads.

Good to know they haven&#x27;t changed a bit since I was banned, 17 years ago.<p>This seems to be the norm with many american tech companies. They abruptly cast you out with a vaguely worded template explanation, no one will talk to you or explain to you what happened. Appeals are rejected.

Another story here for the list.<p>I have a blog where I post about my android app development. My apps have a link to a page in that blog explaining some details of the app. A few months after creating it the &quot;show ads&quot; button was enabled and available to be pressed (and even encouraged you to do it). I pressed it to see if it was worth it, a few days later the account was suspended.<p>As usual, I never got any confirmation about the reason, but years later I think the issue is that one of my apps is very popular (1M users) and basically the 99% of the blog visits are from that app, directly to the app page. I suspect some visits are from bots too, so the most probable cause is that the traffic was flagged as invalid.

We should organise a global protest in front of Google offices. Let them try ignore that!

FWIW...<p>I experienced the same outcome due to an outsourced foreigner being unable to access my U.S.-only website. So Google&#x27;s 150,000 foreigners are in charge of determining everyone&#x27;s website visibility.

On Safari this site is blocked by AdGuard. I wonder what you did to end up getting on blocklists.<p>Ok I figured out why. AdGuard saw “Google” and “Ad” in the URI and blocked navigation to it.

There has to be a more consumer friendly way for businesses to get their products known by potential customers than advertising.

The advertising industry is a cancer upon human civilization and should be abolished.<p>Literally no one is going to speak out in favor of this plague except the people whose livelihoods depend upon perpetuating it.<p>Not even hyperbole: Ask anyone if ads are annoying or not. Unless they’re making money from ads, the answer will be Yes.

We’ve come a long way from “don’t be evil.”

There needs to be some kind of law that mandates that a company MUST reply to customers and&#x2F;or users within a given time and offer a proper redress process.<p>I remember years ago FB would block your site and they would give you NO OPTION to contact them - like AT ALL (they used to hide the support chat button, and I think they still do from some people).<p>I also knew a company that got its own IG account indefinitely suspended because malicious competitors accused it of cloning their names, even though they were the ones doing that. There are even some articles on Google about being able to pay people to do this for you for like $50.<p>And they could never get that account back after months of trying to talk to FB about it or send documentation to the recommended appeal links (all apparently useless).<p>This is unacceptable from any company where you are a customer&#x2F;user, let alone multi-billion dollar companies that definitely have all the money they need for proper support.<p>If your support is this poor&#x2F;non-existent, you shouldn&#x27;t get to talk about your &quot;record-breaking multi-billion dollar profits&quot; quarter after quarter.<p>This is something we as a society can decide upon, whether or not these companies like that (of course they wouldn&#x27;t).