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.
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.
Later we learned their old agency paid off a Google insider to flag our client’s account resulting in suspension.
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.
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.
With “partners” like Google and Facebook, who needs enemies?
That's extremely serious. If you wanted to share details with me I can raise the issue internally; my email is in my profile.
(Speaking only for myself)
Most systems these days are automated blackboxes of hellbanning, whether you pay or not. It is the 1950's parodies of the USSR "You know what you did, and we cant tell you what you did because you already know". And here it is. Google is only one such.
Specifically:
* When an Ads account is suspended it can be devastating to the business or the Google partner. We should have the opportunity to speak with human beings, to bring forth evidence to the contrary, and to escalate within Google instead of with attorneys.
* The vast majority of businesses and agencies simply want to follow Google policies to the letter. Unfortunately the letter of policy is often ambiguous or unclear. When a policy violation is alleged, particularly against long standing and high dollar Ads accounts, there should be a presumption of innocence. Google should explain clearly and directly what is needed to remedy policy violations instead of playing security through obscurity and “guess what I want” games.
* At the end of our time as a Google partner, the automation had become unbearable. We spent 90% of our time resubmitting Ads and campaigns that were suspended or halted for no apparent or clear reason, analogous to advertisement “whack a mole”. Imagine literally any other outlet treating advertisers this way. For example, imagine Viacom suspending a nationwide ad campaign without a word of explanation. Imagine The New York Times pulling an ad without so much as a call or email. It’s patently absurd.
How many google insiders can take bribes like this? Have they gotten rich from it?
What’s the minimum spend to get official help then?
Amazon employees have been convicted of bribery for taking $ to "leak information about the company’s search and ranking algorithms, as well as share confidential data on third-party sellers they competed with on the marketplace".[2]
If this happens at Facebook and Amazon, I can imagine it happening at Google.
[0] https://mashable.com/article/instagram-verification-paid-bla...
[1] I did not find any citable evidence on the first page of Google, but it's something I've heard from friends that are into influencer stuff. Supported by a quote from [1]
"he decided to message someone with an interesting handle (a.k.a. username). That someone said they were able to take over that account because he worked at Instagram."
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/11/former-amazon-employee-sente...
Sure, but that’s not what’s happening here. You don’t pay your customers, you pay your vendors.
Treating your vendors like crap is a widely accepted corporate practice.
Products should not be forced upon people at random times.
All advertising should be replaced by opt-in directories with better indexing and filtering systems that let people search for what they want, when they want.
“I want to see games like Dark Souls but in 2D with pixel art and a soundtrack like Blade Runner”
Instead of mass-raping everyone’s privacy just to guess what people want, let people tell companies what they want.
Instead of manipulating people with false impressions, products should stand out on their merits not on their marketing budgets.
Honestly just banning all advertisement outright would snuff so many ills of society: coerced consumption, waste of resources, waste of time, uglification of public spaces, invasion of privacy, jobs whose sole purpose is to deceive, and other bullshit.
Seems like one is more likely to get a response by complaining on HN.
The vast majority of time spent consuming media is through tech and traditional media just continues to decline every year.
It's only if attorneys file lawsuits that you have to respond via filing court or arbitration documents.
"Oh you spent 4 years working on this extension and have thousands of paying customers? We removed it because, well… we can't tell you! And, no we won't bring it back."
"Oh sorry we have to suspend your Adsense account AND keep all the money because… well, we can't tell you!"
"Oh you composed an original song for your youtube video? we're going to suspend your channel with 3 million subscribers because our system wrongly flagged your song as copyright infringement. And, no, we won't bring your channel back! ever!"
"Oh you use our PAID email service for your company paying us thousands every month? Oops, you're locked out because we falsely flagged you. We might give you access again in 2 months, we'll see… In the meantime use pigeons to send messages"
To Google you are just a number, a statistic. They absolutely don't care about you or your business because they have market power.
This company is the worst partner you can ask for, a true monopoly abusing customers and users alike.
STAY AWAY from Alphabet!
To me it seems like avoiding Alphabet basically means avoiding advertising and it is really hard to grow a business without it.
Any school (including the one my kids were attending) that depended on Google Classroom was down for the morning. External SPOF.
I have a suspended Google Merchant Center account for an ecommerce site. That's Google's service to list products for their "shopping" 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 "welcome to our home" type signs. It'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'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.
Every month or so, one of my Google Ads for another site gets suspended for violating the policy "Certificate required: free desktop software". This policy is about ads that link to downloadable .exe/.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/signup/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'll be approved since there is no actual policy violation.
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 "account review" 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.
That helps
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 "breast", the word "therapist" in the description was interpreted by Amazon's "AI" as being about rape.
I can't let this pass without commenting on it. When did promoting birth control become a problem ? Is Google run by some religious cabal who believe that we shouldn't contradict God's will ? I assume the intention is to keep various groups in the USA happy ? Would be interested to know if you can "promote birth control" outside of the USA.
Is this prohibited? Why?
After appealing the ban multiple times with no luck, we weren't getting anywhere. I talked to a couple of people I know who work at Google (one works in Adwords) and basically said there's nothing you can do.
What we did find out is that the ban was completely automatic, and the most likely reason was that it couldn't render the content on the Angular (wonder what company created that) site we were pushing the ads to.
Since we have all our emails on GSuite, we've tried getting a few different people in the office to signup, and they get instantly banned after they signup.
We try every few months to appeal but get the same old "policy violation".
Looking on the bright side, I now don't get random calls from angry people in India demanding I need to "optimise" my ad campaigns.
From Google's perspective, they look at your account and see activity that indicates you are doing terrible things.
Coupons are an extremely competitive and hostile market to be in. Not saying what happened to OP is fair or acceptable, but things aren't always as obvious looking at them from the other side.
If one could phone an agent as easy as one could phone a sales rep, the problem would be way smaller.
If each service/account termination was signed off by a human with the authority to cancel that decision, things could improve a lot. If they’re concerned about DDoS, they could optionally require the same human involvement for account opening.
My competitor though, they would email PayPal every week telling them we were selling child porn. It would take PayPal no time to lock our account while they logged into the tracker and looked around to check it was still only TV shows. We'd be out of revenue for a few days each time.
That trick is absolutely the quickest way to destroy any online business.
I have no first hand knowledge if it is true, or who the merchant was, or the botnet, it's all hearsay and rumor ... but it's the sort of rumor you have no trouble believing after working in e-commerce for a few years.
But we have a contact there, cause we're paying clients on Workspace (Email, Drive, etc). So, didn't get kicked off hooray -- but then asked about how/why can others advertise their cannabis-related businesses but we cannot. "We'll get back to you..."
And I know, from at least one competitor (cause we're friendly, small industry), their ad-spend was not very much (ie: USD $2500/mo). Another friendly competior got their account banned (but it was a throw-away gmail account).
It's frustrating when the algo picks/chooses winners/losers and it still seems pretty ad-hoc/random. What permits one cannabis-related business but blocks another? Shouldn't an algo be consistent?
If they're using deep learning then no. It's basically random because nobody understands how such contraptions make their decisions.
Come up with your own set of rules that come within google'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.
Don'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.
There's also a benefit on the google side - that if you're a self-moderating group, what gets escalated to them is likely to be a valid issue.
So I'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?
> This applies to literally any public corporation.
I can clearly see the "not your friend" part.
Are all public corporations the adversaries of citizens though? I'm not sure.
I'm not asking for edge cases: companies tend to be friends and not adversaries for their CEOs, for example, and I can imagine that Red Hat (when independent) was not any individual's adversary).
But it a good heuristic that any given public company will be your adversary? Certainly none really care about you.
I think some people downvoted this question of mine, so I’ll try to clarify my thinking.
Google is paid by advertisers to refer people to their content.
I was paid Wolt credits by Wolt to refer people to their service.
It seems to me that providing people with a promo code that they find valuable, and that Wolt finds valuable is providing a similar kind of value as Google’s own advertisements, even if mine is minuscule, and even if I use Google to advertise it.
Exactly. I would be happy to change the domain name if they bothered to tell me that this is in fact the problem.
I hosted a page on AWS S3 bucket exposed to the web, and had my domain CNAME record point to the bucket public-facing DNS name.
Triggered the same Circumventing ban.
I created a Google My Business profile for my business. The business is about 5 years old, but the profile is new.
About one week after creation it was suspended for a "policy violation", but I could appeal.
I sent a single email saying, "I don't know what this was suspended".
4 days later I got an email informing me the suspension had been recinded
Source - I have managed google search ads full time for 12 years.
I shit a brick when I saw it because I figured, "I guess I just won't be on Google Maps"
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.
This is embarrassing as an American citizen but moreover as a human in our current society - what exactly do we value/reward that this gets barely any attention?
Untrustworthy
Create your own site eg my-free-food-coupons.de and then run the ads.
That makes sense. I’ll try moving the site to a different domain and submitting my seventh appeal.
If this is indeed the problem, it’s hard to understand why their support agents couldn’t have divulged this information in one of my six previous appeals.
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.
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 "show ads" 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.
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.
I experienced the same outcome due to an outsourced foreigner being unable to access my U.S.-only website. So Google's 150,000 foreigners are in charge of determining everyone's website visibility.
Ok I figured out why. AdGuard saw “Google” and “Ad” in the URI and blocked navigation to it.
I seem to have a talent for upsetting computer programs.
Literally no one is going to speak out in favor of this plague except the people whose livelihoods depend upon perpetuating it.
Not even hyperbole: Ask anyone if ads are annoying or not. Unless they’re making money from ads, the answer will be Yes.
I had no idea, I don't follow music news. But I bought tickets immediately. I love them and I'd never seen them live before.
It was one of the best concerts I've ever been to. And I'd have missed it without advertising.
This is an outlier experience, but it shows that advertising can be a positive when it's not perverted by all of the things that currently make it terrible.
Sometimes there's a gap in our knowledge of what products, services, events are available. I can remain skeptical of the specific claims made in ads while benefitting from finding out, oh, there's a new pizza place near me, I should try it.
Ads are more annoying than useful, and tracking me needs to stop. But as usual, the most extremist view (positive or negative) is not the most useful one.
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).
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.
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).
This is unacceptable from any company where you are a customer/user, let alone multi-billion dollar companies that definitely have all the money they need for proper support.
If your support is this poor/non-existent, you shouldn't get to talk about your "record-breaking multi-billion dollar profits" quarter after quarter.
This is something we as a society can decide upon, whether or not these companies like that (of course they wouldn't).
I am wondering more and more whether these companies are so profitable because they are more efficient or if a lot of their profits come from cutting customer support most companies used to do.
It wouldn't do any good. The legally-mandated reply would just be another auto-generated form letter.
All you need to do is serve Google in court and they'll respond, trust me :)
A lot of the stories you hear and see online of this flavor are planted by Google and others to dissuade you from filing simple legal actions!
