Google Ads account suspended

A suspended account is not a disapproved ad

A disapproved ad is one ad that broke one rule. You fix the ad and it goes back into review. A suspension is a decision about the whole account, and sometimes about the person or business behind it.

Google treats some violations as egregious. For those the account is suspended immediately, with no warning. They include circumventing systems, unacceptable business practices and trade sanctions violations. For other repeated violations Google sends a warning at least seven days before it suspends.

The three reasons I saw most often

Redirects. The ad points to one address and the visitor ends up somewhere else, or the reviewer sees one page and real users see another. Google calls this circumventing systems, and it is one of the fastest ways to lose an account. Sometimes the owner did not even set it up. A plugin, an old tracking template or a hosting rule is enough.

The ad says one thing and the site does another. A typical case from support was an ad for massage that led to a site selling sexual services. Less dramatic versions happen all the time, such as a price in the ad that does not exist on the page or a service the business does not actually provide.

Businesses Google does not accept. Sexual services, drugs and similar categories. Here the problem is not the ads but the business itself, and no amount of rewriting will change the outcome.

Billing causes its own share of suspensions. An unpaid balance, chargebacks and payment activity Google considers suspicious all lead to a suspended account, even when the ads themselves are fine.

Before you appeal, fix the cause

An appeal is a request to look again. If nothing has changed on the site or in the account, the reviewer sees the same thing and gives the same answer.

Go through the landing pages the ads use. Check redirects, tracking templates and anything that sends visitors to a different domain. Make sure every claim in the ads is true on the page. Google also asks that linked and related accounts follow the policies before you appeal, because a problem in one of them can keep the others suspended.

How the appeal works and how long it takes

The appeal goes through the link in the suspension notice inside the account. Some advertisers have to pass advertiser verification first, and only then can they appeal. You have at least six months from the date of suspension to do it.

Send one appeal at a time and one appeal per suspended account. Google says plainly that sending several appeals at once only slows things down. In my experience a review took around a week. The answer arrives by email.

Why the second appeal is usually the last real chance

Google does not publish a limit on appeals. In practice, an appeal makes sense about twice. If two reviewers have looked at the account and both said no, the chance that a third one says yes is very small.

Most of the appeals I saw fail came from businesses that were simply not allowed. They kept appealing, nothing changed, and every new attempt only confirmed the decision. If the business itself breaks the rules, it is cheaper to accept that than to keep writing.

Where advertiser verification goes wrong

Verification fails most often on documents. People upload the wrong pages of their passport or ID, or a scan where part of the page is cut off. This happens far more outside the EU and the US, because every country's documents look different and it is not obvious which page Google needs.

Upload the page with your name, photo and date of birth in full, readable and uncropped. The name has to match the payment profile and the business details exactly, including the spelling in Latin letters.

A case we won after a month

One account was suspended during verification because the owner's passport listed a place of birth in a territory under US sanctions. He had not lived there for twenty years. He held citizenship of another country, lived there and ran a business registered there. Nothing in the business had anything to do with the sanctioned territory.

The check stopped at the place of birth and went no further. It took a month of back and forth, explaining residence, citizenship and where the business actually operated, before the account was restored. The lesson is that a suspension can rest on one field in one document, and a calm, documented explanation is what reverses it.

What never to do after a suspension

Do not open a new account to keep advertising. Google's circumventing systems policy names creating new accounts after a suspension as a violation in itself, and the new account usually ends up suspended too.

Above all, do not attach the same card. When I was in support I saw it many times. A new account was linked to the card from the suspended one and was suspended within moments. If an account really has to be opened for a separate, legitimate business, it needs a different payment method from a different owner.