The business is an American manufacturer that added capacity to manufacture PPE to make up for the lack of Chinese supply. Since we were supplying direct to the market, the prices of the PPE were in-market from before COVID times, or cheaper. We weren't out to make a killing, just to fill up some manufacturing time and help folks out. We had the equipment, the people, the facility.
However, we didn't have a great way to reach people who needed it - healthcare was not our normal industry - so we decided to put it up on Adwords.
Within 24 hours, the account was suspended. We appealed it (thinking it must have been a mistake), and a month later, they told us they reviewed it and maintained the suspension. We told them we were only promoting PPE to help people in health care find supply and they didn't care. We've never had suspension issues before.
The whole experience left a very negative taste for Google. With their extreme dominance in market share for advertising, they no longer need to cater to customers' needs. (Maybe they care if you're a multimillion dollar customer, but certainly not if you're an everyday SME manfuacturer.) And there's not a lot of alternatives to turn to for that type of advertising. There was no recourse, no discussion, no reasoning. Just the Google blank wall.
We wound up manufacturing lots of it anyway to hospitals in need, but Google actively tried to stop distribution of American-made PPE during the pandemic.