Google Ads suspended me and turned a deaf ear
kajic.com
kajic.com
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?
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?
Maybe all it takes is to know a guy who can complain about the account in the right way that it automatically gets suspended and waiting for a human to take a look takes however many weeks.
Maybe 20k a day is still small fry according to Google. That’s only 7million a year. Apparently Coke has a total marketing budget of 4 billion a year. Couple of the big guys on board and 20k a day is just a rounding error.
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...
I can see it now - and intermediary that links willing briber with willing bribee in an anonymous way. Kinda like task rabbit for big tech...
I'm just joking right?
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)
There's nothing wrong with taking gobs of money to work at a huge corporation but at least be honest that they are terrible.
> Later we learned their old agency paid off a Google insider to flag our client’s account resulting in suspension.
Every employer will have skeletons in the closet. Or out of the closet...
If you really have never heard of this type of thing occurring, then you are either willfully ignorant, or completely separated from the reality of how business is conducted with Google. I don't say this with malice, but with plain honesty. This is a fundamental part of how the interaction with Google works. To deny this so plainly can only make any sort of sense through sarcasm.
Working in Ads at Google, this isn't something I've ever seen. If you're able to share details of cases where bribing insiders has happened (either here or to my email) I can look into them?
The lies and dishonesty come from the highest authority in Google. The only real solution is to force the dissolution of big tech and create competition once again. The only thing that can change business behavior is effects to profit.
This hardly seems like a productive sentiment. A system is only as corrupt as the people in it, and this person is openly trying to address a specific problem the best way they know how. Why would you try to dissuade them? I don't understand what your end game is except to make Google more corrupt.
Of course I think their support is generally reprehensible. But we don’t have a third choice right now, so these employees taking initiative seems like a win.
They are sending a message out that their support is maybe not 100% adequate, but if you do have an issue, just raise your voice on social media and it will be fixed. In the end everything will turn out allright, not?
The message they are sending out is downright misleading. Maybe we should even say no to that.
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.
This does make sense, but why the atrocious support? I mean at least reply to emails even if we have to wait for a month to get a response, just give us something real not the canned, automated email.
I've never ever clicked on any of my own ads EVER and I got suspended for "click fraud" and I'm sure there are many people like me... Why do I have to be terminated without any recourse? This feels, for the lack of a better word, pure evil and cruel. This makes people deeply hurt and hate the brand.
I'm a developer and a business owner and because of my experience with Adsense and Adwords there is NO WAY I'll ever use Google Cloud, no matter how much discount Google is willing to give me and I'm definitely not alone in this. This behaviour is going to destroy Google in the long term. Right now you guys make money on advertising, but as soon as you need to sell something, I'm not sure people who have been hurt are willing to pay for it.
I'm now a Google hater, I'll never do any business with them like EVER even if they pay me to use their products.
Also I'm the opposite of an ambassador for Google brand. I managed to turn several huge customers in EU and US to AWS or Azure solutions instead of Google cloud... Several times and I'll continue to recommend companies to not do anything with Google. Yes in the long run their attitude and people's like me will continue to destroy their brand.
I don't really buy this.
The most effective adversaries already have a deep understanding of detection mechanisms and are typically just tweaking parameters to find thresholds of detection. Other companies mitigate this by delaying bans and doing "ban waves", or even randomizing the thresholds (I have done both for certain types of automated bans for attacks on my systems).
More to the point, adversaries already know what they did wrong so telling them isn't going to make much difference. False positives do not know what they did wrong and telling them will make a tremendous difference.
Full disclosure: I have been the victim of a false positive flag in that my app with over 50M downloads on google play was removed and then reinstated when my reddit complaint post got human attention (thank g̶o̶d Google).
I'm not sure that's true. Adversaries know they are intentionally trying to game Google's system, but that is not the same as knowing all of the internal parameters of Google's system. Telling them what they did wrong in specific cases might well give them useful additional information about those internal parameters that Google does not want to give them.
> False positives do not know what they did wrong and telling them will make a tremendous difference.
While this is true, it is also not actionable, since the whole point is that Google does not know which positives are false positives and has no cost-effective way of finding out (since finding out would require actual humans and the scale of its ad business is too large to make the number of humans that would be required affordable).
I saw it when a business for which I did some work would have customers calling from their competitor's lobby saying, "This stupid receptionist doesn't know about my appointment, what do you mean I'm in the wrong place, I put your name in the phone google?! Screw you I'm going to just get the work done here!" Google/Maps/Android had customers driving past the business for which they had searched by literal business name to some other business that was spending more on Adwords for that literal business name.
It’s a really hard problem.
Let me rephrase this to make it clearer what the actual issue is: it's primarily because the cost to Google of false negatives on fraud detection (failing to detect actual frauds) is much higher than the cost to Google of false positives on fraud detection (flagging users as fraudulent that actually aren't). So Google is willing to accept a large number of false positives in order to avoid false negatives.
Or, to put it more simply: the incentive structure of what Google has chosen as its core business model means it is in Google's interest to randomly penalize a large number of bona fide users simply because a much smaller number of users are fraudulent.
In other words, this is basically unfixable unless Google changes its core business model.
See the problem?
Google does not know how to fix this because they don't think outside of the tech box. This is very much an issue with their way of doing things.
You build relations with advertisers. If someone is spending 20k per day on your system (for months or even years), you better have someone to talk to and actually look at the issues they have.
"Do things that do not scale" as PG says.
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 long ago was it? It may not be...
Let's start with this! I too had a Google Ads randomly get nuked and had no way to talk to any customer service agent, after thousands of $ of spending a month.
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.
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.
Like “rocket jumping” in FPS games: Moving ahead by harming yourself, hah
From the advertiser's perspective, if I can spend $x to acquire a user with an LTV (lifetime value) of $y, and $x < $y, why would I not? How would you prevent it?
I like to think that I'm immune to advertising, and I suspect a lot of people here think that way too, but the bottom line is that it does work well enough on enough people to yield a positive ROI in many, many situations.
Directories, with extensive search and filtering and opt-in recommendation systems. Powered by ML or what have you.
Personally, as a consumer who is always looking for new shit to spend my money on, I have yet to see any ad that showed me something I actually liked or purchased.
Some of the best things I have discovered have been through word-of-mouth, manual searching or sheer luck. For example the GamingSuggestions sub on Reddit. (Please don’t ruin it with subversive marketing if any of you adholes are thinking of that)
Sadly almost every major market platform actively hinders and cripples their search and filter features, except maybe Steam. I don’t know why. Maybe they are afraid of competitors combing through their data?
I search for X and I get almost completely unrelated results, often paid ads hijacking the search terms.
Why is it so hard to search for, for example, an iPhone 12 Mini Red with 64 GB, and not see results for any other models, Samsung, or cases and other accessories and shit?
Worse, as-based systems vary by region. So even if I’m often searching for anime and manga, Google can’t seem to infer that I would like to see such results near the top when searching for related things, unless my IP is from Japan.
Just. Stop. Guessing.
I literally told you what I am looking for to spend money on, so only show me that, until I specifically request other similar products.
Advertising is an industry of mental pollution. It exists explicitly to convincing people they need to buy a product. If they don't know they need to buy it without being convinced, they don't actually need to buy it.
It is literally not worth $2 to me to have your junk injected into my brain. This isn't personal of course. I don't even know how useless your junk is. But the fact is, if you're selling a thing, I don't need it. I have more things than I need. I need less. I'd pay $2 to not own your thing specifically because I don't want more things. And that's not even getting into the real issues with advertising.
Advertising is a lot more than your argument claims. It isn't just notification of a product's existence. Advertising is specifically convincing people to buy your thing. Maybe informing people of your product's existence will get some sales. But you'll get a lot more sales if you convince people they want your product. And you'll succeed at that a lot more easily if you attack statistical psychological weaknesses than if you just list product features. This isn't an accident, and it isn't going off the rails. It's what advertising will always become, because it's effective.
Your argument is along the lines of "well I won't abuse it." That's completely irrelevant, unless you're the only person allowed to advertise in the whole world. It really doesn't matter what your goals are. It matters what the effect of the policies you recommend are, and advertising has well-documented negative societal impact. As long as you don't engage with the actual problems with advertising in your arguments, your arguments aren't addressing my point.
If you actually want to address my point, tell me how you can fix the negative societal impact while still allowing advertising.
- TV / streaming ads that fully disrupt your content.
- Interstitial / popup ads that let you close them after some amount of time.
- Interstitial / popup ads that let you close them immediately.
- Banner ads that try to emulate your content. Ex: Sponsored search results that are specified as ads. Product placements in movies.
- Banner ads that clutter and introduce noise to your content but don't disrupt it directly. Ex: web banners, sports stadium billboards, highway billboards, store front signs, guidance signs ("yard sale down the block"), brand logos on products (esp. on athletes), "temporary" sale notifications.
- Subversive ads masquerading as content: UNDISCLOSED sponsored product reviews
- Ads masquerading as content: DISCLOSED sponsored product reviews
- Unintentional ads: genuine, un-incentivized product reviews. Answering your friend's question "what IDE do you use for X?".
- Indifferent and unconscious ads: your choice to use a product in public and not try to conceal that use.
Almost no one is going to argue against the first few being a net negative, and almost no one is going to argue that the last one is even worth thinking about. So where do you draw the line?
> I'd pay $2 to not own your thing specifically because I don't want more things.
You can do exactly that in many cases. Youtube Premium. Hulu tiers. I'm curious how many people nod at that quoted statement but don't actually do it. It's an easy choice for me to do it because I want to support content creators and the opportunity cost of my time is way higher than what these features cost.
Full Disclosure: My F2P multiplayer games get 75-90% of their revenue from advertisements, and most of that is interstitials. Whenever possible, I configure and experiment with close timers to find the right balance of UX and revenue. If I didn't have ads in my games, they would not feasibly exist. Unlike your home internet, most hosting providers charge per byte of data transfer.
That said, I also offer an ad removal in app purchase at a net loss to me. It's a net loss because what typically happens is players who spend the most time in the game are the ones that are significantly more likely to buy it. But the players who spend the most time in the game are also the ones who would be seeing the most ads if they didn't buy it. They are also producing the most data transfer (ie cost to me).
1. It's truthful.
2. It's about the product itself, not about how it could change your life.
3. There's no monetary consideration for it - not even the product being provided at a discount or free.
Your last two examples are the ones that are on the right side of all of those lines.
And yes, I pay for youtube premium and twitch turbo. Doing so improved the quality of those services immensely.
Tell me: Why is “spam” considered undesirable? Would you disable the spam filter of your email etc.?
All advertisement is spam, just that the ads we see have paid to be not counted as spam.
Seems like one is more likely to get a response by complaining on HN.
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.
"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!
Any school (including the one my kids were attending) that depended on Google Classroom was down for the morning. External SPOF.
To me it seems like avoiding Alphabet basically means avoiding advertising and it is really hard to grow a business without it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In a way, yes. Public corporations generally seek profit maximization. Rational consumers seek value maximization. More profit for seller = less value for consumer. Less profit for seller = more value for consumer. This is an adversarial situation by definition.
https://www.healthcare.gov/appeal-insurance-company-decision...
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.
Didn't use to be this way.
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!