How to reactivate your Google Grants account after suspension
3 min read
If your AdWords Grants account has been suspended, you’ll be keen to resolve this as quickly as possible. If you find the Google policy guidelines confusing then we’re here to help.
We are Google partners and manage Google Grants accounts for several charity/not-for-profit organisations, which includes regular reviews (or audits) to ensure maximum effectiveness and compliance with Google’s policies.
First, we’ll outline the common reasons Google might suspend your account. Then, we’ll also explain the important steps required to overcome the problems, before requesting Google reactivate your Ad Grants account.
Why your account is suspended?
Google state that any account found to be in violation of its program policies is subject to automatic suspension without notification, violations include,
- Your account isn’t actively managed
- You haven’t logged in within 30 days
- You haven’t made at least one change in 90 days
- Repeated submission of disapproved ads
- Your ads are misleading
- Implying that you’re a competitor in your ads
- Providing inaccurate information about the content on your site
- Bidding and budget incorrectly set up
- Campaigns set up to spend over the $329 daily budget
- Didn’t respond to the program survey
- All grantees must complete an annual program survey – The survey link can be found here.
If these points don’t sound familiar, then it is likely your account could have been impacted by a recent change to Google’s policies and criteria, for example, new requirements were introduced in Jan 2018 as follows:
- Maintain a 5% Click through rate (CTR). If your account doesn’t achieve at least a 5% CTR for two consecutive months, your account will be cancelled
- Bidding on branded keywords you don’t own
- Keywords have quality scores of 2-1 or higher. The policy requires active keywords to have a quality score of 3 or higher (on a scale of 10. Quality score is intended to give you a general sense of the quality of your ads
- Campaigns without two ad groups
- Ad groups without two ads running in each
- The account doesn’t have at least two sitelink extensions active
- Accounts not using geotargeting
- Bidding on the single-word keyword
- Invalid conversion tracking.
Getting your account reactivated
The first step to recovering from a suspension is identifying the potential reasons for the suspension. Hopefully, the lists above have provided a starting point. The Policy Centre and can provide further detail on the specific rules for Grants accounts. We’re happy to help if you have other things to focus on right now.
Once you know why you’ve had your account paused then you can work to resolve this. Generally, these things shouldn’t be too time-consuming and could be as simple as paused keywords with low QS ads or adding GEO targeting.
The 5% CTR rule has been particularly challenging for some charities. We would suggest pausing all the campaigns or ad groups that have CTR below 5%. To have your account re-activated you’ll need to prove to Google that you’ve taken the steps to meet their requirements.
Once your account is live again you can review what was paused and work to get these back live by optimising the account. We have provided a guide on how to get the most out of your Google Grants account.
Request to reactivate Ad Grants account
Once you feel that the transgression has been dealt with you can appeal against the account suspension. Requesting to reactivate Ad Grants account. Note that if you repeatedly break program policies, your account may be cancelled and removed from the Google Ad Grants program.
Google can take up to 10 days to respond, although we have experienced much faster responses from them.
In the ‘Notes’ section of your reactivation request, you should clearly detail the steps you’ve taken to update your account and make it compliant.
If you’re not confident with Google Ads then please get in touch. We’re always happy to have a chat and give advice where we can.
