throwaway12345
Newbie
- Aug 2, 2024
- 1
- 0
Brief Backstory:
I own a legit brick and mortar healthcare-service related business and associated website, and created an ads account on my own in Jan 2023 and successfully advertised for over a year, up until Feb 2024. In the middle of Feb 2024, I got multiple emails, simultaneously, saying my individual ads had "malicious software", and an hour later I was suspended for circumventing systems. The website is a basic Squarespace site with no custom scripting/plugins, and nothing had changed, in terms of content, on the website for months. I have now spent the last 6 months contacting ads support, chipping away at the campaign and website to eliminate anything I could think of that come anywhere close to a policy violation, repeatedly making appeals along the way, with no success. It's been looked at by multiple Google reps and agencies as well, with no insight gained.
Since policy violations aren't properly displayed/reviewed/updated when your account is suspended, recently at the advice of one of the agencies, for testing purposes I created a new gmail account, new ads account, and used a personal (never-used-for-google-ads-before) credit card. Since the original website was built on Squarespace, I just cloned the website and gave the clone a new domain. I manually recreated the original campaign, ad by ad, (paused because it's just a test), in the new account, pointing at the new domain. The new account has no violations whatsoever, and has been sitting there paused for a month without suspension or violation.
Given identical sites and campaigns, one suspended and one not, I feel like the original must have been suspended in error, and I didn't actually make a mistake. And for some reason the appeals are hopeless.
My Questions:
1. What are the thing(s) that get permanently banned / shouldn't be affiliated with new accounts?
- A person?
- A specific piece of photo ID?
- Corporation number?
- Address / Phone?
- Domain?
- Site content? (Doesn't appear to be this because I cloned the sites)
- Just the ads account?
- IP address? (Doesn't appear to be this because I haven't change it while being simultaneously logged into both the suspended and unsuspended accounts from different browsers)
- Credit card? Is a separate "authorized user" card, associable with the primary credit card by Google?
- Computer Hardware?
2. If an innocent account like mine can be suspended without recourse, what's the best approach to "quickly recover" (say within a month) with a new account?
- The advertiser verification spooks me the most as I only have a finite number of unique persons/photo IDs within the business, and if I have to create new a corporation with its own unique docs, that seems overkill. A new credit card is kind of a pain, but easier if I can just use an "authorized user" card. Duplicating the rest is trivial.
Thanks in advance for your advice.
I own a legit brick and mortar healthcare-service related business and associated website, and created an ads account on my own in Jan 2023 and successfully advertised for over a year, up until Feb 2024. In the middle of Feb 2024, I got multiple emails, simultaneously, saying my individual ads had "malicious software", and an hour later I was suspended for circumventing systems. The website is a basic Squarespace site with no custom scripting/plugins, and nothing had changed, in terms of content, on the website for months. I have now spent the last 6 months contacting ads support, chipping away at the campaign and website to eliminate anything I could think of that come anywhere close to a policy violation, repeatedly making appeals along the way, with no success. It's been looked at by multiple Google reps and agencies as well, with no insight gained.
Since policy violations aren't properly displayed/reviewed/updated when your account is suspended, recently at the advice of one of the agencies, for testing purposes I created a new gmail account, new ads account, and used a personal (never-used-for-google-ads-before) credit card. Since the original website was built on Squarespace, I just cloned the website and gave the clone a new domain. I manually recreated the original campaign, ad by ad, (paused because it's just a test), in the new account, pointing at the new domain. The new account has no violations whatsoever, and has been sitting there paused for a month without suspension or violation.
Given identical sites and campaigns, one suspended and one not, I feel like the original must have been suspended in error, and I didn't actually make a mistake. And for some reason the appeals are hopeless.
My Questions:
1. What are the thing(s) that get permanently banned / shouldn't be affiliated with new accounts?
- A person?
- A specific piece of photo ID?
- Corporation number?
- Address / Phone?
- Domain?
- Site content? (Doesn't appear to be this because I cloned the sites)
- Just the ads account?
- IP address? (Doesn't appear to be this because I haven't change it while being simultaneously logged into both the suspended and unsuspended accounts from different browsers)
- Credit card? Is a separate "authorized user" card, associable with the primary credit card by Google?
- Computer Hardware?
2. If an innocent account like mine can be suspended without recourse, what's the best approach to "quickly recover" (say within a month) with a new account?
- The advertiser verification spooks me the most as I only have a finite number of unique persons/photo IDs within the business, and if I have to create new a corporation with its own unique docs, that seems overkill. A new credit card is kind of a pain, but easier if I can just use an "authorized user" card. Duplicating the rest is trivial.
Thanks in advance for your advice.
