Do you know what to do if you see something like this message in your Google Ad Grants account?
We’ve had a few concerned non-profits contact us recently after getting this message and seeing all activity in their account stop – meaning traffic to their website falls off a cliff.
Don’t panic! In our experience, this is usually fixable.
Send an Ad Grant emergency distress flare!
The Ninjas are ready and waiting to help you with your Ad Grants questions and challenges – just hit the button to send out a distress flare.
The chances are that Google has paused/suspended/cancelled your account temporarily due to the account breaching the terms of service for the Ad Grants programme. The Ad Grants terms of service were updated at the start of 2018, we covered these changes in a bit of detail in this article.
For the organisations we’ve seen this cancellation/suspension happen to it was usually a pretty straightforward process to put right, top reasons for the account being suspended or paused were:
- Keywords that were not relevant to the cause or that were relevant but were single-word keywords where the charity had not requested an exception from Google Support
- The charity was sending traffic to a domain other than their primary domain, if you wish to send traffic from the grant to an event or campaign microsite then you need to request an exception from Google using this form
- Keywords where the quality score was 2 or lower – this is no longer allowed by Google, you should remove/pause all keywords where q/s is two or lower and then set up an automated rule to do this for you going forward – let me know if you need help doing this and I’ll write an article on what to do (or let a Ninja do it for you)
- Campaigns didn’t have 2 or more Ad Groups
- Campaigns were targeting locations other than the organisation’s core market – e.g. other countries, we even saw one case get suspended because they had set targeting to “people in or interested in my location” – so it’s clear that Google is getting quite strict about this
- Click-through rates too low – Google now wants all Ad Grants to sustain a minimum 5% click-through rate, thus ensuring the traffic generated by your Grant account is as relevant to your cause as possible. You can find a whole range of suggestions for improving your account click-through rate here.
Our advice if you’ve been hit with this message is to dive into your AdWords account and check for the above issues and then contact Google support to request your account reactivating. You can request reactivation here. You could of course contact Google at the start to find out what the issue is but our experience is that this adds a bit of a delay in getting things sorted.
If you’re stuck with this then please get in contact with us today, we’re happy to take a look and offer you some initial advice on how to get the issue resolved.
If you need help with the day-to-day management of your Google Ad Grant, paid Google AdWords account or some other area of your digital marketing life then please get in touch and we’ll let you know how we might be able to help.