How to Fix a Deactivated Google Ad Grant Account

Are you pulling your hair out right now?

Did you login to Google and see a message that goes something like this?

Your account is deactivated for not complying with Google Ad Grants’ Mission-Based Campaigns policy – Contact us for reactivation after adjusting your account, such as removing single-word keywords, less relevant phrases and keywords with quality scores of 1 or 2.

Don’t panic, stop pulling your hair, make a nice cup of tea and sit back, read through this article and we’ll explain how to get things back up and running again. Of course if you don’t have time to read through this guide you can always contact a Ninja, we’d be happy to help.

Get Rid of Those Single Word Keywords

Apart from a few exceptions (see list here) Google don’t let you use single-word keywords in your Ad Grant account (excluding your own branded words, recognised medical conditions, acronyms).

This aversion to single word keywords is mainly because it’s really hard to determine the intent of a search when somebody types a single keyword into Google. For example, even the keyword “donate” (even though it’s on the exception list) could have a wide range of different intents, is the searcher looking to make a financial donation (fundraisers hope so) or are they looking to donate blood or maybe some clothing or an old piece of furniture?

Note: Google say that terms with dashes, periods, or special characters are not treated as single-word keywords.

With a bit more effort in the keyword research phrase you can figure out those longer-tail (multiple keyword) search terms and steer clear of those single word keywords.

Avoid Overly Generic Keywords

You can’t add overly generic keywords in your account. So what exactly do Google mean by this? The official line is that these include things like “best videos”, “cool apps”, “e-books”, “today’s news”, “easy yoga”, “download games”, “things to do”, “job alert”, or names of other organisations, places, historical events, or people on their own

Allowed examples include “museums in [your city name]”, “emergency preparedness apps” or “YouTube video to learn English”, but not a city name, ‘Android apps’, or ‘YouTube’ on their own

Google have advised that if you’re using overly generic keywords that you may see these terms disapproved for ‘Unclear Relevance’ in your account.

You can put a stop to overly generic keyword headaches by checking your Search Terms Report and then adding negative keywords where needed.

Low Quality Keywords

This is an easy one to measure and an even easier one to fix. Google have provided very clear guidelines that keywords with a Quality Score of 1 or 2 will no longer be accepted in Ad Grant accounts.

Remember that Quality Score is an aggregated performance estimate for your keyword, it’s not an out and it’s not used to directly determine Ad Rank. Quality Score is based on expected performance which is made up of expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. So you can pull all of these levers to increase your quality score.

To prevent your account being suspended/deactivated it’s wise to set up an automatic rule to pause any keywords with a quality score of less than 3 and send you an email so that you can figure out what went wrong and try to get the keyword (or variations working again) after you’ve made some tweaks.