Why No One is Safe from Google Ads Suspensions

Jeffro (00:00.846)
Welcome back to digital dominance. Have you ever been cruising along, your campaigns are finally working, appointments are coming in, when one day you notice something seems off? So you go into your ad account and you get a notice saying, your account’s been suspended. Now this instantly jumps to the top of your priority list because your client engine has just ground to a halt. Sometimes the issue is straightforward, like your credit card expired, payment didn’t go through. Okay, easy. But many times, the rationale for the suspension is not so clear and the process to resolve the issue can

take a while, submitting appeals, fighting with support. So is this just part of the game or is it possible to never run afoul of the rules? My guest today is John Horn, the CEO of Stub Group. John and his company are a leading Google Ads agency that has successfully led over 15 ,000 ad campaigns, which have driven over $400 million in revenue for their clients. So John has lots of experience both preventing and recovering from account suspensions.

I’m excited to dive into this side of Google Ads because it’s a really important topic. So welcome to the show, John.

John Horn (01:01.276)
Jeffery, thank you so much for having me.

Jeffro (01:03.598)
Definitely. Well, I mean, you clearly live and breathe pay -per -click advertising. I checked out your website a few days ago while I was prepping for the interview, and now I see your face retargeting me in my news feeds. So you’re walking the walk, not just talking about it. You’re actually doing it. And with ads too, there’s a thousand things we can talk about. But I want to focus on this issue of accounts getting suspended. Now, there’s so many rules, and I’d venture to guess that most account suspensions come as a shock to the owners. So has that been your experience?

John Horn (01:32.348)
Absolutely. So in Google, what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to keep their ecosystem as clean and legitimate as possible. There’s a lot of businesses out there who are trying to scam users who are trying to follow illegitimate business practices, et cetera. And so Google is constantly fighting this battle with the scammers. For context, last year, Google closed down over 12 million ad accounts suspended over 12 million ad accounts just last year alone.

That was up from, I think it was about 5 .6 million the year before. So there’s a lot of accounts that are getting suspended every single year. And, you know, most of that is, is great. I am very much on board with that. I do not want to be scared that if I click on a Google ad and go to a website that I’m going to have malware installed, or I’m going to try and purchase something and that product never gets to me, so forth and so on. But unfortunately,

Jeffro (02:04.974)
Yeah.

Jeffro (02:19.598)
So that instills trust in the users. Right.

John Horn (02:21.532)
Absolutely. Yeah. And to Google, you know, trust is paramount because if they lose the trust of users, then those users move elsewhere and they don’t get to make money from advertising, et cetera. And so Google is very paranoid about that trust. Unfortunately, that paranoia often comes to hurt legitimate advertisers as well, which kind of goes into what you were asking about, which is, you know, do businesses generally expect suspensions? And no, usually what happens.

is your campaigns are running, things are normal, things are going along as is. And then you wake up one morning, you see an email from Google and it says, your account has been suspended. And it gives some policy. It might say it’s been suspended for circumventing systems or suspicious payment activity or something like that. And you try and start reading this policy and you’re like, well, this is really vague. Like, I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know what I did wrong. It’s saying it could be…

It could be any of these 10 things or something else. Like how on earth am I supposed to figure out what I did wrong and how to fix it? And so that’s kind of the position that a lot of advertisers are in when they reach out to us for help is like, I’m, I’m a legit company. I’m trying to pay Google money and they won’t take my money and I want to fix it and they won’t tell me how. And I’ve talked to support. I’ve tried to talk support and they won’t talk to me. And it’s like, you know, what do I do? And so that’s where we kind of come in and try and figure out what’s going on.

Jeffro (03:41.486)
So why do they do it that way? Because there’s clearly something they’ve identified that violates the rules. Why don’t they just be upfront about it and tell you, hey, if you fix this creative, you’ll be good.

John Horn (03:52.86)
That is such a good question. I would, that is the question I share as well. I have thoughts. Obviously these are speculations. I think a big part of it, I think there’s probably two, two parts of it. The first part is that Google, they don’t want to give a game plan away to those bad actors to know, okay, these are exactly the checklist of things that Google’s looking for. And so if I kind of massage and make sure I have this or say this that way, I’m okay. Google’s, I think intentionally keeps things vague to try and keep those bad actors guessing.

I also think there’s an element of Google trying to avoid liability in that if they tell you here’s exactly what you did wrong, and then an advertiser says, wait, I didn’t do that, or that you didn’t violate a policy and now you’ve had tremendous negative impact on my business, opportunity cost, Google doesn’t want to get sued. So I think it’s a combination of trying to do the right thing of not telling bad actors how to do things exactly, and then also just trying to cover their rear as well.

Jeffro (04:51.117)
That’s interesting. Cause I know sometimes, like what their Google business profile, for example, they block a profile and you appeal it. You’re like, Hey, I didn’t do that. Okay. They’ll, they’ll reverse it if you’re right. And so like, why not do the same thing, you know, with ads? Is it just because you’re paying money for it as opposed to a free service perhaps?

John Horn (05:13.564)
It’s a great question. Google, because they’re such a massive organization, you know, they behave differently across many different products and within products. So there’s the thing I say constantly to our clients and to advertisers who reach out to us is the only consistent thing about Google is their inconsistency. It will constantly have advertisers be like, Hey, Google said I can’t run this ad, but my five competitors are running the same type of ad and they’re being way more aggressive than me, but they’re all running. Why? And the only good answer to that, I mean, there’s no good answer is just.

Google is very inconsistent with how they enforce things and kind of, you know, they’ll let things go for a long time. And then if they’re like, you know what, you know, I don’t like this. They may take your ads down, but competitors are just running for years potentially. So what we try and focus on in those situations is try and channel that frustration into the right areas. So you can call Google all day long, yell at them, complain at them, you know, fill out appeals saying, why are you doing this to me? None of that’s going to have any positive outcome.

what you have to focus on is identifying what may have gone wrong or what may Google be flagging to think that you violated a policy. And oftentimes there are actually things that are wrong, not maliciously per se. For example, one thing that can cause what they call a circumventing system suspension is if you have a URL in your ad on Google and it redirects to a different page, that actually is against Google’s policy and that can cause a suspension.

Now, a lot of advertisers aren’t doing anything malicious. They might not even know if there’s a redirect there, like maybe their web team put some kind of a redirect on a page, over to a new page, and the ads team didn’t realize it happened. All sorts of stories like that I could tell. But at the end of the day, technically, it did violate Google’s policy. And so what you got to do is look for all those types of things, fix them, make everything as perfect as possible, and then appeal to Google. Tell them what you did.

right in a way that Google likes to see things explained and provide documentation and so forth. And then Google absolutely can and does reverse suspensions. We help tons and tons of businesses reverse suspensions, but it’s not easy. It takes a lot of work, a lot of knowledge and pattern recognition, and then just persistence in kind of hammering down Google’s door with appeals.

Jeffro (07:27.054)
So what are some of the most common reasons you see that accounts get suspended?

John Horn (07:31.676)
I’d say there’s three most common reasons. The most common right now is what they call suspicious payments. And that’s a very broad policy that basically says Google thinks there’s something fishy going on related to payment method or payment in the account. And a lot of businesses get confused because they’ll get this suspension literally for a brand new account that they haven’t paid any money in. Like they’ll create the account, they haven’t run any ads yet, and suddenly it’s suspended. They’re like, we haven’t paid money. How can this be suspicious?

And there’s a lot of things at play. Sometimes it’s Google seeing, wait, why are there multiple ad accounts being paid by the same credit card that can look suspicious to them? It can be, you know, problems in how you create the account to begin with, like mismatching your business information and address with the business name that’s paying for the account, things like that. So a bunch of different opportunities and options for what can cause that suspension. Second most common, I would say, is circumventing systems, which again is a very, very broad.

policy that covers everything from redirects, like I mentioned, to cloaking on your website, malware on your website, a ton of different things that can fall under that policy. And then the third most common one would be unacceptable business practices. And that one is interesting because it’s a little more of Google saying, we think something is fishy with your business itself.

It could be, hey, your business has a bunch of bad reviews online. Google could see that and say, you know what, these guys don’t look legit. You know, there’s a bunch of one -star reviews. People are complaining about them. We think this is unacceptable. It’s not safe for our people, for Google users. They might suspend an account for that. It often also though, is due to confusion on Google’s part. So for example, in the franchise space, we’ve worked a lot of franchisees where Google will suspend the account for the franchisee because they think they’re pretending to be someone that they’re not.

Jeffro (09:22.478)
Hmm.

John Horn (09:22.844)
So let’s take, I don’t know, a random, a random franchise. Let’s take Wendy’s. Well, Wendy’s not the best example, but let’s just say Wendy’s. Let’s say that you have a local franchise that has, you know, Wendy’s in Austin .com. Well, Google might look at that and say, wait, they’ve got this brand name in their, in their domain name. They’ve got the Wendy’s logo. These guys are phishing. These guys are fakers. We’re going to suspend them. The reality is they have all, you know, complete authorization from Wendy’s to do that, but you have to prove that to Google. And so.

That’s, you know, I think the third most common suspension type right now is that UBP or unacceptable business practices.

Jeffro (09:55.886)
Yeah. And it’s interesting that they just, they slap your wrist first and ask questions. They don’t even ask questions later. They make you go do the work and figure out what’s going on. and that last one seems trickiest because yeah, I mean, maybe you’re just bad at business. Doesn’t mean you’re illegitimate. You’re just, I, sorry, I got some bad star reviews when I first started, but I’m better now. Yeah. That’s, that’s frustrating.

John Horn (10:07.868)
Yeah.

John Horn (10:20.956)
Yep. Exactly. Yeah, it’s frustrating. It’s confusing, challenging. But there’s a lot that can be done when you approach things calmly. So, you know, realizing, okay, this is the reality. Google’s not going to tell me what’s wrong. It’s basically up to me to figure things out. And so let’s go into things, figure things out, calmly address them with Google, calmly appeal things. And we have a very high success rate, you know, for our clients in getting things fixed.

But it’s yeah good

Jeffro (10:50.702)
How long does it typically take to get someone reinstated?

John Horn (10:56.348)
It’s a fantastic question. The short answer is it varies wildly. The more detailed answer is you’re often looking at weeks to a month or months potentially, depending on the situation. It also, in our case, it really depends on what advertisers have done before they hire us to fix things. So oftentimes advertisers, they’ll try to fix things. They’ll DIY initially first.

they’ll submit appeals and sometimes they can actually hurt their case more with Google because they’re throwing kind of half -baked appeals into the process or maybe they’re just literally submitting an appeal that says, hey, tell us what we did wrong. And so you’re kind of using up some of those first appeal opportunities but not giving Google anything that they’re gonna actually look at and analyze. So it’s always more difficult for us once there’s already been a lot of water under the bridge but that also is very common because a lot of people try DIY.

Jeffro (11:40.365)
you.

Jeffro (11:48.91)
Mm -hmm.

John Horn (11:51.996)
before they come to us. So it doesn’t make it impossible to fix issues. It just extends that timeline, generally speaking.

Jeffro (12:00.333)
Are there any violations that result in permanent suspension where they say, there’s no coming back from this. We’ve made up our minds. Don’t even talk to us.

John Horn (12:08.54)
Absolutely. So, I mean, technically any suspension is permanent unless they change their mind. You know, you’re proven guilty until proven innocent. But there’s definitely suspensions where you appeal to your blue in the face. You think everything’s perfect. Everything looks amazing. And Google just says no. And again, they don’t tell you why they’re saying no, other than just pointing you back to the big policy. So it happens. We have a high success rate, but not 100 % success rate. We’re always very open.

with businesses about that who reach out to us, which is, hey, there is a risk that this account might never be suspended. And so it’s really important that you be strategic in how you approach appealing that suspension and do everything you can to maximize your success of getting that fixed.

Jeffro (12:53.23)
So what about in that case, or even if you’re just worried that it’s going to be a long drawn out process, could you just create a new account and start running ads there? Obviously, if it’s a small account, that’s probably easier because you don’t have as much to recreate. But is that possible?

John Horn (13:08.572)
It’s a great question. So there’s kind of different approaches to that. The short answer is if you have an app as an advertiser, just go out and create a new account. It’s very, very likely that Google is gonna connect that new account to your old account and suspend that new account just because it exists, just because it being tied to the old account. So they might see, hey, he’s got the same credit card, the same billing address, the same user, the same IP address, stuff like that. Because Google…

You know, they want you to fix the problem they’ve identified, not just go create a new account because in their minds, you’re a problem to the ecosystem and you going and creating a new account doesn’t solve that problem. Now there’s, there’s different approaches that can be at play where, you know, some advertisers, they might partner, let’s say with an agency like stub group, for example, to, you know, leverage an agency relationship with stub group and kind of approach things through a separate account.

where there’s established history and credit lines and things like that with Google. So there are some options, but generally you want to be working with an agency that knows what they’re doing and is able to kind of guide things through the right way and make sure that Google’s policies are being followed as opposed to just going and creating a new account because that’ll very likely get suspended as well.

Jeffro (14:22.19)
Gotcha. And it sounds overall like, you know, there’s no way to just run ads and be a hundred percent guaranteed that you’re not going to get suspended. Even if you do the basic stuff like don’t have the redirects or, you know, have good reviews, like there could be something that Google just flags rightly or wrongly and decides, Hey, we don’t like this.

John Horn (14:41.02)
There could always be something like that. Absolutely. And sometimes things that are outside of your control, like your website getting hacked and malware put on the website and then Google suspending your account because they see malware, things like that happen all the time as well. So, you know, that said, there’s obviously many, many accounts out there that never get suspended, that never have issues. The majority of accounts are in that, in that place. But I think a lot of businesses don’t realize how close.

they are or how easy it is to have a problem. Because until you have to go through the nightmare of a suspension, you just kind of think, look, common sense, we’re paying Google money. You know, if there’s an issue, they’re going to tell us what the issue is. We’ll fix it. They want to keep making money. That’s what common sense would say. The reality is it’s just not that, not that simple and doesn’t really work that way. And so it’s really important for every advertiser out there to be just really thoughtful about their websites, making sure they have the right policies and their websites.

making sure they’ve got good processes in place in their ad account to avoid things like redirects, you know, not pushing the line, not being too aggressive with their ad copy and saying things that aren’t true, obviously, or doing any of the other things that could violate Google’s policies.

Jeffro (15:52.174)
So what about you know we talk about account level suspensions are there partial suspensions you know if I’m running ads on YouTube and the display network and they just say hey we’re gonna stop these ones for a while while you fix this issue does that happen.

John Horn (16:05.564)
Yeah, it’s kind of three levels of suspensions and disapprovals. There’s a couple of sub levels beyond that, but I’ll just talk to the main three. So there’s the account suspension, which is what we’ve been talking about, which is Google saying, look, you may not run any ads in your account at all for any website, for any reason, like your account is suspended. And that is the situation there, like 12 or 13 million of those last year.

Then you have what they call ad disapprovals. And there is, I think, five or six billion of these every year. And this is them saying, Hey, there’s an issue with a particular ad. So it’s not an account level issue. It’s, it’s an ad level issue. And generally these are much easier to fix. It could be as simple as look, you’ve got the wrong punctuation in your ad. You know, you’re not following editorial policies. It could be, Hey, your landing page URL doesn’t work and you can’t run that. It could be, Hey, this is a misleading ad. You need to tweak this or Hey, this is a

election content, so forth and so on. Lots and lots of ad disapproval reasons. So those are easier to fix, generally speaking. They can still be challenging, still be a bit of a nightmare to work through, but they’re not as devastating, generally speaking, as the account level suspension. And then you can also have what I will call a domain suspension. Google doesn’t call it a domain suspension per se, but if they think that your domain has malware on it or is compromised in some way,

they might prevent you from serving ads to that domain, but still allow you to serve ads from your account to a different domain. And so those are kind of the three primary levels. You’ve got ad disapprovals, domain level issues, and then account level suspensions.

Jeffro (17:39.726)
Interesting. Now you, we’ve talked pretty much about Google today, but you do other ads as well, Facebook and everything, right? So how does it compare between Google and Facebook? You know, are you more likely to get suspended on one versus another and how, you know, getting reactivated, is that more of a problem on one or the other?

John Horn (17:48.988)
Mm -hmm.

John Horn (18:00.892)
Great question. A lot of the same kind of reality is applied to Facebook, even Microsoft, with Bing, even Amazon, as applied to Google, where there’s generally way less information about what went wrong than you would like and not much support to help you figure things out. We definitely, as a stub group, we spend a lot more time on Google suspensions than we do on other platforms.

We’ll do some work in other platforms for some clients, but generally speaking for Facebook, I would say a lot of suspensions come down to either user level issues. So people thinking there’s a problem with a user. So for example, Facebook doesn’t want you to create fake users on Facebook. So a lot of companies, they’ll create like our company name as the name of the Facebook user.

Jeffro (18:53.486)
Mm -hmm.

John Horn (18:54.076)
Facebook’s usually going to put the kibosh in that right away because they want real people as users so that’s a very common issue and then it could be related to the ads that you’re running especially if you’re in a more sensitive vertical like Supplements or weight loss or CBD or financial products anything that’s got more policy, you know around it You’re more likely to get suspended and then same thing with you know payment methods if something goes wrong there you can have issues so

Yeah, it’s a lot of the same ideas apply for Facebook and Microsoft as they do for Google.

Jeffro (19:28.462)
Okay. So now a lot of, I mean, this, a lot of this feels like it hurts smaller businesses more because they don’t necessarily have the resources or the team to be on top of this and to pay extra to get stuff reinstated or, you know, know all those rules. I, whether that’s intentional or not, you know, we could debate, but I think it kind of just ends up landing that way. But what about if a company is doing both SEO and PPC, on Google, let’s say,

How can those efforts work together? And also, I was curious if issues with your SEO, could that trigger suspension on the ad side, for example?

John Horn (20:09.084)
Great questions. So I’ll answer probably the first question first, how do they work together? I always recommend to our clients have great SEO and great PPC. That’s the best world. You wanna have, obviously the best organic rankings you can, but you also wanna have the best ads you can. And those combined generally provide exponentially better results than just having great SEO by itself or just having great ads by itself. And the more you do of that, the more market share.

generally you can capture because you are just capturing more opportunities on that search engine results page for people to see you as a solution and click either on your ad or your organic listing than on a competitor. So great SEO, great PPC. I think, you know, work really well together. In the suspension and policy space, they generally speaking are very, very separated. So I don’t really see issues with ad accounts related to SEO and vice versa.

You can have an app account that’s suspended for unacceptable business practices and has great SEO ranking. As an example, there’s not really, doesn’t seem to be much, much communication within Google, kind of those sides of things. I’ll also see situations where Google will say your website has, you know, is, is malicious intent or malware or something like that. And yet on the SEO side of things, Google says everything’s good. You look at their transparency report. Google says it’s perfect. You look at search console. It says no issues, no security issues.

But then Google ads like, no, you can’t run ads there. You have malicious intent. And so they’re very different products and teams and approaches from what we’ve seen.

Jeffro (21:47.246)
That’s interesting. And it makes sense. And I think to your point of having both, you know, it’s kind of a, you’re covering your own back to make sure that, Hey, I want these both working so that if Google does suspend the ads, I’ve at least still got some organic traffic coming in while I sort that out. It’s not the end of the world. Like, yes, it took a hit, but I can still keep rolling forward.

John Horn (22:11.612)
Absolutely. And vice versa too, where Google’s constantly changing their ranking algorithms and your organic listings might take a hit. And so you might need those ads to fall back on. So they definitely, if you can call it diversification where you’re still so reliant on Google for everything, at least there’s a little bit of diversification within the types of Google that you’re.

Jeffro (22:16.59)
Mm -hmm.

Jeffro (22:31.182)
Yeah, well, at least with SEO, other search engines are affected by that too. So obviously the paid ads on Google, that’s only going to show up on Google results, but your SEO efforts pay dividends elsewhere too. All right. Well, I think this is where we’re going to end today as we’re coming up on our time, but I really appreciate you being here today, John. This is an issue that most business owners seem to face at some point for some reason or another, like we talked about, you know, you may not even realize what you’re doing, but hopefully this episode will be a good resource to avoid suspension.

John Horn (22:42.172)
Absolutely.

Jeffro (23:01.038)
or to at least recover quickly and know that, you know, that’s possible or kind of get an idea of where to start. So guys, if you’re listening, go check out the links in the show notes to connect with John, especially if you have an account that’s suspended, he can help you. Follow us, Dubb Group on social media. He’s also offering a free consultation for podcast listeners. So if you’re not sure where you stand and you’re worried about getting suspended or, you know, any of that stuff, go talk to him and he can get you sorted out. Last question for you, John, what’s the…

biggest Google ads account that you’ve rescued from suspension.

John Horn (23:35.228)
biggest one. The first one comes to mind is when we got unsuspended a couple months ago. They were spending, it’s been $6 million, I think on Google over the past couple of years. We’ve worked with some others that have spent 50 million as well. But the one that comes to mind is that 6 million one. But yeah, it goes to sit to show it really doesn’t matter how much money you spend with Google, you can still have the same problems as a mom and pop spending $1 ,000 on Google.

Jeffro (24:02.926)
Right. Man, that’s, it’s kind of crazy. And obviously that’s a huge part of the growth of that company, you know? So that’s the lifeblood. You got to get that fixed as soon as you can. Well, thanks again for being here, John. And thanks to all of you for listening. Keep your ad accounts clean and I’ll see you in the next episode. So long.

John Horn (24:14.428)
Absolutely.