I worked for Google Ads for 7 years and now I’m banned
Am I getting my ‘just deserts’? 😅
I worked for Google Ads as a software engineer from 2014–2021, on both Search ads and YouTube ads.
In exploring ideas for my new startup, I unintentionally committed an “egregious violation” that resulted in my Google Ads account getting permanently suspended.
Even knowing ex-colleagues and having multiple resources I could directly contact at Google, it took months to reverse the inaccurate ban.
This is what I’ve learned being on the other side.
What happened
In our initial exploration of startup ideas, we decided to run a mini Fake Door Test. A Fake Door Test can be used to gather information about potential demand, before fully building out a product. To do this, we:
- Developed a small MVP experience via a Shopify store
- Used Shopify to create Google Shopping ads automatically for our store
- Attempted to run the ads with Google to test market demand
All of our products + ad content were initially approved, but all of a sudden the Google ads account was banned for two separate reasons:
- Unpaid balances: This felt like an obvious bug on Google’s side. Our ad content never ran, so we never accumulated any bill, but were continuously notified that we had an unpaid balance on the account. The screenshot below shows the unpaid balance violation on the same screen as the $0 balance in our account 🤷
- Circumventing systems: This was the self-proclaimed “egregious violation”. This violation is deemed so egregious that it is considered impossible to recover from. The violation messages specifically mention that this error can “follow” you; for example if you attempt to create other Google Ads accounts with the same information (e.g. your company name, your billing information, etc), those accounts will also be banned for the same reason. As a small startup just getting off the ground, this was particularly scary since paid ads will eventually be part of our strategy down the line.
What we tried
I knew things were bad when contacting Google Ads Support via phone: our violation was considered so egregious that after typing in our account ID, the automated system communicates that they don’t speak to customers with suspended accounts and promptly hangs up. We tried everything we could think of with Google directly, from filing multiple ads appeals, to emailing every support email we could find. We also tried circuitous routes, such as trying to go through Shopify support, our Google Cloud contact, or the accelerator programs we participate in. As a prior employee, I also tried Xoogler (“ex-Googler”) forums and asked my ex-colleagues for advice. We kept hitting dead end after dead end.
Reflections
There is work to be done for SMBs at Google
From my time internally at Google, I know the Ads products are tough to navigate as a smaller or newer company. Adwords is a super complex system, and it can be hard to get started or get support on an ongoing basis. Comparatively, massive corporations with massive spend have entire accounts teams at Google dedicated to their support.
And yet the impact to the business is critical; during this time, we were completely blocked. We couldn’t advertise on Google, and that directly affected our entire company strategy and bottom line. There is a lot that could be done to improve the experience for SMBs, who make up a significant portion of Google Ads users.
False positives or false negatives?
As an ads behemoth, Google deals with a ton of fraudy and malicious actors. It’s tough to know where to draw the line; is it better for a few malicious actors to get through, or for a few genuine use cases to get errantly flagged? At Google’s scale, I can appreciate the complexity of that tradeoff, but as a small business trying to get off the ground, it felt pretty bad to be that errant data point.
Lack of visibility
One of the most frustrating parts of this process was the lack of visibility into why we received the violation and therefore minimal knowledge regarding how to fix it. For example, many of our rejected appeals contained vague language such as “Your account continues to violate Google Ads policies” without any specifics. This is intentional; for security reasons, Google doesn’t want to tell users why the account was banned or how to recover. If they did, malicious actors would use this information to truly “circumvent systems” in the perpetual cat-and-mouse game of fraud. Therefore, there are minimal resources from Google or online more generally for real businesses like ours to get back up and running.
I still don’t really know why our account was suspended, but shout-out to our YCombinator point of contacts, who were finally able to get the ball rolling toward a resolution. Our errant ban was reversed, but we’re still working on becoming a verified advertiser to run paid ads. Onwards!
