My name is Jack and I work in the search team here at Push and today I'm gonna be discussing Google and their policies.
What are Google policies?
Policies are designed not only to abide by laws but to ensure a safe and positive experience for our users. This means that policies prohibit some content that are believed to be harmful to users and the overall advertising ecosystem.
So why are they in place?
Google want to support a healthy digital advertising ecosystem - one that is trustworthy and transparent, and works for users, advertisers and publishers . Essentially safeguarding the search engine to make sure that everything that goes out is reliable and truthful.
What happens when an ad violates a policy?
So there are four outcomes are gonna be touching on the two main ones today and that is eligible limited and not eligible. There's also eligible, but it's moderately restricted and eligible but limited in all locations. So you'll generally find that you'll hit the first one or the last one if you violate a google ads policy.
- Eligible (limited)
- Eligible (moderately restricted)
- Eligible (limited all locations)
- Not eligible
Eligible (limited)
A status given to ads that comply with policies but are limited as to where and when they can appear. So this can prevent certain types of ads from showing certain regions to certain ages or on/certain devices as well.So this could include alcohol products, copyrights, gambling, healthcare and also things like trademarks, which are discussed below.
Not eligible
A status given to campaigns are groups, ads or keywords that are not servicing. So google cannot allow them to show in the search engine due to their policies that are in place.
Google is getting even stricter on policies
Due to growing fraudulent activity, Google is up to its stance to safeguard its search engine. Recently, if you work day to day inside of Google ads, you'll find that a lot more ads are more frequently getting flagged up as breaking policy violations.After a lot of criticism regarding false advertising and 'scam like' ads rising up to 32% in some industries and verticals, Google has made the decision to change its policy review process.As an example in the finance industry, Google has overhauled its policy screening process and will start enforcing the new rules officially on September 6. But we know as digital marketers that work in Google Ads advertising, this has been seen for a long while and it's become a lot more strenuous and strict. There has been a lot of coverage on this and this is why Google has stepped up to cover this.
How does this again affect us as digital marketers?
So not every policy violation is correct...More often than not Google Ads, disapprovals are comprised of an automated review process, which doesn't think through context, as a person would. So disapproval can quite often be mistakenly incorrect .So stressing the importance to check your abs accounts daily is really, really pivotal here to ensure that your policy violations are correct and if they aren't correct, then you can flag them up.
An example Trademark Policy Violation
One of my clients hadn't experienced many policy violations before, whether a new account in the portfolio covering a dealership was struck for trademark.So how did this affect us?This meant that our ads could run an eligible but limited availability and you can see on the image below the response from Google. Essentially Google's tightened its process and this is why they were eligible in a limited fashion.
This point is covered really well in a recent blog by PPC Hero:While the responsibility of notifying Google or trademark infringement lies on the trademark owner, Google does have safeguards in place to flag ads for violations. This can work for you or against you. Google can, but not always does catch ads that use trademarked terms and limits their reach.So in my specific case, my client was using their own trademark name, but they were being flagged up as a trademark violation and had to get this whitelisted against their name to allow their ad to run using their own brand name. It's just really stressing the importance that you want to be on top of this and if there is a mistake regarding a policy that you can correct it as soon as possible.
How to appeal
The good news is that you can appeal and there are two methods:
- Non-urgent
- Urgent
Non-urgent
From your Google Ads account, you highlight the ad and see in status why it's eligible; in the example below, you can see the policy that it's apparently violated Third Party Consumer Technical Support .
Highlight the ads, then you click on the option to Appeal policy decision , you can then choose the reason for your appeal and then decide what you want to appeal.
Urgent
The second method is more of an urgent basis, so you can go into Google Support and then you can file a case from there and that will go through to someone from the Google team, who will review your case.
