all right today, we are talking about how to get a suspended Google Ads account unsuspended. For those of you who have been following me for some time, know that I recently had a problem with this, and I get questions about this all the time. So, I thought I would ask an industry expert on just how they would go about it. Stay tuned. [Music] Agency owner for the last nine years and recently I had my Google Ads account suspended. Now, I've gone through this personally a number of times in my agency, and when I was going through this process, I found out about some industry experts who could actually help you with this process. And so, I just recently jumped on a zoom call with one of them, and that's what I'm bringing you today. So, here we go. All right, so today I'm here with John Horn, the CEO of stubgroup.com. Now, Stub Group is actually an agency as well, just like me. They provide Google Ads services to clients, but one thing where we differ is they also can help people get their Google

accounts unsuspended. If you run into that, one thing I want to say is we're talking about Google ads, not Google AdSense. AdSense is where Google pays you to put ads somewhere. These are actually where you're paying Google to put ads out to get business, to get leads, to get sales. So this is about a Google ads account. I just want to be clear about that. So welcome John. Great to have you, Mike. Thanks so much for having me. So I'm going to run through some questions since I get a lot of the time in the comments, and please feel free to elaborate on those. So why does Google suspend Google ads accounts? That is a million-dollar question. So Google does a lot of things right. They are trying to protect users who are on the internet using Google, and they're trying to keep off all of the scam artists, the bad actors, all the illegitimate companies that are trying to use Google for nefarious reasons. So Google has a ton of systems and processes and algorithms in place to catch those bad

actors and suspend their accounts and prohibit them from advertising by Google. And that's great. I commend Google for that. Hopefully they keep that up. The problem is that with the scale at which they operate, there are a lot of instances where legitimate advertisers who aren't trying to do anything shady are caught in that kind of broad net, and their accounts are suspended either because they, you know, accidentally triggered the algorithm and didn't do anything wrong, or sometimes because they just didn't understand some policy or did something that's confusing to Google. And Google, you know, gives them that red bar of depth in their account, and they just don't know, don't know why specifically. And I just want to confirm on that. We're talking about the account itself, not the ads. I think that a lot of people get that confused. Google will say, Hey, your ads aren't running because you have something triggering the ads. Once, for instance, we wrote something in an ad one time about how to target a specific type of customer. They flag that because we use the word target, which is a

trademark term. Our ads were flagged, but our account was not suspended, so there is a difference there. Um, so when your Google account does get suspended, why, you know, won't Google tell me why they suspended my account? I think there's a couple reasons for that. And like you're saying, typically when Google suspends your account, they'll give you a notification in the account. They'll usually send you an email, and they'll point to some policy that they're saying you violated. It might be suspicious payment activity, circumventing systems. Yeah, there's a couple common ones, but those policies are very vague. They might tell you generally, Hey, you may have done one of these 10 different things, or maybe you did something else. And it's usually very hard to know exactly what you did that triggered the system. And I think there's a couple reasons for that. Part of that is because Google doesn't want to give a game plan to those bad actors out there to figure out exactly how to game the system of, Oh, if I do exactly this thing here and that thing.

there that I can get past it so I think part of the reason Google's big is for that reason, and then also frankly I think Google's vague because they want to protect themselves from liability. You know if they tell you hey you did exactly this thing and you didn't actually do it they messed up, they don't want to get sued or they don't want to, you know, get in trouble because they've said something that's inaccurate so I think it's also you know vague is is better in Google world for that reason sure understood and I was introduced to John because I recently had a Google ads account suspension uh where somebody actually hacked into a couple of client accounts and it was uh it was a five-week nightmare for me and I came across them because this is specifically what they can help people do so that's how I met John so John when people come to you with Google account suspensions what is the most common reason that you see I'd say probably the most common reason right now and it tends to go in

Cycles, but right now it's probably related to what Google calls their suspicious payment activity policy. Okay, which is a fairly broad policy, but typically it means they think there's something weird or wonky about how you're paying for an account or the business information you've added. Maybe they don't think that you're actually authorized to advertise the website. You're doing something around that, and a lot of people get frustrated because they'll create a new Google Ads account. Maybe they haven't even used Google ever in the past, and right away they'll get suspended for this. And they'll say, We haven't even paid Google anything. Like, we haven't. They haven't charged our card. How can it be suspicious? And that's a great question, which I don't always have a great answer for, but um, but that's one of the biggest things we're working through right now. Okay, so, but you said it does kind of go in cycles. It does. So, for example, early, early COVID days, Google went crazy after Google Merchant Centers because so many fly-by-night

drop shippers popped up, and so it was like every day we were getting tons of people reaching out, Hey, my Google Merchant Center is suspended, you know, what do I do? And sometimes it'll be a different vertical or policy that Google kind of cycles into. Sure, and one of the reasons, as I touched on before, our account got suspended was somebody actually hacked into using our account, hacked into and added malicious accounts or essentially malicious campaigns to two clients' accounts. And what they did was they were advertising services to a website that if people actually did go to that website, they would basically get this malicious software installed on their computer as well to help steal passwords. And it was a complete nightmare. But the one, you know, this is one instance where the Google algorithm caught it before they could run any ads because the ads that they were running in one campaign was set up to spend a thousand dollars a day, which would be charged to my client. So it was a freaky situation, but you know, it was one of

those instances where it worked like it should. Uh, John, what are some of the steps that you can tell people who have suspensions to, you know, deal with it? Yeah, so first of all, do not create a new Google Ads account. I see that happen time and time again, and what's most frustrating to me is people. They'll get a suspended account. They will call Google support and say, Hey, what do we do? And a lot of the Google support reps will tell them to create a new account, and that's really bad advice. Google reps, they don't, they don't know. Well, I don't know if they don't know or they don't get what's going on, but they don't realize that it's actually against Google's policies to go create a new account as a workaround to a suspended account. And so the business, okay, like, okay, this is easy, let's create a new account. Suddenly it gets suspended, maybe for circumventing, now because it looks like you're trying to get around the system, and now you're making your life even harder to resolve.

because now you've got to explain to Google why there are multiple accounts. And here's what's going on. So, please don't create a new account. Please focus on what's suspended first. That's not to say you can't still figure things out with multiple accounts. A lot of people who hire us have multiple accounts. They've already tried a bunch on their own. So, there's still ways to make it work, but it just makes it more complicated, right? And I'd say that might be a last-ditch effort. Um, yeah, I don't know if they still do this, but I know a number of years ago, we ran into some clients that had started multiple accounts, and Google might not have connected the dots right away, but eventually they ended up banning both accounts. Yeah, I've seen that happen as well, um, where I've seen multiple things. Sometimes I've just seen them do the second account, sometimes I've seen them both. It depends partly on whether they think that the business is trying to double serve and you know, get multiple

ads for the same business and the same auctions, and sometimes it's just more I think algorithmic where they say, oh, you know what, this business already has an account, we think the second one is maybe maybe fraudulent or confusing, or someone else is mimicking them, and they'll pause that second or suspend that second one, sure. So regardless, don't start a second account, go through the process first. What should someone with a suspended account not do besides what we just talked about, opening a new account? So don't take it lightly, it's a really big deal, and don't assume that if you just send a very short appeal to Google saying, I didn't do anything wrong, please fix my account, that that's going to help you. Once you're suspended, I like to say you're in court with Google, and you're guilty until proven innocent in Google's eyes. And so what you need to do if you're submitting an appeal on your own is you need to dig through Google's policies, try to understand everything.

anything that you might be doing that you're where you're accidentally violating policies. Make sure your website is perfect as far as you can tell with people's policies. Make sure that you're not doing anything shady or gray or on the line and your ads within your account get it all looking great. Provided much information and documentation to Google as possible in your appeal and don't yell at them in your appeal or on the phone. You know make it respectful make it you know I'm sorry if I made a mistake here's what I've done to fix it and that Skilling to significantly increase your odds of success and just to add on that quickly to what John said about kind of what not to do. You got to remember you're you're not dealing with with a computer necessarily when you're trying to get these fixed you're dealing with people and one thing I've learned is when you are appealing it don't just say what the hell is going on how you know start screaming at them in all caps be polite.

and spell the entire situation out. Don't leave any details because what will happen is, sometimes you submit it to them, they get back to you, and this goes back and forth because they want more detail. Give them as much detail as you can the first time, I promise you, it will go much quicker. And so, you know, are there ever any instances that you find where, you know, you guys can't help? It certainly happens, and it's always a sad day when we have to come to a client and say, Hey, I just don't see a path forward. It doesn't happen that often; we have a pretty good success rate, but it absolutely happens. And so, when we work with clients who hire us for this help, we're very open with them, say, Hey, here's what we can do, here's a success rate, but here's what might happen, and that is, sometimes Google is just a brick wall, and for whatever reason, they're just not going to accept appeals, even when we believe everything has been fixed and resolved and is perfect. And sometimes

too it's a matter of consistency. I've had situations. I had a situation just this last week where I submit an appeal to Google a couple weeks ago. Incredibly detailed appeal. Everything looked great. They denied it. I waited a couple weeks. I submitted the exact same appeal and they accepted it within an hour. And that's just such a situation where sometimes like you said there's a people aspect where different people on the policy team may have different perspectives about how they should apply their policies. And also too there's there's somewhat of an automatic automated aspect as well where sometimes appeals kind of go through an automated system first and then maybe go to people or not to people. And so sometimes it's also a matter of perseverance and keeping up with Google following up and you know not taking no for an answer but sometimes we do have to tell clients hey we just at this point don't see a path mode right and just to add to that as well I think what some people say is oh persistence I'm going to submit the

appeal 12 times a day for the next week. I promise you that is not going to get you anywhere any quicker. So in fact, a lot of the time what we've seen is that somebody submitted multiple appeals. What it does is it creates a case number for each one of those appeals. And so now it's going to a bunch of different people. So I would, I mean, would you agree with me when you say, do not do that 100%? Yeah, that massively muddies the waters when there's more multiple appeals in process. And that'll take, that'll actually make everything go much more slowly. Like you said, it's not going to make it go faster, sure. So if somebody's got a problem like I did with my account and they come to you, how can you help? Or how can people get in touch with you? Yeah, so a lot of people reach out through our website, stepgroup.com. They've got, they're saying, hey, I've got a suspended account or accounts, you know, can you figure it out? Can you help us?

and so we'll have an exploratory conversation where we'll figure out, okay, what's going on, what policy are you suspended for, what have you done so far in terms of have you submitted appeals, have you not submitted appeals, get a lay of the land, and then from there, if we believe we have a good path forward to help them fix things, which most of the time we do, then give them the option to, Hey, go ahead and hire us, and we're going to jump in and figure things out. And what that looks like is we essentially take over and we submit appeals to Google on the client's behalf. After we do a full audit of their website, we do a full audit of their Google Ads account or accounts if they have multiple. We help get all the documentation that we know people are going to want to see in our appeal. And basically, you know, like a lawyer, we try and figure out what's your case, how do we package this up in the way that we know Google likes to see it, and then we go through in our systems.

and processes with Google to submit those appeals, and work through Google. Sometimes that first appeal is successful, and that's awesome. Sometimes it's not, and we have to keep working and pushing and kind of fighting the fight, but that's what we do on behalf of our clients. Great. And once again, to add something to that, I think what a lot of people don't understand is the whole patience aspect of it. You know, we both have seen accounts where you submit an appeal, and within a couple of hours, the account is back up and running. And we've seen it take much, much, much longer. I think it always depends on the policy that you violated, if there's multiple accounts involved, you know, how many. If you submitted a thousand appeals, and that, you know, that obviously muddies the water. So, you know, I think patience is a huge part of this. Well, it's extremely frustrating as Google Ads for a lot of people is a lifeline for business. I think what they need to realize is that it just

takes time, and you just have to be patient with it. I could not agree more. Yeah, I think a lot of people, they make the mistake because they're feeling the real pain of, I'm missing out on business, my business is, you know, crashing because I'm not able to run these ads and businesses aren't coming through for them. They think, Okay, we've gotta, you know, like you said, submit the 12 appeals a day, we've got to push and make this go as fast as possible, and that ends up than actually delaying things for them because they're making Google mad, or they're muddying the waters, or they're not really taking the time to go through every potential problem and fix it before they submit that appeal. So, I 100% agree, patience is key. Okay, well thank you John, is there anything else you wanted to add? I would just say anybody in Google ad space, even if you're not suspended right now, which hopefully is the case, be aware of how big a deal this actually can be and read through Google's

policies. Make sure that what you're putting in your account is not violating policies. Make sure you've got everything on your website Google wants to see. And just, you know, don't risk things with Google because if you risk something and you go down, then you're about to enter what I would I think accurately describe as a nightmare. It's going to be a lot of your life. It's going to take a lot of time. It's going to give you some sleepless nights. So try to avoid that and uh and get things right the first time. Awesome. Well, thanks so much, John, for joining. Um, for those of you who are wondering, again, it's stubgroup.com. I will put a link in the video description below where you, if you do run into this problem, by all means, go at least have that initial conversation with them to find out if that's something that they can help you out with and give you some advice on. I can't tell you how instrumental it was just talking to these guys and obviously forming a

relationship you know long term so check that out. And thanks a lot John for coming on. Thanks so much Mike. So once again, I'd like to thank John Horn for that awesome interview. And if you got some great value from this video, please do me a favor, hit that like button, subscribe, and that little bell icon so you'll be notified of when I release new videos each and every week. And over to the right hand side, you will see some more related Google ads videos. Thanks so much for watching. I really do appreciate it. And we'll see you next time.

Forget Your Worries - Here's How to Quickly Unsuspend a Google Ads Account😩

Forget Your Worries - Here's How to Quickly Unsuspend a Google Ads Account😩