How To Get Your Ad Grants Account Unsuspended

I previously wrote a blog post on how charities can get over £7k free advertising per month on Google, which you can read here. As a follow-on from this, once everything has been set up and your ad grant account is live, it’s then vital to stay on top of any changes Google makes to how their ad grant programme works. Every so often they update the criteria which all Grantees must meet in order to keep the account active.

Hopefully this post will help keep you informed of the latest criteria. As well as to give you some tips and tricks we’ve learnt along the way to prevent your grant account from becoming deactivated.

Here’s the latest criteria you need to be aware of:

Bidding

You must use conversion-based smart bidding for all campaigns. Smart bidding is a set of automated bid strategies in Google Ads that use machine learning to maximise conversions. Each campaign must use either ‘maximise conversions’, ‘maximise conversion values’, ‘target CPA’ or ‘target ROAS bidding’.

Tracking Conversions

For all non-profits what you want to get out of the Google Grant is a meaningful impact. This can be generated in the form of memberships, donations, petitions signed, volunteer sign-ups etc. In order to use the Ad Grants to do this, you must have conversion tracking set up tailored to your brands objectives.

How to stop your grant account from becoming suspended?

What can often happen is the automated checks that Google does flags a problem that’s actually just been misinterpreted by their system. If this is the case, you will need to get in touch with someone from Google to get your account re-reviewed.

The more likely reason however, is that one of the programme terms or policies has been violated somewhere in your campaigns. If this happens then you will need to take a closer look at your account in order to resolve the issue.

In most instances, you will receive an email from Google flagging to you that you need to check your account’s compliance with programme policies. This email will link through to a policy compliance report explaining which area of the account is causing the problem. Here’s what it will look like:

Here are some of the common reasons for account suspension:

Ads are in the wrong format – they are only allowed to be Search text ads with no videos or imagery.
There aren’t enough ad groups per campaign – every campaign requires at least two ad groups per campaign.
Click through rate is too low – all ads need to have a minimum CTR of 5% each month.
Keywords have a quality score that’s too low – they all need to be above two.
URLs you’re sending people to from your ads is either broken or linking to an unowned domain – all ads must link users to the charities registered website and to relevant working web pages.
There are some keywords in the account that are single-word or to overly generic – they must contain two or more keywords.
Invalid conversion tracking – you need to be reporting at least one conversion per month.
Conversion rate is too high – Google doesn’t like it when conversion rate is higher than 15% because it means that the conversion goal is too easy to achieve.
All ads must include at least 2 sitelink ad extensions – sitelinks provide the person searching with more opportunities to click directly from your ad to landing pages on your website.
Your account isn’t actively being managed – if you haven’t logged in within 30 days and haven’t made at least one change in 90 days.
Bidding and budget incorrectly set up – campaigns set up to spend over the $329 daily budget.

Once you’ve identified the reasons for account suspension and made the changes needed you will then have to contact Google again to ask them to re-review the account. Hopefully they will rectify the account suspension within 24 hours. Google can also help you identify, solve and get everything sent for review all in one online chat with them if you get really stuck. Plus it also speeds up the whole process in the aim of getting the account back up and running promptly.

As always if there’s anything ppc marketing agency can help you with please don’t hesitate to get in touch!