Circumventing Systems - Google Ads Guide to Appeals
If you are reading this piece you most likely received an email from Google Ads that reads:
Your account is suspended Your Google Ads account 000-000-0000 has been suspended for Circumventing systems.
If you believe this is an error, submit an appeal and we’ll review your account. If you have a prepaid balance remaining in your account, you can request a refund at any time.
The Google Ads Team
It sounds and reads straight forward - but in reality circumventing systems is the most severe suspension an account can get. The reason why it's severe goes back all the way to when Google Ads was known as Google AdWords and had an affiliate program during the late 2000's.
Thousands of affiliate advertisers flocked to Google in search of profits. Affiliates are those who are intermediaries to products / services and receive a cut from the final sale. In turn, they do not own the product and typically are not loyal to any one brand. This mentality brings about dubious techniques to maximize profits by inventing ways to get around certain restrictions or rules that are in place. Double serving in auctions through multiple accounts is one. Using cloaking technology to create extremely aggressive and misleading landing pages is another.
As Google Ads however keeps shifting towards automation to replace it's cost of human support - circumventing systems has been opened up further to tackle account errors such as questionable billing, trademark violations at ad level and other benign account status alerts that previously would have put the account in limbo but allowed for communication and transparency between an account holder and the support team.
The main culprits in a circumventing systems error are the following:
Cloaking technology
Redirects on the landing page
Unclear intent of the landing page
No terms and conditions or policy pages
Poorly built gateway pages
Suspicious billing details
Double serving in auctions
Multiple accounts leading to the same final URL
Bidding on trademark terms intentionally
Entering auctions on an industry which Google does not recognize as legitimate
Competitors filing reports against you
Competitors opening new accounts to send traffic to your final URL
Dubious lines of code
Hacked hosting and/or domain
Hosting domains on servers which have been hacked
Using a hacked CMS theme
If you've gone through your site and checked through this entire list then the most likely explanation is that the automation process has tripped up somewhere erroneously and you face grim results.
Having contacts at Google who can look at the appeal filed is the most sure way to save your account. There are also other means to get back to advertising with Google Ads.
We specialize in account retrieval for Google, Bing and Facebook accounts for $500. If your business has been hurt by this status error we encourage you to reach out to us for a finer inspection of the account and possible reasons that could have contributed to it along with options on how to get back to advertising. We start with a scheduled consultation which transitions to a hands on audit and within a week we will provide a write up outlining next steps. If you’d like us to attempt to retrieve an account — submit payment below and schedule a consultation.