New and established advertisers are sometimes surprised when their advertisements don’t show up on Google immediately. Here’s the most likely things that are happening, and what you can do about it. Note that there are lots of other reasons – these are just the most likely causes and solutions.
If you have a message from Google, asking you to contact them, follow the steps in the “Contact Us” article – Google don’t make contacting them an easy job, even they ask you to contact them!
Editorial Review Delays
These mostly affect recently created adverts – anything up to a few weeks old. You can see the status if you use the new AdWords User Interface. Next to the adverts will be a status column that indicates whether the adverts are held pending completion of a review.
Google has policies on the adverts they will and won’t show. Adverts and keywords are checked to see that they are within the policies. The closer the adverts and keywords are to “Unacceptable Content” or “low quality landing pages“, the more likely it is that the adverts will need a human review.
Automated review – common for high volume, long period publishers who don’t offer dodgy adverts, can take as a little as a few minutes or as long as a day. Human review has multiple queues depending on what kind of offer (“adult content”, “not family safe”, “pharmaceuticals”, “trademark usage”, etc). Once you get into one of the long queues, you may be there for some time – days are not uncommon; the more suspicious adverts may be held for weeks.
Well run high volume accounts can achieve “Trusted Advertiser” status, meaning that adverts rarely have human review delays. They mostly get automated reviews, very quickly. Lower volume accounts with suspicious keywords and landing pages, or those subject to special attention, such as adult content, will find that all advertisements are manually reviewed and may take many days to be checked.
There is a mechanism to bump up the priority of a review, but it is only offered to a selected group – larger agencies and the AdWords Help Forum Top Contributors are amongst those. We can ask for an “expedited review” – typically completed in between minutes and a day.
If you know your keywords and adverts are fine, and you have a high quality offer (something that search users will like and won’t regard as a scam), and your adverts aren’t showing…. there’s a couple more possible causes, which I’ll look at later in the article – big causes first!
Established advertisers can avoid some of the negative consequences of editorial reviews – see this old article about editorial review delays and workrounds for some more detailed advice. If you use those techniques, you may be able to avoid the need for expedited reviews.
Account Review Delays
As well as the Editorial Review Delay, which typically affects recently created adverts, the whole account can suddenly be halted. This is usually caused by Google’s AdsBot, a piece of software that visits the site every few days. If it finds something on the site it doesn’t like, it will halt the advertising and wait for human attention.
The likely outcomes from an Account Review are that everything is OK – advert flow suddenly resumes again – or that the site is in breach of the Terms of Service, or that the site is hosting Malware.
New Advertisers
New advertisers may have their adverts run just fine right from the start. A few may have their adverts run for a while and then stop, and a few may have their adverts blocked from the very start.
Most of the sites that run immediately and with no problem will be avoiding the Unacceptable Content Policies. Affiliate sites, with different Display and Destination URLs, and with offers that look like those in the Unacceptable Content Policies or Low Landing Page Quality Scores, are more likely to be held up immediately.
If you get immediate adverts – you are probably avoiding the Unacceptable Content Policy. However your adverts may have run only for a day or two. If so, you probably have a declining Quality Score –
check the articles on here about Quality Score (look in the Category list to the right). Quality Score is crucial for most advertisers, and poorly understood by new advertisers.
AdWords is highly automated, which helps to keep costs down for the large number of advertisers. The downside is that sometimes a full legitimate site is trapped in the review, because the software judges that it is carrying Unacceptable Content.
Legitimate site owners – not new affiliate advertisers – can have their account reviews sped up by an advertising agency. Basically, if you are large enough to afford the services that an AdWords Professional can give you, and that expert advertiser judges that the site, keywords and adverts should run, they can get Google’s attention drawn to a good account and help it to run sooner. Whether paying for that kind of service makes sense, depends on your anxiety to advertise, the cost of the lost opportunity and your budget!
Established Advertisers
Your adverts may have been running for months or even years, and suddenly everything stops… It is probably the AdsBot having detected something strange. Perhaps you have changed your content recently, or perhaps the AdsBot is enforcing new policies. Sometimes, after a week or two, the advertising will start up again, as mysteriously as it stopped.
The changes to a site may include someone adding a popup – forgetting the AdWords Policies deny those – or the site being hacked to include Malware. The changes are not always those made intentionally by the site owner
If your established site suddenly has no advertising, you have basic choices outlined in the next few paragraphs.
1/ Wait and hope that it gets better – if your budget is low and the advertising brings in only a small fraction of your new business, that’s probably a good strategic choice, as would be considering opening accounts with Yahoo!Search Marketing and MSN AdCenter and upgrading your SEO (organic rank) efforts.
2/ Pay for investigation. Again, much as with the editorial review delays, if a well connected advertising professional can see no reason why your adverts shouldn’t be running, they can phone Google to ask for attention to the issue.
Bluntly – if your account is valuable to you, then Google takes the problems more seriously. If it is worth only pocket money, then wait and hope.
Breach Of Terms Of Service
This appears to be most commonly applied to new affiliate advertisers who have not fully read or understood the Unacceptable Content Policies. The usual problem is an assumption that Google will show adverts if paid. That’s an erroneous assumption. Google will gleefully fail to show adverts, if users don’t click on them – even if you offer $100 per click. Google only shows adverts that *search users* judge as being worth clicking on.
Google has built up a large list of keywords, advert content and sites that it thinks are unlikely to win friends amongst search users. Advertise with those dodgy deals, and you’ll get suspended. Don’t try signing up under a new account and start offering the same deals (same keywords, and same content on the domain) or you’ll be suspended again. Do it frequently and you’ll be permanently banned.
If Google detects malware on your site, the advertising will stop immediately. Resuming advertising is slower – it will eventually, usually, resume. But it often isn’t fast – that is, don’t clear the infection and expect advertising to resume the same day. It’ll probably take a few days, enough time for the AdsBot to visit a couple of times and verify.
You may be able to speed that up, if you use a new landing page, and get an expedited review for the new landing page.
Note that we have seen some strange ways to become detected as a malware host, including the webmaster who took a piece of malware and adapted it to do something useful, but without infecting visitors. Google look for signatures of malware – so doing stuff like this will still trip the suspension of activity, even if you don’t actually infect visitors.
Why Agencies And Top Contributors Get Different Access
Larger Agencies and well connected Google Advertising Professionals may have access to Google staff to help with account problems. All the AdWords Help Forum Top Contributors have email addresses and phone numbers for Google staff who can investigate problems and expedite reviews.
Why should we get this level of service, when you can’t?
Well, for one thing, we’ve read *tens* of thousands of problem reports and responded to thousands of questions about why accounts don’t run. We’re already running accounts for clients with spends from tens of dollars to tens of thousands of dollars per day.
All this activity means that Google trusts our opinion as to whether to something is right or wrong. So if Google investigate something we flag, it is more likely that the account will be profitable for Google – we bring in accounts that Google want to work with. If you can’t afford to pay for our time, or we judge that your advertising is unlikely to work, then it is unlikely that Google’s investigation would be compensated by finding a valuable account.
