The BlackHatters, along with many other Google AdWords users, received the following email from Google yesterday regarding reviewing paused ads within Google AdWords accounts…
Dear AdWords Advertiser,
We’re writing to let you know about some upcoming changes to the types of ads we review.
What’s happening?
Starting on 6 September, we’ll begin reviewing paused ads the same way we review active ads. This means that your new and existing paused ads will be sent through the standard ad approval process. As a result, if your paused ads violate one or more of our AdWords advertising policies, they are likely to get disapproved.
Why?
We’re proactively reviewing paused ads to eliminate unnecessary delays in getting your ads approved and to ultimately enhance your experience with Google AdWords.
When?
Starting on 6 September, we’ll begin reviewing new paused ads, followed in the coming weeks by the review of existing paused ads.
Interesting move from Google to review paused ad’s within accounts. Now Google’s explanation of this is to ‘ eliminate unnecessary delays in getting your ads approved’…hmmm…
Really? How is reviewing paused ads going to speed up the approval process? If the ads are paused anyway…why would you want them to be reviewed quickly? Fair enough advertisers upload ad’s paused fairly often, but, the simple trick here is to put ad scheduling on new ads to run a hour before you actually posted them. That way they are still seen by Google to be ‘active’ yet just not scheduled to run, so you have nearly a week in order for them to be approved.
The BlackHatters think there is another reason…to catch out dodgy affiliates!
Many affiliates will have run PPC ads in the past before the landing page quality guidelines were enforced (about 18 months ago now) and these ads will still be sitting paused in their AdWords accounts. By reviewing paused ads Google will be able to penalise these affiliates with Google Slaps or Suspensions in the future. Advertisers may also have tried getting around trademarked terms or using excessive capitalisation or punctuation in their ads before they were disapproved…does it mean that any advertiser who has tried to improve their CTR in the past is going to get penalised?
We dont know for sure, but we will be keeping a close eye on Quality Score come September 6th when this new review is enforced.
Our advice to anyone out their who may have old ads that they dont want to be reviewed…go in and update the ad copies on them and overwrite the ads. You can try deleting the ads but Google can still see deleted ads…and whilst Google are saying the review is just on paused ads, we know from our experience that they do look at deleted ads and can still give you a Google Slap for an ad that is already deleted.
Brought to you by the BlackHatters.
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It may not be as sinister as you imagine.
I think it’s to help big advertisers with time sensitive ads, such as Apple on ‘Black Friday’, who cannot wait for ad approval on the day. You can’t schedule individual ads can you, only at a campaign level? Creating new campaigns just for these ads is too much work.
From my experience Google already slap affiliates with dodgy landing pages in paused campaigns so doing it at an ad level seems nothing new.
Good point…may well be for advertisers with time sensitive ad copies. Glad to see not everyone is as sinister thinking as us!
Great news lol.
Btw i got my account banned about half a year ago for the ads i was trying to run ( they got 0 impressions) that i setted up about 1 and half year ago.
But the interesting thing is that my MCC account registered with same personal details still working with no problem.
So maybe anyone know is banned adwords account can affect somehow MMC account registered with same personal details ?
Not 100% sure…we know that accounts linked via MCC can be spidered by Google when they are looking for Landing Page Quality guidelines.
Its weird that they just announced it. In reality I have experienced this before already since mid July at times. I suppose they were testing it out.
@cmon. In terms of MCC linked to your banned account. You will not get banned for that. Official policy is that its a different “entity” , but you will be on their “suspicion” list. So your ads will trigger more human reviews and also any small mistake can cause your suspension.
[...] The scumbags at Google Adwords have started reviewing paused ads. BlackHatPPC tells you how to avoid the slap from some random ad you made in 2002. [...]