If you use Google Ad Grants — or manage accounts for nonprofits that do — you should read this.
Over the past year, we have been documenting troubling, and in my opinion predatory, behavior from Google toward its Google Ad Grants recipients. Google has been restricting delivery from certain accounts without showing an error message, providing an email notification, in-product alert, or any kind of explanation whatsoever. For nonprofits without much in experience managing Ad Grants accounts, this “shadow-ban” is completely invisible. They don’t even know it’s happening.
Their ads simply stop performing — or never even start — and thus they conclude they must be doing something wrong, and quietly give up on a grant they are fully entitled to. This, in my view, is the most pernicious behavior Google is directing at its Grantees right now — but it’s not the only one.
I’ve managed hundreds of Google Ad Grants accounts over my career and I wrote the book on this program — literally — and I have never seen misbehavior of a type or scale toward Grantees than I have seen now and over the past year. I’m writing this because I have spent months documenting a pattern of behavior in the Ad Grants support infrastructure that is too consistent, too multi-layered, and too insulated from a corrective support path to be credibly excused as a series of one-off mistakes.
This is the first in a series of posts. The full documentation is far too extensive for a single LinkedIn post, and it keeps growing. What I can do today is name the pattern clearly. Across multiple client accounts and multiple support cases over the past year, here is what the sequence looks like:
Step 1: Silent restriction. In the case of a new account, the ads simply never start delivering, even when all requirements are met and a healthy and eligible campaign set of ads and keywords is built and activated. Google has throttled the account to zero delivery, but the client isn’t notified i any way. There is no “your account has been throttled” email, no in-product warning, no error message, no nothing. Without opening a support inquiry — which itself can be difficult, also by design — clients have no way of knowing this throttling has happened.
Step 2: Invented requirements. If the client is, in fact, able to successfully contact Ad Grants support — rather than following persistent suggestions to consult the “Ad Grants user community” whose inanity will be addressed later — is contacted, agents cite compliance issues that either do not exist in any published Ad Grants policy, or directly contradict the policy documents they link to in the same email. Put another way: if Google’s published policies are considered to be our standard, then support agents’ demands will lead an observant client to believe the agents have either badly erred in their interpretation of the published policies, or are simply making things up as they go along. At this point, even after a year of documenting the behavior, I myself am not sure which is actually happening.
Step 3: The waiting squeeze. When compliance with those requirements is demonstrated — even if not required by any published policies — a brief response from support indicates that the client can expect a response in around five business days. This is the beginning of a pattern of unnecessarily excessive wait times imposed in order to grind down the client’s willingness to continue contesting Google’s behavior. The client may, or may not, get a response within five business days. My personal record of waiting on behalf of my client is 19 days.
Step 4: The reshuffle. Around this time, a new agent “takes over” the case, “stepping in for my colleague” without reading the prior correspondence and issues a different set of requirements targeting a different campaign that was never previously mentioned. Each bit of compliance action demanded is just as undocumented and without precedent as before. Thus, the process starts over.
Step 5: False factual claims. The new requirements frequently include specific assertions about what is missing from the account — assertions that are demonstrably false. Campaigns that exist are said not to exist. Fully compliant ad groups are also said not to exist. Perfectly implemented and compliant conversion tracking is said to be missing. All of these things are present and verifiable in the account.
Step 6: Egregious policy abuse. One of the most brazen offenses of the Ad Grants team is to shut down entire accounts due to false “infractions” identified in campaigns that are still under construction, while as many a dozen compliant campaigns — far beyond what’s required to meet the requirements of an active account — are active and running (To the uninitiated: this is like a mechanic inspecting your perfectly-running car, finding a broken wrench inside your toolbox in the trunk, and refusing to pass your car because of that broken wrench). Sometimes these phantom “requirements” demanded in order to activate an account frequently include specific assertions about what is missing from the account — assertions that are demonstrably false. Campaigns that exist are said not to exist. Fully compliant ad groups are also said not to exist. Perfectly implemented and compliant conversion tracking is said to be missing. All of these things are present and verifiable in the account. Finally, tiny errors that for 20 years have resulted in nothing more than a brief error message — typoing an ad’s URL, for example — are now being used to suspend entire accounts. Not the type of shadow throttling we’ve been talking about up until this point — I mean, full, official suspensions. For typos.
Step 7: Ear-plugging and gaslighting. When asked, repeatedly and in writing, to cite the specific policy language that explains the demanded changes, the support team almost never acknowledges the request. If you ask for an escalation to a supervisor, you get the same non-acknowledgement. It’s as if you never said it, over and over again. One single time when I requested citations, my support agent said she would collaborate with the team and produce them. Great! But the next email made no mention of them, and, as detailed in previous steps, simply produced new “violations” from different capmaigns that were never mentioned before. For this particular client, by the way, we’re now into the third month of the back and forth toying with the customer for no clear reason other than to harass them.
Step 8: The final compliance Catch-22 death spiral. Eventually, the wheel of generating fake reasons to restrict an account lands on the account’s lack of conversions. “Your account hasn’t received any conversions in 30 days,” says the agent, presumably with a straight face. The account, that’s been shut off and unable to advertise for going on three months, hasn’t generated any conversions in 30 days. Really. I’m not kidding. Google is using its own spending restriction to cause a condition used to justify its further restriction. An account throttled to zero spend cannot generate conversions. Zero conversions then gets flagged as a conversion tracking violation. There is no path through this loop that is designed to close. A fifth-grader could identify this as corruption and abuse, but Google is happy to smile the toothiest of grins right at the nonprofit organization while spitting this rationale right into its face.
Taken individually, any one of these could be a mistake. Taken together, as a repeating sequence across multiple accounts, multiple case numbers, and multiple months, they describe something else.
I am building a public record of this pattern, and this series will document it in full — with correspondence, with policy analysis, and with the specific language used by support agents alongside the policies they claim to be enforcing.
If you or your organization has experienced any step in this sequence, I would like to hear from you. Please comment below or message me privately. I’ll never identify you or your account without your consent, nor is this any kind of sales pitch. I’m collecting feedback to determine how widespread Google’s abuse actually is.
The Ad Grants program is one of the most valuable tools available to nonprofits, and Google is at the very least failing, and at worst abusing, the people it’s supposed to be serving. The scope of this behavior needs to be measured and made public.
This is post 1. More to follow.
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