Google just shut down our $1M business
I’ve been browsing HN for a decade now and somewhere I read on HN that people lose their online account and everything associated with their account. This has stuck with me and at one point I thought to create a second Google ads account to make sure our main Google ads account was able to keep running if the other account somehow received a violation. Just a pure spread-your-risks decision. After we decided to move into Germany with our eco-friendly brand, I used the second Google ads account to create German ads on a new Shopify hosted .de domain. The ads would target by geo location, consumers in Germany, so that there would be no overlap with our main market.
After a couple hours our account and our Merchant Center account, which is used for shopping ads, got suspended. I had no clue why so I wasted an appeal. After further reading on the internet, I discovered that creating more than one Google ads account is against Google policy. This is how scammers work to dominate search and shopping results. Never knew that. I was told that Google doesn’t consider intention, so you’re either good or bad. In this case I was the biggest criminal according to Google and my account was banned on a personal level for life. Not allowed to advertise ever again on Google. Lost some good nights sleep over that one.
The first ad account remained working which I find bizarre as the payment information and addresses used on these 2 accounts were exactly the same as I did not have bad intentions.
About a month ago I was invited to join the accelerated growth program of Google to help businesses expand into other countries. I was working with 2 Google account managers 4 weeks to prepare launching -again- in Germany. I used our .com domain to target Germany. All was well until I accidentally added .de for an ad instead of .com/de/, within an hour our main account was suspended. After an appeal and having it bumped to priority from my Google account manager, I received the depressing email that our account remains suspended. And that we should not create new Google ads accounts as those will be suspended too. Great.
We are all perplexed how a legit company, selling eco friendly products that we design ourselves, have it all trademarked, and have in stock in our own warehouse, are treated like criminals.
Luckily we massively increased our ad spend on social media couple weeks ago and are well positioned in Amazon, but I have really lost all faith in Google and their policy teams. We will (barely) survive as search and shopping was a big chunk of our revenue.
That you get flagged by a bot, gets suspended, I can get into that. But if you explain your story, have advertised for over 3 years with $30k monthly ad spent (I know it’s tiny for some, but for us as a small business it’s big), and all domains sell the same products, just into another country, than get your account banned for life, is just ridiculous.
Just had to get this off my shoulders and possibly warn anyone ever thinking doing the same to spread your company’s risks. A real butterfly effect, what an impact a single post or comment eventually had on my business down the line.