Title: We have just received an email from Google that we still violate their Google policies and they will not reinstate our account. This is not a post to get sympathy but rather a story why it was closed and how HN played a role in this.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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&#x2F;de&#x2F;, 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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