Mass Ad Disapprovals from “Google AdWords”

Mass ad disapproval for same policy. When I logged into Google Ads this morning, I saw multiple accounts with newly disapproved ads for one fairly odd policy: “Disapproved (Government Documents and Official Services).” The reason this seemed so odd is because the disapproved ads were for a dumpster rental service. Below is the official policy from the Google Ads support website:

Weird email notices. To make matters even stranger, I started getting emails about this alerting us to these disapprovals from “Google AdWords,” a name Google Ads hasn’t used in years.

I soon began getting emails from clients that received the same messages and realized it was not an isolated issue.

Randomly affected accounts, seems like glitch. As of now, 43 different accounts in our MCC, none of which deal with government documents or services, were seeing ads disapproved for the same reason. Accounts ranging from HVAC companies in California, eCommerce beauty product, to orthopedic insoles, had ads disapproved for this reason. 9 different accounts even had ads in their brand campaign stop serving due to this disapproval.

Google Ads support reply. We have reached out to Google support who tells us that it is a known issue that they are currently working on resolving, and that the only current workaround is to re-upload the ads being incorrectly disapproved. However, this could come at the expense of resetting these ads’ historical data, which could affect performance.

We do not yet know the cause of this error, and as of this writing it has not been resolved. It does seem that others are experiencing and are looking for Google Ads help.