Why Google suspended your ad account and what you can do about it

Running multiple Google ad accounts is a lifeline for many online businesses, but one small mistake can leave you with nothing but a Google suspended account – and no advertising. In fact, the internet giant shut down a whopping 5.6 million advertiser profiles in the last year. Read on to find out what causes bans and how you can protect against them. 

Why has Google suspended your account? 

Google dedicates a lot of energy to enforcing its policies. However, this can sometimes mean even legitimate users can see account bans happen, just as we have previously discussed with Facebook bans. 

First off, Google generally does not permit more than twenty ad accounts under the same email address for one business. However, it discourages users from having even this for multiple businesses – and twenty is a low limit even for a single e-commerce or affiliate company. The software company says in its own reports that it takes ‘a multi-pronged approach to combat this behavior.’ The threat isn’t going anywhere soon if trends continue: the number of account bans tripled between 2020 and 2021. 

So how does an account get flagged for a Google ban? 

We know from our own research that major platforms like Google use ever-more sophisticated algorithms to link together different accounts or to spot other chinks in your armor – more on that in a moment – and Google itself backs this up. They announced in 2020 that they were investing further in technology to ‘better detect coordinated adversarial behavior’, using ‘improve[d] automated detection technology and human review processes.’ 

While the full workflow is not fully public, and we have to keep some of our research private to protect our users’ accounts, one of the keys to why Google suspended your account is what is known as your browser fingerprint. 

What is a browser fingerprint and how does it cause Google bans? 

Your browser fingerprint is a collection of information about you as a user that third parties collate to build up an identifiable and trackable profile. 

The components of this are almost impossible to go over in brief, as they cover all areas from hardware to geolocation, IP information, plugins and even fonts.  

Consider for example that you are set to be from the United States, and your manually set geolocation corresponds to this – but your device’s time zone shows you as being in China. 

In this case, the third party has successfully understood two elements of your browser fingerprint that should match, and found them lacking. As another example, certain fonts – or lack thereof – can be a big red flag leading to Google suspending your ad account. Most operating systems (OS) have a specific list of fonts that are already on the system. Therefore, if you claim to be a particular OS to mask your device, but you don’t have a particular font, it raises suspicions. 

If Google suspended your account, therefore, it’s highly likely that the system discovered that you had multiple accounts appearing as if from different devices, or found a singular account that didn’t match to what it could find out about your true fingerprint. 

What can you do if your Google ads account is suspended? 

You can submit an appeal against a Google ban. However, the appeal is highly likely to go nowhere; Google’s policy is only to reinstate banned accounts in so-called ‘compelling circumstances’, such as an error in identification. 

This is why prevention is in this case much more important than cure, as it can stop significant consequences to your business. 

How do you stop ad accounts getting banned? 

The most successful businesses are those that invest in getting the basics right, and this is one of the most foundational stages to building a business that can scale fast and far. 

If you are running multiple accounts, or planning to run multiple accounts, do not rely on using nothing more than different email addresses, private mode in browsers or even virtual machines. They are unreliable and incredibly easily discovered through even simple browser fingerprinting. 

This is where Multilogin comes in. We give businesses the possibilities to create thousands of virtual browser profiles, each completely segregated and with its own browser fingerprint that is completely customizable. Change all settings from hardware to navigator objects and more so that you appear as a genuine native device. 

Each profile is securely stored on AWS Cloud, so encrypted that even we can’t read it. Simply create a separate Google account using each Multilogin profile, ensuring that the profiles are distinct in fingerprints, and your business will be far more protected than ever before.  

Want to run 1,000+ ad profiles? Discover your competitors’ ads or verify your own through different demographic profiles, all the while protecting against Google suspending ad accounts? Whatever it may be, you’ll be ready to smash your goals with the most secure solution in the industry.  

Get started today by visiting our pricing plans page to learn more about how we can help you grow your online business.