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Adwords reps telling me to move restricted products to a new site

by h8erade
1 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hello everyone,

So I've got products on my site that Google Adwords Policy has a problem with. They're not illegal products and you can walk into any grocery store and buy them without the need for an ID. I got a bunch of ad declines so I reached out to my reps to get some clarity as I was perplexed. The ads were general ads and not related to the restricted products, but you can navigate to the products from wherever on my site. The reps told me which products were causing the issues. Ok, no big deal, I took them down. Meanwhile I took screenshots and submitted a bunch of proof showing other people in my vertical are selling these products and ads are still running for these specific products in Adwords.

I reach out to my reps every once in a while with a reminder like "hey, seriously, my competitors sell these products with no problems. Can I put them back up or are you ever going to get the whole space cleaned up?" Finally the reps tell me how to get around the policy team - take the restricted products and put them onto a separate domain. None of my competitors are doing this. It seems super nefarious to me.

Anyone have experience with this? I have no problem creating a microsite for these products at all, but how do I link to them? I wouldn't be able to run ads for that site in Google. If I linked to that separate site within my main site navigation, is that something Adwords would see as skirting around the issue? Alternatively, what if I hid the products from any visitor that came in through google ads? I can detect that something came in from paid search via a trigger in my ad's URL and block these products but I don't know how the google crawler works.

Let me know if you have any ideas. I'm really concerned about doing anything that could be deemed black hat to the policy team and I'm also concerned that my customers aren't going to be able to find what they want on my site, so I need to find a happy medium.
#adwords #microsite #move #policy #products #reps #restricted #restricted products #site #telling
  • Profile picture of the author h8erade
    Came to update this and to see if anyone maybe had feedback. I am continuing to get ad disapprovals. I have spoken with several product manufacturers who can't understand why Google has their specific branded products listed as prohibited on the policy help section. The products listed in that policy are off my site but Google has started to branch out their policy and disapprove ads for things not listed but that are in the same category. This is tough to do because the category has thousands of products in it and I am positive that we are being reported by our competitors, large and small, as there are many complaints in the adwords help forums about policy disapprovals in this category of products stemming back several years. I can imagine that if I were a small advertiser banned from Google I would start reporting everyone in the space for anything related and unrelated just to see what sticks.

    Our site ranks incredibly well with customers and we're a top rated site in terms of customer satisfaction. Our conversion rate is unbelievable. When people come to our site, they find what they're looking for. We know that Google knows this information as they've often asked us how we do it. We're proof that beautiful pages mean nothing if a customer can't figure out how to shop - so we have placed a lot of effort into guiding people along. We're not an affiliate and we sell directly to consumers so ultimately we have to consider them our main source of revenue, not adwords, but adwords (and adwords alone - not merchant center, not natural search) is essentially telling us what we can and cannot sell and say on our site with obvious disregard to governmental agency guidance in our space, which is heavily regulated.

    We are about to devote our best developers to a project to hide the specific category of products when someone comes in from Google Adwords. We have already ceased all forms of advertising for these products. I don't want to waste time doing this if it goes against policy, but adwords policy doesn't state anything about serving up different content to adwords users. All it states is "Remove all content that violates this policy from your ad text and website."

    If you're not comfortable discussing in an open forum, please feel free to PM - I'm happy to discuss details of my site and the policy we're having trouble with if needed.

    Thank you everyone!
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