What Google Considers Gray Advertising and How to Advertise Legitimately?

Webmasters who have tried launching ads on Google Ads at least a few times have experienced firsthand how stringent the ad moderation can be on this platform. Interestingly, most ads are reviewed not by moderators but by AI-trained bots. Google, with its paranoid suspicion, even scrutinizes the most benign white advertisers.

In this article, we delve into what kind of advertising Google deems gray, leading to account restrictions or even suspension, and how to drive traffic in a legitimate manner.

Google Ads Requirements for Advertisers and Ads, which Even White Businesses Suffer from: Besides Google's renowned focus on the trustworthiness of accounts, payment instruments, and other expenses, the platform also scrutinizes all account data for involvement in gray areas and affiliate marketing. Unofficially, Google views the use of affiliates to promote a single offer or service as unfair competition. However, this information is described quite dryly in the platform's rules, and failure to comply with these rules can result in sanctions against advertising accounts, even for the whitest and most open businesses.

Several rules in Google's advertising policies state that promoting pages lacking necessary information about a product, service, or company is prohibited on the platform. In other words, anything advertised that doesn't belong to the advertiser's business is seen by Google as a potential rule violation, which could lead to the permanent suspension of the account.

The only exception is advertising agencies that have Google Partner status. Advertising accounts of such agencies enjoy a higher level of trust and several other advantages from the platform.

Furthermore, Google Advertising rules state that to attract new and existing leads, it's recommended to provide all company information that may be shown to users. However, if the company name doesn't exactly match the domain name of the promoted website or the name provided during advertiser verification, ad campaigns in such accounts may not be approved by the moderation system.

The next rule that complicates the lives of many webmasters and media buyers driving traffic to affiliate offers and services is attempting to bypass Google's tools responsible for checking ads, landing pages, and other content.

Even if a webmaster uses well-heated farm accounts, high-quality proxies, and a reliable anti-detect browser with a stable cloaking, account bans or ad rejections can often occur even for using pre-landing pages in advertising bundles.

How to Gain Trust from Google and Advertise Legitimately

Based on the above, not only media buyers and arbitrageurs but also direct advertisers need to regularly register new domain names and advertising accounts, investing money and time into increasing their trustworthiness for stable work with Google Ads. And, if the goal is to create a white campaign image to increase the ROI of all advertising campaigns, then, as absurd as it may sound, one will have to constantly borrow data from other companies to link to advertising accounts.

As of 2023, affiliates and direct advertisers whose offers and services Google considers prohibited or restricted have several options for stabilizing their work with the advertising platform:

1. Use trusted advertising accounts of Google partner agencies.
2. Establish a constant cycle of farming and warming up accounts, purchasing payment instruments, proxies, and other expenses.

The first option involves adding advertiser Google accounts to the agency's advertising account. Through such manipulations, the trust of the advertising account is transferred to the working account without additional warming up. Additionally, ad campaigns launched through the agency account undergo moderation in priority order. Another advantage of using agency advertising accounts is the ability to withdraw unspent funds even from a blocked Google account. In October 2023, Google tightened its rules and began requesting advertiser verification even before launching campaigns, but the YeezyPay service team has already adapted to this innovation and offers its users a solution that requires manual moderation at the stage of creating a new account.

If a webmaster doesn't perform actions within the account that could trigger Google's algorithms, an advertising campaign, even on gray verticals, can generate tens of thousands of dollars and last up to a year.

The second approach to working with Google Ads is also effective but requires more time and money. Moreover, it's unlikely that the remaining advertising budget from some accounts can be refunded, and the accounts themselves will be even more expensive due to a higher number of bans.

Conclusion

In its efforts to make its operations as transparent as possible for users, Google sometimes pushes the situation to absurdity by demanding the same level of transparency from all advertisers. Such realities complicate advertising not only for affiliates but also for white advertisers.

With the tightening and constant updating of rules, purchasing traffic for niches that Google considers gray using standard approaches with farm accounts is not as easy as before. However, one of the effective methods to this day remains agency advertising accounts with increased trust.