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Ads Disapproved for “Speculative & Experimental Services” on Google. HELP.
Hi!
I have an alternative healthcare clinic account, not the woo woo shaman type but functional medicine. The ads have been disapproved for “Speculative & Experimental Services.”
I checked the policy and it named one of the services provided- Platlet Rich Plasma (PRP). We have removed that service from the landing page and copy and it still is disapproved. Since the list is non-exhaustive I have no clue what else is triggering the policy.
Of course it’s impossible to get a hold of anyone at Google anymore as the chat option just points you to help articles instead of a rep.
The odd part is that the ads are running just fine on meta and programmatic.
Does anyone have experience with this? Know what else is on the policy list? Have any ideas?
Any help is appreciated.
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1 Reply
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I’ve had some experience with this. Often it’s to do with banned words being used on the website, depending on your location. Words like “facial rejuvenation” and “Botox” etc. these are banned in Australia and UK and fall under various treatments Google refuses to market. If you’re in the US it may be different.
Google will not allow advertising if such banned words are appearing on the website, even if you’re not bidding on them. One way advertisers get around this is creating a dedicated landing page hosted away from the website and not using those banned words in the content,.while you keep your main site just as you want it. Prospects can then return to your website organically and see the full unfettered list of services. And as you’re sending users to a stripped back LP on a different domain, Google won’t mind. Sites like Unbounce allow you to create these types of LPs rather easily.
I don’t know what your alternative therapy services are but the likelihood is at least one of your treatments or words used on the website is from its banned list.
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*Functional medicine*
*Alternative healthcare*
If medicine was functional it’ll be legit healthcare not alternative, no?
The disapproved seems business as usual. Google covering themselves against lawsuits when someone is harmed or killed from ads run on their platform
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I’ve been in this situation.
Used a sub-domain for the landing page/mini landing site. In my experience they check the full site even if you’ve stripped the navigation off the landing page.
Then follow the appeal process. Submit the automated appeal/dispute within the account. When that gets denied contact support and speak with the crappy tier 1 agent who won’t help you at all. They should escalate it for a manual review. When they reply (could be a week or more) don’t take a phone call. You want the tech who did the manual review to email you their reply
Now you can reply to that email and it goes back to the higher level tech who did the manual review. Now you can make sure in a back and forth process of “what terms are triggering the policy?” And “ok I edited the site and it’s still flagged can you tell me what I missed?”
I also think we eventually got “white-listed” because I kept going back to “my guy” via email every time the bots flagged us again. I think he got tired of helping me 🙂
Not sure it still works this way (was 1-2 years ago that I had these issues in the account) but thought I’d share.
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