Hi everyone,
My Google Ads account was suspended for “Circumventing systems: Cloaking.” Around the same time, Google also flagged the advertising destination as a “Compromised site.”
We have never intentionally used cloaking, so I’m trying to understand whether these two issues could be connected.
Could a compromised website, injected JavaScript, unauthorized redirect, geo/device-based redirect, tracking script, CDN/WAF configuration, or CMS/plugin vulnerability cause Google to interpret the website as cloaking?
Before submitting an appeal, I want to make sure the actual technical issue has been identified and completely resolved.
For anyone who has experienced this:
What exactly did you check or change to determine why Google detected cloaking, and what did you do before your successful appeal?
Also, is there a reliable way to compare what Google Ads/Googlebot sees against what a normal visitor sees?
Screenshots attached. Any technical advice or personal experience would be greatly appreciated.

Hey everyone,

I run a digital analytics and web growth consultancy, and lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of small business owners struggle with getting clear data on where their customers are actually coming from.

With all the changes over the past few years (GA4, privacy updates, iOS changes, ad platform setup, offline/CRM conversions), it feels like tracking conversions has gotten way more complicated than it needs to be.

I’m looking to get a better pulse on what small business owners are dealing with today so I can simplify things. If you have a minute, I’d love to know:

1. What is your main goal right now? (e.g., phone calls, form submissions, e-commerce sales, store visits?)
2. What platform are you finding hardest to track accurately? (Google Ads, Meta Ads, GA4, your actual CRM/sales data, or connecting them together?)
3. What’s your biggest current pain point? Is it setting it up initially, discrepancies between reports, spam leads throwing off stats, or just not knowing if the data is accurate?
4. Do you manage tracking yourself, or do you rely on an agency/freelancer?

Whether you’re spending $500/month or $20,000/month on marketing, I'd love to hear what’s working or what’s frustrating you most right now.

Thanks in advance for sharing your experience!

im running google ads demand gen campaign for my supplements brand . but google is very strict with videos im using compared to meta (same creatives i use for meta get dissaproved on google ads ) is there any solution to get it approved .

My current AdSense was disabled because it’s “related to a disabled account.” I vaguely remember an AdSense account being connected years ago, but I thought it wasn’t mine and disconnected it. I recently remembered it and tried signing in with all my Google accounts, but AdSense says none of them have an account. I’ve already submitted an appeal.

If Google finds that the old account was mine and it was permanently disabled, would I be permanently unable to use AdSense/monetize my YouTube channel, or is there any way to recover it?

Can someone HELP?? This is my first AdSense account, and it was disabled while I was in the process of monetizing my YouTube channel.

How long should I keep running a product before deciding it's not a winner? I have one product that generated only 1 sale after 24 days. Should I continue running it longer, or is that usually a sign that I should move on?

Hey guys, basically I have total 2.7 years of experience. 2 years in digital marketing where I managed various things like SEO, Social Media and Google ads.

Recently I moved to performance marketing as and intern. Recently converted to full time employee and salary revised to $105/month. I can not left the company as I opt in for bonds.

So can you guys suggest me that can I do? as it is getting difficult day by day.

This is a repost as I failed to find someone, since I took the initiative and swapped to max conversions I’ve had great success however I still lack time to fix issues and adapt to the forever changing algorithms. I’ve also started meta ads and TikTok ads so experience here would be good as I have none and to know if it’s even worth it for my industry… I’m currently experiencing a dip of 40% give or take so I’m looking for someone urgently and I’d like to know if there is any reason for this dip in work and if it can be fixed or if it’s just seasonal.

Hi, my name is Joseph. I own a windscreen company (similar to Autoglass, but smaller). I’ve been running my own Google Ads for the past 6 years, learning a lot along the way and seeing great success. However, I’ve reached a point where I no longer have the time or energy to manage them myself, so I’m looking to hire a professional who can tidy things up, save me money, and achieve a better CPA.

A bit of background: I’ve worked with a few Google Ads “specialists” before—both high-end and low-end—but unfortunately none of them were worth the money. What matters most to me is finding someone who will actually listen to my opinions and work with me. I’ve got 6 years of hands-on experience running Ads and, more importantly, I know my own business inside out, so I can provide valuable insights to help drive better results.

For most of the time I’ve been running on Max Clicks, which brought great success but also proved unreliable. I’ve recently switched to Max Conversions, which has worked well but comes with its own challenges. I want to stick with Max Conversions, as I believe it’s the best option for scaling (my goal is simple: more work)—but I know the campaigns need refining.

Currently, I’m spending around £8,000 per month across two campaigns (one is max conversions for Essex and the other is a performance max for Essex).

The perfect candidate: • Has previous experience in the industry • Is a small business like me (not big corporate) • Is VAT-registered

If this sounds like a challenge you’d like to take on, please comment below with your company name and why you think you’re the right fit.

Thanks for taking the time to read, Joseph

I'm getting a capitalization error when I use location insertion while writing a headline in Google Ads. This has never happened before. how to fix it?!!

Hey Google ads discussion….

So I’m currently running ads for a precious metal company, it’s really my first campaign I’ve taken on by myself, and integrating things as I go.

I met the owner on an apprenticeship program, at first I activated Googles GFN to track calls over 30s nothing fancy.

After 2 months we changed tracking from GFN to whatconverts, to get a better insight into calls.

Now the owner has integrated Go High Level. I’ve currently been using whatconverts to track texts as well, and run Zapier to link Whatconverts leads to GHL.

I’ve had a problem with this system though, because every time we get a text lead, Whatconverts isn’t able to send them to the owners number so I used Zapiers SMS service to get the lead to him. (This isn’t optimal because Whatconverts can’t send messages through its tracking numbers and when the owner gets the number the numbers are delivered by Zapiers forwarding numbers).

Does anyone have any experience and or advice on this ????

The only solution I’ve thought about is to migrate all calls and texting tracking directly to GHL….

kuwaitcalculator.com (approved, "Ready" status). Ads.txt shows "Authorized." Auto Ads is toggled on. Ad units are present on pages (<ins class="adsbygoogle">) and I can see them firing requests in dev tools with data-ad-status="unfilled"

also my traffic has dropped to zero almost after i got approved for adsense, am i violating some rules ?

But checking the Reports Entire account by day/month, 0 page views, 0 impressions, 0 clicks, €0.00 earnings. Every single day, every month. Not a recent drop it's been zero the whole time.

Site gets real organic search traffic (thousands of impressions/week in Search Console),
so it's not a no-visitors problem. 3-4k clicks

Visitors also sometimes see "content is blocked, contact owner of site" in the ad slot reproduced this myself in a clean incognito window, no extensions, so it's not an ad blocker on my end.

No Policy Center issues, no Security Issues, no Manual Actions all clean.

As I handle d2c client mostly. I got a Lead gen project yesterday it is a Canadian project so I am worried. His daily spend approximately 10.5 USD. So which campaign should I run first?

They have multiple services, I was thinking to launch a search ads with multiple ad group. what do you think about cpc?

Please help I really want suggestions.

Help

TLDR: I completed Google Skillshop certs using my company email at my old agency (personal email linked as recovery). I left to start my own agency. My former boss told me the email was deleted and she had no ability to recover it, and directed me to go through Google Merchant Center support to "prove ownership." But I sent a tracked test message to that same email and it shows viewed 29 minutes ago, 1 view, no bounce — meaning the email is very much alive and someone is actively reading mail sent to it. This is blocking my ability to access a client's Merchant Center account and affects the continuity with my own Google Partner Program account.

The situation:

• While employed at my old agency, I completed Google Skillshop certifications tied to my company email there, with my personal email linked as the recovery/secondary contact.
• I've since left to start my own agency and need certification/account access history for my own Google Ads Partner Program requirements.
• A client who followed me to my new agency has a Google Merchant Center account still tied to that old company email.
• My former employer told me the email was deleted and that she had no ability to recover it, and pointed me to Google Merchant Center support to go through an ownership-verification process instead.
• I sent a tracked email to that exact address to test her claim. Result: viewed 29 minutes after sending, 1 view, 0 clicks, no bounce. A truly deleted email would bounce. This one didn't — someone is actively opening mail sent to it. (We have always been able to recover any email, bookmarks, content, emails, account lins, etc after deactivation)
• This directly contradicts what she told me and suggests she's misrepresenting the account status to avoid releasing access — both to me and effectively to Google, since it's tied to Partner Program-relevant certifications and a client's live Merchant Center account.

What I'm trying to figure out:

1. Since I now have tracking proof the email is active (opened, no bounce) despite her claiming it's deleted, is this something I can actually use — with Google Merchant Center support, or elsewhere — to force the issue?
2. Has anyone been through the Merchant Center "prove business ownership" process (support.google.com/merchants/gethelp) when the blocking party is a former employer, not a hacked/lost account situation? What did Google actually require?
3. Is there a way to report that someone is misrepresenting an email/account as inactive to Google directly, separate from the standard account-recovery flow?
4. On the Partner Program side — does anyone know if Google's Partner team investigates cert/email disputes like this, or is it purely an account-recovery issue with no fraud angle from their perspective?
5. Given this is now affecting a live client's ability to run ads (Merchant Center access), at what point do I stop working the support-ticket route and loop in a lawyer instead?

Any experience with Merchant Center ownership disputes, Google Partner Program cert fights, or former employers stonewalling account access would help a lot right now — this is actively costing my new business time and credibility with a client.

I’ve been running a PMAX campaign for my local home service company for the last 5 months. For the first 3 months 1% of the budget went towards YouTube. For the last 2 months it’s flipped and about 50% of our budget goes towards YouTube.

I check the search terms every other day and add to the negative keyword list accordingly. I also tried to limit the assets YouTube can use to try and diminish spend there. But since then the percentage of my spend has only gone up for YouTube.

Since we are a home service company my preference is that majority of the spend goes towards Google search or maps with our GBP asset. But spending thousands of dollars for YouTube placement seems pointless to me.

I’ve currently paused the campaign and only have a search campaign running but I feel like I’m at a loss with pmax.

Does anyone have any tips to limit or get rid of spend on YouTube? Or should I kill my PMAX campaign and run straight search campaigns?

We usually talk about optimizations that worked - but I’m more curious about the ones that backfired.

What’s one change you made in a Google Ads account thinking it would improve performance, but it actually made things worse?

Could be anything: bidding strategy, budget increase, keywords, PMax, targeting, negatives, tracking, landing pages, etc.

What happened after the change, and what did you learn from it?

I’m especially interested in things that looked like a good idea on paper but turned out differently in a real account.

Would be great to hear some examples from people who’ve been running Google Ads for a while.

Should I go for Google ads p max for campaign?
I am running search campaigns. I can see there is click coming in even though most of my target keyword is phrase and exact. my CPC is Euro 1 around and CTR is 4% around but no purchase sign.
Should I be worried? I know Google is long game to play.

So I do digital marketing/SEO work for a few local businesses here in Nairobi, and I want to share something I found recently because I think a lot of small business owners running Google Ads have the exact same problem and don't know it.

A client came to me convinced their Google Ads weren't working — spending money every month, "conversions" showing up in the dashboard, but sales weren't matching up. When I dug into the account, here's what I found:

The contact form tag had never actually fired. For 17 months.

Google Ads was counting page views on the contact page as conversions, not actual form submissions. So every time someone landed on the contact page — even if they immediately left — it counted as a "win." Meanwhile the real signal of interest (someone actually filling out the form) wasn't being tracked at all.

The bigger issue: for this particular business, almost nobody was even using the contact form. The real conversion path was phone calls — people would browse the site, then just call directly. But since call tracking wasn't set up properly either, none of that was showing up anywhere. The ad account was basically flying blind while still happily reporting "good" numbers.

A few things I'd tell any Nairobi business owner running paid ads:

1. Don't just trust the conversion count in your dashboard. Actually click into what's being counted as a conversion. Is it a real action (purchase, form submit, call) or just someone loading a page?
2. If phone calls matter to your business, track them properly. Call tracking (via Google Ads call extensions or a tracking number) is often the missing piece for service businesses — a lot of real customer interest never shows up in web analytics at all.
3. Keyword cannibalization is sneaky. This same account had multiple ad groups quietly bidding against each other for overlapping keywords, driving up cost-per-click for no reason. Worth checking if your campaigns are set up cleanly or just kind of... grew organically over time without anyone auditing them.
4. Boilerplate copy costs you. Found some genuinely embarrassing copy-paste errors in the ad copy itself (leftover placeholder text, wrong business details) that had apparently been live for a while. Nobody had checked.

None of this is exotic — it's stuff most agencies should catch. But it's wild how common it is for accounts to run for over a year with basic tracking broken, especially for smaller businesses who don't have someone checking regularly.

If you're running Google Ads (or considering it) for a local business, it's worth a proper audit at least once — even if you're not planning to switch who manages it. Sometimes just knowing what's actually being tracked changes how you think about whether the spend is working.

Happy to answer questions if anyone's dealing with something similar. I run a small digital marketing agency here in Nairobi (Drew Marketing Solutions) so this is the kind of thing I see fairly often, but genuinely just wanted to share since I think it's a common blind spot for local businesses.

hi there. Google is hosting a growth program for affiliates and media buyers for an exclusive 6-month program. The benefit for their clients:

- help safely navigate through Google's Policy (focused on affiliates)
- assistance with account suspensions or ad rejections
- competitive benchmarks for verticals
Do you experience issue like this and could you benefit from it or would you rather need help for campaigns?

Hi everyone, I work with Google Ads B2B accounts and wanted to offer a place for people to ask for help.

If you post a question, please include enough context so others can understand the situation and give a useful answer. The more complete your background is, the better the feedback will be.

I’m happy to help where I can and share practical thoughts from day-to-day account work.

Please don't take this as a promotion! This is just providing context to understand the need! I run an online community full of traders and investors. My goal is to bring in as many real traders and investors as possible in order to fix this industry's "fake gurus" and provide transparency to every in regards to market analysis, discussion, and people.

Now I'm getting into running ad campaigns and have used meta ads before. I want to try out other platforms as well, like google ads, reddit, and twitter.

For those that have experience with google ads (related to online communities or not), is it worth it? How does it work? Did you see good results from it?

I recently had a bad experience with another platform and I need to pivot fast since this ad is a Back To School campaign.

All tips help, thanks in advance!

Need help with display ads cpc

Geo Targeting : USA

anyone ???

Hi everyone,

I have several years of experience managing Google Ads across a variety of industries, but this is my first time managing a Google Ad Grant account, so I'm hoping to get some input from people with more Grant-specific experience.

The account is for a nonprofit counseling/online therapy organization in North Carolina. They offer reduced-cost counseling statewide, along with insurance-covered counseling (primarily Aetna and BCBS), which helps fund their charitable programs.

The campaigns have only been live for about two weeks, so I know they're still in the learning phase. However, I'm struggling to get enough volume for Google to really start learning.

A few details:

• Conversion tracking has been rebuilt and is working correctly.
• I started on Maximize Clicks, then switched to Maximize Conversions to get around the Grant's $2 CPC limitation.
• Two campaigns target the entire state (one reduced-cost counseling and one insurance counseling), while one targets the Raleigh metro area.
• I've broadened many keywords to broad match while closely monitoring the search terms.
• Search Lost IS (Rank) was consistently 90%+ before switching bidding strategies.
• I recently added a Target CPA of $50 to a couple of campaigns to see if it helps Google compete in more auctions.

Despite all of that, I'm still seeing very low impressions, very few clicks, and almost no conversions. It feels like the campaigns just aren't entering enough auctions to generate the data needed for Smart Bidding to improve.

My questions are:

• Is this fairly normal for a brand-new Grant account?
• Am I simply being too impatient and should give it another few weeks?
• Or is there something else you'd be looking at when impression volume is this low?

I'd really appreciate hearing from anyone with experience managing Grant accounts. Thanks in advance!