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I spent $855.77 on Google Ads and got my ads banned 5 times

lydiaoncybersecurity.com

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Re: I spent $855.77 on Google Ads and got my ads banned 5 times

#31

Post by somedude895 »

mvdtnz wrote: post #16

With such wildly differing titles between the article title and the Hacker News title I think this is just outrage bait.

Yeah the getting banned from Google Ads is really just a side note to the whole web projects story. The author also isn't very knowledgeable when it comes to Google Ads to begin with, so it's indeed very clickbaity.

Re: I spent $855.77 on Google Ads and got my ads banned 5 times

#32

Post by konschubert »

hello_there wrote: post #28
konschubert wrote: post #6

Yea. I am selling a pretty honest product, nothing fishy about it. Not even naughty. Just an eink display for google calendar. My Google Merchant account got banned immediately and I have no idea why. For now, I have decided to not play this game and will look for marketing avenues outside google. EDIT: In case you want to play a game of guess-what-got-him-banned, this is the product page: https://shop.invisible-comp…

This looks like a very nice product and it matches exactly something that I've been wanting and thinking about. So I tried to order one (using PayPal), but it doesn't seem like you're shipping to Norway. Are you planning to open up for shipments to more countries any time soon?

Norway requires CE, as far as I know. I don't have that certification yet, it's quite expensive, about 7000 Euro.

It pains me that I cannot sell within Europe, I can see the sales I am losing.

Hopefully I can bootstrap those funds before the holiday season :D

EDIT: I created a google form. When it is available in Europe, I will notify anyone who leaves their email: https://forms.gle/96sGBWFsxgAomG3Q9

Re: I spent $855.77 on Google Ads and got my ads banned 5 times

#34

Post by mschuster91 »

konschubert wrote: post #6

Yea. I am selling a pretty honest product, nothing fishy about it. Not even naughty. Just an eink display for google calendar. My Google Merchant account got banned immediately and I have no idea why. For now, I have decided to not play this game and will look for marketing avenues outside google. EDIT: In case you want to play a game of guess-what-got-him-banned, this is the product page: https://shop.invisible-comp…

I want one so bad. Only thing is, I'd like to run my own software on it - do you support modding?

Re: I spent $855.77 on Google Ads and got my ads banned 5 times

#35

Post by KMVed »

konschubert wrote: post #6

Yea. I am selling a pretty honest product, nothing fishy about it. Not even naughty. Just an eink display for google calendar. My Google Merchant account got banned immediately and I have no idea why. For now, I have decided to not play this game and will look for marketing avenues outside google. EDIT: In case you want to play a game of guess-what-got-him-banned, this is the product page: https://shop.invisible-comp…

Why mention Google calendar? Why not also display Outlook calendars or whatever?

Seems like you could, and Google is probably wondering why you are trying to use their name in your product?

Lots of red flags for this commodity product, which is issue three.

Re: I spent $855.77 on Google Ads and got my ads banned 5 times

#36

Post by konschubert »

gndk wrote: post #24
konschubert wrote: post #6

Yea. I am selling a pretty honest product, nothing fishy about it. Not even naughty. Just an eink display for google calendar. My Google Merchant account got banned immediately and I have no idea why. For now, I have decided to not play this game and will look for marketing avenues outside google. EDIT: In case you want to play a game of guess-what-got-him-banned, this is the product page: https://shop.invisible-comp…

Could be related to your site saying "Note: Due to high demand, current orders may take two weeks to ship. ". Thats pretty long. What do you have set in your merchant center shipping settings? See https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/6069284?hl=en

That note is just there since last week because there was a peak in orders and I am struggling to keep up. It wasn't there when they paused my merchant account.

Re: I spent $855.77 on Google Ads and got my ads banned 5 times

#37

Post by jimrandomh »

Browser plugins that access your email are a very-high-risk category for malware, so much so that if I see an ad for one I wouldn't personally give it the benefit of the doubt. Combine that with A/B testing for different product ideas, and the clickthrough experience not actually ending in a plugin which can be malware-scanned, and rejecting it under the "circumventing systems policy" seems correct to me. The reviewer can't distinguish between "the plugin was not served because this is a fake test for a product that doesn't exist", and "the plugin was not served because the malware doesn't want to send a sample of itself to the reviewer".

Re: I spent $855.77 on Google Ads and got my ads banned 5 times

#38

Post by throwaway290 »

konschubert wrote: post #6

Yea. I am selling a pretty honest product, nothing fishy about it. Not even naughty. Just an eink display for google calendar. My Google Merchant account got banned immediately and I have no idea why. For now, I have decided to not play this game and will look for marketing avenues outside google. EDIT: In case you want to play a game of guess-what-got-him-banned, this is the product page: https://shop.invisible-comp…

1) Mentioning Google and Google account many times

2) something innocent (using Tor, using blocklisted VPN, being associated with a banned google account)

3) something you're not telling us (violating some google policy, billing address in sanctioned country, using stolen cc, I know you didn't but you asked to guess!)

Re: I spent $855.77 on Google Ads and got my ads banned 5 times

#39

Post by konschubert »

junon wrote: post #30
konschubert wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of openness, there is this: https://www.invisible-computers.com/invisible-calendar/image... and this: https://github.com/Invisible-Computers/image-gallery/blob/ma... I also want to make the esp32 controller itself more hackable in future, but I don't want to promise anything because that's quite a lot of work for me. ------- I'll ship within Europe as soon as I have bootstrapped the 7000 Euro necessary for C…

Thanks! Anywhere I can get updates for Europe certification? Rare case I'd subscribe to a newsletter if you mentioned it in there.

No, I don't have one... I really need to get one going. In the meantime, there is only instagram: http://instagram.com/invisiblecomputers/

Re: I spent $855.77 on Google Ads and got my ads banned 5 times

#40

Post by konschubert »

throwaway290 wrote: post #38
konschubert wrote: post #6

Yea. I am selling a pretty honest product, nothing fishy about it. Not even naughty. Just an eink display for google calendar. My Google Merchant account got banned immediately and I have no idea why. For now, I have decided to not play this game and will look for marketing avenues outside google. EDIT: In case you want to play a game of guess-what-got-him-banned, this is the product page: https://shop.invisible-comp…

1) Mentioning Google and Google account many times 2) something innocent (using Tor, using blocklisted VPN, being associated with a banned google account) 3) something you're not telling us (violating some google policy, billing address in sanctioned country, using stolen cc, I know you didn't but you asked to guess!)

My guess is that it is probably 1). Somebody in their anti-spam team read "Google Calendar", saw my display and thought "Nah, that's no google calendar" :D

But maybe it was something else. It's of course possible I violated some kind of policy. But they're not sending me any debug messages :D

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