AdWords Policy vs Site Security

Marketing
1

Riddle me this…

Google has suspended the AdWords campaign for a site I manage. The backstory is:

  • our Adwords is, and always has been, only set to target US Google searches.
  • our site is only accessible to US IP addresses. We block non-US traffic for 3 reasons:
  1. We we only sell our products to US based customers.
  2. We want to reduce the risk of our site being infected or tampered with by malicious overseas hackers.
  3. We want to reduce the risk that our products will be copied and “knocked-off” by overseas companies that do not respect US coypright and trademark laws.

Google is now suspending our campaign and telling us the reason is that fact that our site is not accessible wordwide is a violation of their AdWords policy.

Again, we have had the non-US traffic block on our website for years now. Why all of a sudden would AdWords be forcing us to expose the site to the world just to run our AdWords in front of US based customers?

It seems absurd that we would have to open our site up to the world and raise our risk profile just so ads can continue to run in the US. What am I missing? Please advise. Thanks in advance.

2

It could be a change in the ToS or possibly that they only just detected that you are blocking other countries.

If that is their policy, you must choose to either accept it or not. I’m not sure that Google would be open to negotiation, but only they can tell you that.
I think you just need to weigh up the pros and cons: the value of having AdWords Vs the risk opening the site world wide.

3

I did some searching. It does seem there have been some recent changes, but I did not find anything concerning the need to be worldwide accessible.

@sixrfan got a link to the policy?

4

First time I’m hearing about this… How about asking Google to point to the specific clause in violation?

5

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