Google AdWords to Start Re-reviewing Old, Paused Ads

Quick update this morning.  Last night Google AdWords announced that it’s going to start re-reviewing all paused ads in your account, putting them through the same ad approval process as your active ads. The process begins September 6.

What Does this Mean for My Account?

Well, in the immediate, it means that old ads that you have paused in the accounts (or even new ones if you uploaded them on pause) are subject to getting disapproved.  This could be mildly annoying if you keep standard / seasonal ones on pause for later use, but if you’re on the up and up, it shouldn’t be a big deal.

Having written that, anybody working with AdWords for any period of time can tell you about how the ad approval process fouls up some basic stuff sometimes and it can take some time to get legitimately compliant ads back online.  But, if you weren’t running them actively any way, urgency should be low.

What you should be more concerned about is that if you use multiple domains or have changed domains since opening your AdWords account, you may have paused ads pointing to the old domains.  AdWords only allows you to use one domain per ad group.  If they re-run old ads through the approval process, it could cause conflicts with your active ads.

To be safe, we’d recommend you do a little fall pruning and delete or update any old, paused ads to old domains to make sure you avoid this potential problem.

Why No Pop Culture Referential Pic on this Post?

I’m meeting with a prospect in 20 minutes and it’s too early for my synapses to make a connection between Public Enemy’s Rebel without a Pause and this announcement.  If you have any good ideas, comment below and I’ll do a quick photoshop job and update later.