AdMob Account Disabled

I tried to log into my AdMob account this morning, and was presented with this message:

Your account has been disabled for invalid activity or repeated policy violations. Some examples include recurring manual clicks or impressions, violation of our content policies which can be found here, robots, automated click and impression generating tools, third-party services that generate clicks or impressions such as pay-to-click, pay-to-surf, autosurf, and click-exchange programs, or any deceptive software. If you have any questions or concerns about the actions we’ve taken, how you can appeal this decision, or invalid activity in general, you can find more information here.

I obviously haven’t done anything that I thought was remotely against the AdMob Terms & Conditions. I’ve been using AdMob for years, and recently changed all my mediation to them. And now they’ve gone and killed my account - for reasons completely unknown to me.

I’m not at all impressed.

This could turn out to be a major problem, as practically all my revenue at the moment is running through AdMob. I’m not actually showing their ads directly, just using their mediation to trigger some Custom Events I wrote for LeadBolt, Tapjoy, AppBrain, SendDroid, etc. And also using House Ads to cross-promote some of my apps.

I’ve sent through an appeal - but based on my own & other peoples’ experience with Google’s developer support, I’m not overly hopeful of getting a decent chance at reinstatement.

So looks like I’ll be spending the next week updating all my apps to remove any trace of AdMob :frowning: Any suggestions for what I should use instead? I’m planning on MoPub at this stage. They won’t be able to replace all the features (especially pre-loading custom ads) that I was using with AdMob. But at least they’re a smaller company who probably won’t randomly disable my account.

Ultimately I would really like to write my own mediation platform, but that won’t be happening any time soon. Just another warning - don’t put all your eggs in one basket! AdMob was the single point of failure for my revenue, and looks like they were also the weakest link.

Hey David. The same happened to me while a go. What was your revenue if its not a secret?

You only have one (1) complain to write to them. I did not succeed.

I would recommend you AppBrain and millennialmedia ads. And how are you with AirPush?

I have implemented AppBrain instead of AirPush yesterday and i think i will get 30% of AirPushes revenue soon. I have no idea about millennialmedia, but I will implement it into my iOS apps along with IAP.

Im sorry for you.
I am wondering, i use a sentence in my app like “if you can see info, you can click the ads :p” . It’ll bring the ban to me ?

That sucks, sorry this has happened to you.

Do you think this could be the reason they suspended your account? That you are not showing any of their ads, only using their mediation. This could cost them money and bandwidth, without making them any. I don’t know, but does it say anywhere in their terms that you cannot use them solely for mediation?

@wikan - definitely!
@XdebugX - they shouldn’t allow it then instead of banning…

Yes they shouldn’t, it’s sad really the communication ad-mob and google has with it’s developers. They should at least email you first with what the problem is before any type of suspension.

I think here we all see googles biggest problem. U get banned no question asked! I would love to pay 100/ year for better support and more information about whats right and whats wrong.

Look at the Apple. Yesterday they have personally contacted me regarding to my iOS dev account.

Some guy has CALLED me.

Google should copy them in this area!

I think it may be the trigger which caused my account to be disabled. But I can’t see any way that it’s a valid reason. I’m not actually able to display AdMob interstitials anyway (they’re only enabled for big publishers I believe). So they physically don’t let me run ads from them! If this is somehow against the TOS I’d be very surprised.

My revenue from AdMob itself was tiny (less than $5 / month). This may have triggered anti-fraud alerts somewhere, as I was sending a few hundred thousand impressions via mediation. But I really don’t see how this is a problem - AdMob themselves haven’t enabled me to use their interstitial format, so I’m forced to use third-party ads anyway.

It’s possible that since I was using Custom Events with a 100% fill rate and 0% CTR, this triggered some alerts too. But I don’t really know - it’s all guess work.

Thanks for the advice. I haven’t used Airpush yet, because I’m waiting for their non-EULA SDK release. However I have integrated their current (5.0) SDK, so I can turn on the Airpush SmartWall at any stage if I’m feeling adventurous.

Well, I could turn it on. That is, until AdMob disabled my mediation… :smiley:

Also - when trying to contact Google never give up after the first try. From my experience you get a real person after a few tries (but it takes weeks though if not months because you have to wait at least a week between e-mails).

I feel sorry for you David. But that is likely the reason they terminated your account. You should have set up a custom server and run a script there if you wanted to do mediation for notification ad networks. I wish you good luck trying to contact them, because they are all a crew of cyborgs…

I’m sorry David, I had terrible experiencied with Google (my account dev was banned) and is frustrating, no answers from their side. Definitely google need to change it.

Maybe in your case is different, a friend of mine had same Admob problem, he appeals it and he got reinstated after one week, hopefully will be the same for you.

Regards.
B.

Here’s their tech support: :D:D:D

I have been using admob for about 2 years now. Every time I see someone complaining about being banned (Used to happen more frequently 18 months back and much less now a days), I always noticed there is definitely a reason for said account being banned.

I don’t mean any disrespect to admin of this site (He provided a great forum for all of us to learn from each other), but I do think his activity violated terms of Admob.

http://www.admob.com/home/terms

In Restrictions there are enough provisions to restrictions (Although thoughtfully left vague).

If you are using a service and trying to work around the system removing their ability to make any money in the transaction, you will not be treated as a customer.

In reality google has been always been nicer to all of us (Even though some of the dev are abusing the system).

I can see where you’re coming from. But with regards to “working around the system” - as I mentioned in reply to another comment - it’s actually not possible for me to include AdMob ads in the Interstitial format. I tried - but Google hadn’t enabled it for my account. So they gave me the option of using Interstitial mediation, but didn’t give me the option of using their ads in it. I don’t see how they could have expected me to do anything differently here.

Although you’re right - the “Restrictions” section of their TOS is sufficiently vague. Take this part for example (emphasis mine):

Company reserves the right to remove any Content from the Site at any time, or to terminate User’s right to use the Services or access the Site, for any reason (including, but not limited to, upon receipt of claims or allegations from third parties or authorities relating to such Content or if Company is concerned that User may have breached the terms of this paragraph), or for no reason at all, subject to the provisions of paragraph 13 (“Termination”).

So they reserve the right to terminate your account for any reason - or for no reason :huh:

[quote=“david”]

Yes the first time I saw that after couple of people got banned about 18 months back, It freaked me out and that that was the first time I looked at alternatives.

If anyone want to check if what you are doing is in compliance with Admob TOS, I would recommend checking with [email protected] google group. Its fairly active group.

I agree with @Androider about the reason for being banned, but it is absolutely ridiculous nonetheless. This is an outrage that Admob, a company with ~50% market share, can abruptly disable a developer’s account which has years of hard work for such a trivial offense and with no discussion. Makes me sick.

Well, my account was just reinstated. :smiley: I got this email from Google:

Hello,

After thoroughly re-reviewing your AdMob account, we’ve decided to reinstate your account. However, there will be a delay before ads start running on your sites, as it may take up to 48 hours before all of our servers are informed of the change.

To help prevent invalid activity in the future, we recommend reviewing these references to learn more about invalid activity, our program policies, and practices to keep your account in good standing:

Google AdMob - Earn More With Mobile App Monetization
Behavioral policies - Google AdMob Help

We also encourage you to regularly review your site’s traffic logs for any suspicious activity and notify us of your findings at http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/request.py?contact=invalid_clicks_contact. Please note that there’s no need to alert us of all instances of invalid activity, so we ask that you use your best judgment when reporting unusual activity on your site.

If you need help logging the traffic on your site to determine the source of your visitors, we recommend using Google Analytics: Analytics Tools & Solutions for Your Business - Google Analytics. You can also try these Google search terms:

Webmaster resources
Website tracking and logging
Site traffic analysis

We appreciate your patience, and apologize for any inconvenience. If you have any questions, please visit our Help Center at Google AdMob Help.

Sincerely,

The Google AdMob Team

Of course, the email lacks any specific information about what may have caused the suspension. But it seems I wasn’t infringing the T&C after all. It must have been an automatic alarm triggered by some anomaly (which is what I suspected). I would love to know what the trigger was.

I’m definitely relieved to have my account back. But this makes me very wary of relying on AdMob in the future. I’ve nearly finished the code to switch to MoPub - but the SDK is nowhere near as nice to code for. I really like the Custom Event classes provided by AdMob.

If I were you, I would think it twice before using Admob for mediation of notification networks again… just in case !

David,

Glad to hear you got your account back. Best wishes.