AdWords account disabled

[henare]

Google has disabled our account. I think it was some stupid T&C change from a while back?

[mlandauer]

Dear Google Grantee,

We are writing to inform you of a change we are making to our URL policy.

Google Grantees may only promote the one website domain name associated with the registered nonprofit that approved for Google Grants. We realize that some nonprofits may have separate domain names for events or fundraisers. However, to maintain the integrity of our program, we now require that Google Grantees only promote the one domain name associated with the nonprofit that was approved for Google Grants.

For more on the URL policy, please visit the Help Center article: https://support.google.com/nonprofits/answer/1657899?hl=en

NEXT STEPS:

Google Grantees must remove any extra domain names from their account by July 2013. After a short grace period, we will begin enforcing the new policy. Grantees that continue to promote multiple domain names or a domain name not associated with the registered nonprofit will be subject to removal from the Google Grants program.

EXAMPLE:

Your organization has the website domain name www.HelpForAnimals.org.

You are allowed to have ads that direct users to subdomains and subfolders within your website, such as your volunteer page, events page, or programs page:

www.subdomain.HelpForAnimals.org/subfolder www.HelpForAnimals.org/volunteer www.HelpForAnimals.org/events www.raceforlife.HelpForAnimals.org

You may not promote an entirely different domain name, such as www.ShopForPets.com or www.AdoptDogs.org.

For more information on Google Grants guidelines, please visit: www.google.com/grants

To contact the AdWords team, please visit: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/8206?hl=en

[henare]

Dumb :rage:

Thanks for the details @mlandauer.

[mlandauer]

I tried to follow it up with our lovely Google contact to see if they would make an exception. We didn't have any luck.

My gut instinct is that an exception is possible because it really doesn't make any sense in our case. I can see how it would make sense for more traditional charities who don't actually do their work online but...

I say we reopen this and have another crack.

On Sat, Apr 26, 2014 at 12:54 PM, Henare Degan notifications@github.comwrote:

Dumb [image: :rage:]

Thanks for the details @mlandauer https://github.com/mlandauer.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/openaustralia/oaf/issues/147#issuecomment-41455706 .

[henare]

Yay optimism :thumbsup:

[henare]

Jen from mySociety told me their interesting hack...

I think the hack that we've used to get around our issues was the creation of specific pages on our main organisational page directing the traffic to the sites from there and using the adwords grants to drive traffic to the main mySociety site. It's not as effective as the old way around though as you're adding another click through for people :(

[kat]

spoken with support about this, hoping for a call back today to confirm our adwords are back.

[kat]

turns out our suspension was not due to multiple domains but because at some point we had a 3 week window to renew and didn't. So I've been pointed to rejoin at techsoup via their validation programme, I've filled in a form with them them to enable us to do this, but it may take 48 hours to kick in!

[kat]

As soon as techsoup opens up we apply for a validation token. https://www.google.com/nonprofits/account/u/0/signup/au - then goes back to google

[kat]

done, we have adwords for oaf.org.au. Have also applied for additional domains to be added to our account