How do I run a first Google Ads campaign without getting it disapproved?

What Google says, in its own words

Google's advertising policies cover four areas: prohibited content, prohibited practices, restricted content and features, and editorial and technical requirements. Its ad review reads your headline, description, keywords, destination, images and video against them.

What that means if you have just launched

• Check your category. Google's policy overview says gambling, dating and most cryptocurrency advertisers need its certification first, and that some healthcare products can only be advertised once Google has approved the advertiser.
• Finish the page first. Google's page on ad review says a new webpage must be complete before the ad can be reviewed, and that changing the ad restarts the review.
• Let the crawler in. Under the destination requirements, the page must return no error to Google's AdsBot crawler and open in the locations you target. A redirect to a different domain is a mismatch, and so is a display URL whose domain is not the page's.
• Say what it is and what it costs. An ad that does not name what it promotes is not allowed. The misrepresentation policy wants the full cost disclosed before and after purchase, so a free trial that turns into a paid plan has to say so. It also wants any offer in the ad to be easy to find on the page.
• Expect to prove who you are. Google's verification page says all advertisers will eventually be required to complete advertiser verification, and that your name and location then show in a disclosure on your ads. Its page on timelines says an account that misses a deadline is paused.
• What ends the account. Google's enforcement page says an egregious violation suspends the account at once, with no warning. For other violations it warns at least 7 days before, and repeat violations earn at most 3 strikes per policy. A suspension also takes related accounts, such as ones on the same payment method.
• What it costs. Google's cost guide says there is no flat fee and no monthly subscription. On Search you pay when someone clicks, and each click is priced in an auction, so Google states no price for one.

Approval means the ad broke no rule. It says nothing about whether anyone will buy.

The numbers Google states

None of Google's pages listed below says which rules most often stop a first ad. Google's 2025 Ads Safety Report counts every advertiser together: over 8.3 billion ads blocked or removed and over 24.9 million accounts suspended in 2025. The policies behind the most removals were abusing the ad network (over 1.29 billion ads), personalisation violations (over 755 million), legal requirements (over 646.7 million), misrepresentation (over 421.5 million) and trademark (over 372.7 million). One ad can count under several policies, and the chart has no line for the editorial or destination rules.

How Sami uses it

Sami ranks Google Ads against the other channels for your product and says why it is in or out. Free methods come before paid ones in the plan.

A paid step gets one week if your product is bought on the page, with the spend and the stopping line set before it starts. Should I run ads before anyone has paid? covers whether to test at all and how big the test should be.

Sami never runs the campaign or spends the money. You do. The spend, clicks, signups and payments you bring back as an export or a screenshot each become a dated record. Two figures then decide whether the test worked: what a customer cost you, your customer acquisition cost, and the share of people who clicked and went on to sign up or pay, your conversion rate.