Follow these guidelines to help ensure your creatives are approved.
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Upload creatives and make sure they're marked "active."
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Assign creatives to active (or pre-flight) line items as early as possible, and make sure to target each exchange you intend to buy inventory from.
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When using Campaign Manager 360 or another third-party ad server, include backup ads for each placement. Make sure the backup ads are always active for the full duration of your line items' flights.
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Turn on the rejected creative alert to be notified if your creatives are rejected.
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Make sure the dimensions of the creative asset you upload are the same as the dimensions of the actual creative (excluding "high-impact formats", such as skinned pages).
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Make sure the creative can be viewed in all geographic locations and on google.com sites, so that it can be reviewed by the Display & Video 360 creative review team and by the exchange review teams. Unviewable creatives will be banned.
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Make sure each creative only advertises a single advertiser or brand. Creatives for e-commerce sites can rotate various products, but the e-commerce site's own brand must be visible in the creative.
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Make sure your creatives abide by Google Ads' policies . Failure to do so will lead to creative rejections.
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Be sure that your creative (and any third-party assets) will function properly on all operating systems (for example: macOS, Windows, ChromeOS) and browsers (for example: Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox).
Review your landing page
Many creatives are rejected due to issues with the landing page the creative opens, rather than the creative itself. Follow these guidelines to avoid landing page rejections.
- Set an appropriate default URL (that corresponds to a real page) in your advertiser's basic details. This URL is used as a fallback if Display & Video 360 can't detect a landing page in your creative.
- Make sure your creative clicks through to the page that matches the product or service you're advertising.
- For HTML5 creatives, make sure the creative's click tag is set to the actual landing page, not google.com or some placeholder URL.
- Landing pages must:
- Allow crawling by both Googlebot and Google Adsbot :Confirm your robots.txt file doesn’t disallow the “AdsBot-Google” user-agent from accessing your landing pages. This allows Google to monitor the quality of the page.
- Send a confirmation to the user agent: The landing page should return an “HTTP 200 (Success)” code to the "AdsBot-Google" user-agent.
- Include text on the page: Pages without any text may not be crawlable.
- Be free of errors: Landing pages shouldn’t return HTTP error codes like 403, 404, or 500, even if the page appears functional to you. Ensure the page doesn’t show “session expired” or include a search engine that returns no results.
- Be viewable in any country: This should be the case despite any location targeting used in the creative, especially the United States, as Google's crawlers operate globally.
- Comply with Google advertising policies
, based on Google Ads' policies:
- If your landing page advertises pharmaceuticals or gambling, make sure your advertiser is certified and the ad complies with our guidelines.
- If your landing page advertises alcohol, make sure the ad complies with our guidelines .
- Landing pages shouldn't:
- Require sign-in, or be behind a firewall or router: Allowlist Google's IP ranges, and make sure that your server's firewall, .htaccess, or security plugins aren't blocking crawlers.
- Trigger a re-crawl: After fixing server-side access issues, make a minor edit to your ad, or use the appeal option in the Policy Manager to trigger a new automated review.
