The first thing to know is that Google almost never suspends an Ad Grant account without a specific, findable cause. The second is that the cause is rarely the thing the notification email seems to be pointing at. Here is how to identify what actually happened, in the order that finds it fastest.
First: is it suspended, paused, or just not serving?
Three different states get called "suspended" and they need different fixes.
- Account suspended. A banner across the top of Google Ads, campaigns showing as ineligible, and usually an email. This is a policy action.
- Account deactivated for programme non-compliance. The grant itself is withdrawn — often for the click-through rate rule or a missed survey. The Google Ads account still exists but the grant funding is gone.
- Serving but getting nothing. Not a suspension at all. This is almost always the $2.00 bid cap or missing conversion tracking, covered in why grants underspend.
Check which one you have before doing anything else. Fixing a bid strategy will not lift a policy suspension, and appealing a policy decision will not fix a bid strategy.
The five causes, in order of how often we see them
1. Click-through rate below 5% for two consecutive months
This is the single most common cause of an Ad Grant being deactivated. Google requires the account to hold at least a 5% click-through rate; miss it two months running and the grant goes. Check Campaigns → segment by month and look at account-level CTR, not campaign-level. One badly performing campaign with high impression volume can drag the whole account under while every individual campaign looks acceptable.
2. Keyword policy breaches
Single-word keywords, overly generic keywords, and keywords with a Quality Score below 3 are all against Ad Grant policy. Sort your keyword list by Quality Score ascending and by word count — the offenders usually surface within seconds. There are narrow exceptions for brand names and recognised medical conditions, but the exception list is shorter than most people assume.
3. Missing or broken conversion tracking
Valid conversion tracking is a programme requirement, not a nice-to-have. Accounts that were migrated from Universal Analytics and never reconnected to GA4 fail this quietly — the tracking looks configured in the interface while recording nothing. Tools → Conversions, and check the "Recent conversions" column, not just that a conversion action exists.
4. The annual programme survey
Google for Nonprofits asks every grantee to complete an annual survey. Miss it and the grant can be withdrawn for a purely administrative reason. The reminder goes to the email address on the Google for Nonprofits account, which is frequently a former employee's address.
5. Website policy
The site you advertise has to be on a domain you own, served over HTTPS, with no commercial advertising and no affiliate links on the pages you send traffic to. A site that added AdSense to cover hosting costs will fail this even though nothing changed in the Ads account.
Check the Google for Nonprofits account too, not just Google Ads. If charity status lapsed, or the organisation was re-verified under a different entity, the grant can be withdrawn from that side entirely. Nothing in the Ads interface will explain it.
What to do in the first hour
- Screenshot everything. The banner, the email, the account-level CTR for the last three months, the keyword list. You will need it for the appeal and it changes once you start editing.
- Do not mass-delete. Deleting the evidence makes it harder to show what was fixed, and deleting campaigns loses the history that Smart Bidding depends on. Pause rather than remove.
- Find the actual trigger using the five checks above, in that order.
- Fix the underlying pattern, not the flagged item. If three keywords breached policy, the process that added them will add more. That is what the reviewer is assessing.
What not to do
Do not open a second Google Ads account. Running a new account to get around a suspension is itself a policy violation, and it puts the original at risk of permanent loss rather than a recoverable pause.
Do not appeal within the hour. An appeal filed before anything is fixed gets rejected, and repeated rejected appeals do not help your case. Fix first, then appeal once, with specifics.
Do not assume it was the last thing you changed. CTR suspensions reflect two months of history. The cause is usually something that has been quietly wrong for a while.
After it is fixed
A reinstated account starts under closer scrutiny, and a second deactivation for the same reason is much harder to recover from. Watch account-level click-through rate weekly for at least two months, and treat 6% as the floor rather than 5% so there is room to absorb a bad week.
The full list of rules that can pause an account is in the Ad Grant policy checklist. Once you know the cause, the reinstatement guide covers filing the appeal.
The honest summary
Most suspensions are not bad luck. They are an account that was built to launch rather than built to keep running, catching up with its owner. The reinstatement is usually straightforward; keeping it reinstated means changing how the account is maintained, not just what is in it today.