An Ad Grant account that nobody logs into gets deactivated. Not for breaking a rule — for going quiet. It is the one deactivation that happens to accounts doing everything else correctly, and it is entirely preventable.
What "inactive" means
Google treats a grant account as dormant when nobody has signed in and made a meaningful change for an extended period. The grant is a donated resource; an account sitting untouched is one that has stopped being used, and Google reclaims it.
"Meaningful" is the word that catches people. Logging in, glancing at the dashboard and logging out is not activity. Google is looking for evidence that somebody is managing the account — keyword changes, new ads, negatives added, bids or budgets adjusted.
Set-and-forget is the whole problem. The accounts that get caught are usually the well-built ones. Somebody structured it properly two years ago, it worked, and nobody has needed to touch it since. Working is not the same as active.
The warning signs before it happens
Deactivation is not the first thing that goes wrong. Watch for these, roughly in the order they appear:
- Spend drifting down month over month with no change on your side. Auctions move, competitors arrive, and a static keyword list slowly stops winning.
- Click-through rate sliding toward 5%. Ad copy ages. Terms that converted in 2024 read as dated now.
- The search terms report filling with irrelevant queries, because nobody has added a negative in months.
- Emails from Google going unopened, which is the same root cause as the missed annual survey.
Any two of those together mean the account is coasting, and coasting ends the same way.
The monthly minimum
You do not need to manage a grant account daily. You do need a real monthly pass. Thirty to sixty minutes, the same week each month:
- Read the search terms report for the last 30 days and add negatives for everything irrelevant. This is the highest-value thirty minutes in the account and it protects CTR at the same time.
- Check account CTR against the last two months. If it is under 6%, act now rather than at 5% — the rule is explained in the 5% CTR rule.
- Pause zero-click keywords. Sort by impressions descending, filter clicks = 0, pause anything with volume and nothing to show.
- Rotate one ad. Rewrite a headline in your weakest ad group. One change is enough; the point is that copy keeps moving.
- Add something. Five new long-tail keywords from the search terms report, or one new ad group. An account that only ever shrinks is dying slowly.
That routine is what "active" looks like to Google, and it happens to be the same routine that keeps the account performing. There is no compliance-only busywork here.
What not to do
Do not make token changes. Nudging a budget by a dollar each month to register activity is the kind of thing that technically logs a change and does nothing for the account. If you are going to spend the time logging in, do the search terms report.
Do not pause everything during a quiet season. Charities with seasonal programmes sometimes pause all campaigns over summer. An account with no active campaigns for months is indistinguishable from an abandoned one. Reduce scope instead — keep one evergreen campaign running on your mission and brand terms.
Do not rely on an agency you have stopped hearing from. If nobody has sent you a report in three months, assume nobody is logging in. Check the change history yourself: Tools → Change history, set the range to 90 days, and see whether anything is there.
Getting reactivated
This is the gentlest of the deactivations. There is no policy breach to remediate and no argument to make.
- Log in and bring the account genuinely up to date — negatives, ad copy, dead keywords paused. Do the work before you file, not after.
- Request reactivation through Ad Grants support.
- Put the monthly routine in a calendar before you close the tab.
If the review surfaces other issues while it is open, the wider process is the same as reinstatement after a policy suspension.
The honest version
Most organisations that lose a grant to inactivity did not decide to neglect it. The person who ran it changed roles, the handover covered the newsletter and the CRM and not the ads account, and eighteen months passed. The fix is not discipline — it is making sure the account belongs to a role rather than a person, with a recurring calendar entry attached to it.