Reinstatement is not an argument, it is a demonstration. The reviewer is not deciding whether the suspension was fair — they are checking whether the account now complies. Appeals fail far more often for being vague than for being wrong.
Fix before you file. An appeal submitted on a still-broken account is a rejection, and a string of rejections makes the eventual successful one slower. Work out the cause first — the five common causes covers that.
Step 1: make the account genuinely compliant
Not "compliant enough to pass". Every item below should be true before you touch the appeal form, because a reviewer who finds a second problem will reject on that instead.
- Every keyword is two words or more, unless it is your brand name or a recognised medical condition.
- No keyword sits below Quality Score 3. Remove or rewrite them.
- Every campaign has at least two ad groups; every ad group has at least two active ads.
- At least two sitelink extensions exist at account level.
- Geotargeting is set to somewhere real, not "all countries".
- Conversion tracking exists and has recorded conversions in the last 30 days.
- The landing pages work, load over HTTPS, and carry no third-party advertising.
Step 2: fix the pattern, not just the instances
This is what separates a one-time reinstatement from a second suspension. If forty single-word keywords were added by someone using Google's keyword suggestions without reviewing them, then deleting those forty changes nothing about next month. Write down what will be different: who reviews new keywords, how often the search terms report is checked, who watches click-through rate.
For a CTR deactivation specifically, deleting the worst keywords is rarely enough. The structure that produced a low click-through rate — broad ad groups with ad copy that cannot match every query in them — produces it again. Rebuild into tighter themes.
Step 3: write the appeal
Short, specific, factual. The three things a reviewer needs:
- What the cause was. Name it plainly. "The account fell below the 5% click-through rate requirement in June and July."
- What you changed. Concrete and countable. "Removed 63 keywords below Quality Score 3, rebuilt four campaigns into eleven tightly themed ad groups, added negative keyword lists, replaced all ad copy."
- What prevents a repeat. "Search terms are now reviewed weekly and negatives added; account CTR is monitored against a 6% internal floor."
Leave out the mission, the funding situation and how much the grant matters. It is true and it is not what is being assessed, and it makes a short factual appeal read as a plea.
Where to file
Route depends on what was suspended. A Google Ads policy suspension appeals through the banner in the Ads interface or Google Ads support. A grant deactivation — the CTR rule, the annual survey, eligibility — goes through Google for Nonprofits support, not Google Ads. Filing in the wrong place is a common reason people wait weeks for nothing.
How long it takes
We will not give you a number, because it is Google's queue and it varies. What we can say from experience: a clean, specific appeal on a genuinely fixed account resolves faster than a vague one, and a second appeal after a rejection is slower than the first. That asymmetry is the whole argument for fixing properly before filing once.
If the appeal is rejected
Read the rejection for the specific policy cited — it is usually different from what you assumed. Do not immediately refile. Go back through the checklist above line by line, because a rejection after a fix almost always means there was a second breach nobody found.
If the rejection cites eligibility rather than account policy, the problem is on the Google for Nonprofits side: lapsed charity registration, a changed legal entity, or an organisation type that is excluded. No amount of account work fixes that.
The first sixty days after
A reinstated account is watched. Treat the two months following reinstatement as the risky period, because they are:
- Check account-level click-through rate weekly, not monthly.
- Review the search terms report every week and add negatives.
- Do not add broad keywords to chase volume. Volume is what got the account paused.
- Confirm conversions are still recording — a site redeploy can silently break tracking.
The uncomfortable part
An account that has been suspended once was almost never a well-built account having bad luck. Reinstatement gets the funding back. It does not, by itself, produce a grant that spends its budget on the right people — that takes the same rebuild you would have needed anyway. The suspension just made it urgent.