What you need to know.
If you’re an Australian business that offers new or recently approved medical treatments or services you may have found your Google ads have started getting disapproved over the past few days or weeks. This is a result of a new Google Ads Policy update.
If you are receiving this error message, ‘Disapproved: Speculative and Experimental Medical Treatment’, it means Google’s policy team thinks you are promoting unproven medical treatments or services. The actual policy update outlines the following:
“Promotion of speculative and/or experimental medical treatments is prohibited. Examples of products and services that will be prohibited (non-exhaustive).
Stem cell therapy, cellular (non-stem) therapy, gene therapy and similar forms of regenerative medicine, platelet rich plasma, biohacking, do-it-yourself (DIY) genetic engineering products and gene therapy kits.”
The focus of the new updates is around current, new, experimental or stem-cell/ gene-based therapies.
“Promotion of speculative and/or experimental medical treatments is prohibited.”
Don’t worry, you might not be affected.
Here’s the good news, if you know your services are approved by an Australian medical regulatory body and should be approved, there are a few things you can do to get your ads back up and running.
- Resubmit disapproved ads as they may have been picked up in the initial disapproval list but on manual review or secondary review they can simply be approved.
- If you are still disapproved after resubmitting, look at the final URLs for the disapproved ads and if there is a common URL that is being disapproved. Try changing your final URL and resubmit.
- Look at ad copy and try different headlines and descriptions that don’t focus on the disapproved services and resubmit.
If you have tried all of the above and are still having no success in getting approved or you are just looking to get your ads running asap, please reach out on our contact page as we can help get your ads approved directly and quickly with Google’s Policy Team.