My Unresolved Fight with Google Ads now Solved: A Kinder, Gentler Google in 2025?

An acknowledgement that the last part of my essay title comes from a well-known President George H. W. Bush (Bush I) phrase circa 1988/89.

Last summer (August, 2024), I published an essay on this Substack entitled, “My Unresolved Fight with Google Ads” (https://sodakfred.substack.com/p/my-unresolved-fight-with-google-ads). It detailed my attempt to run a small ad campaign with Google Ads through a Google Merchant Center account during April 2024 and how that effort and my account got suspended and my nearly two month running battle with Google Ads to find out what exactly I had done wrong and how to fix it so I could finish my ad campaign while still in the general (although late) garden vegetable seed selling season (if you don’t know about my small gig seed selling business, you can access it here: https://dakprstreamseed.us/ ). My 2024 fight with Google Ads ended last June with my account still suspended, my two dozen products having “low visibility” in Google’s internet search engine, and no finishing of my spring ad campaign, with Google still holding over a hundred dollars of mine without an offer of refunding it to me. Towards the end of my back and forth with Google Ads bots and humans, I had threatened to contact my state’s Attorney General’s Consumer Fraud division and perhaps even my U.S. Congressional delegation about how Google Ads was treating me (never finding truly specific examples of why they had suspended my ad campaign and my Google Merchant Center account) but I didn’t follow through with my bluster.

The summer of 2024 saw the Blue Team still in control of two-thirds of the elected U.S. government in D.C. and I probably decided that contacting my Red Team Congressional people wouldn’t make any difference. Besides, I think when it comes to elected D.C. and the money power of Alphabet (Google’s parent company), the color in Washington is pretty much purple because Alphabet most likely contributes money to everyone’s campaign funds. And summer and fall of the year is the doldrums of garden seed selling so why put the effort into resolving the fight with Google Ads at that time? Some sales that came into my little Shopify store around Black Friday in November and early December by people who truly had to do some digging to find my website should have probably sparked my interest to try to fight with Google Ads again or by the very least in late winter but I still floundered in starting the battle anew. I don’t think I really understood how suppressed my Shopify website was during that time and only with more standardized searching of my individual seed products did I realize that my little Shopify on-line store was doomed until I got Google’s 800 pounds off of me. Thus, by around the end of April, 2025, I was pumped up enough to bang on Google Ads door and ask why they were still punishing me.

I must have asked for another review of my Google Merchant Account suspension and then contacted Google Ads in a more personal way (as personal as it generally gets with Google as a company) highlighting my problems from 2024 and even sending them (or in another soon to be e-mail conversation) my Substack essay from the previous August because on May 2, 2025, Google Ads (either a bot or an actual human) opened a “case” for me (and thus a case number which became important to include in the various e-mail threads) to see if they can fix the problem.

May 2, 2025 e-mail (partial screen capture) from Google Ads.

The seemingly “happy note” from Google Ads on May 2 was followed up three days later by another e-mail that there were still “problems” with my website that needed to be resolved before things could advance. This is probably when I told them in more detail about the constant merry-go-around that I had experienced with them during the spring of 2024 and probably when I sent them the link to my Substack essay. The communication with Google Ads appeared to be settling in again to an attrition fight over details over an extended time period.

May 5, 2025 e-mail (partial screen capture) from Google Ads about my website still having “problems” in their eyes.

Some of my replies back to the various Google Ads e-mails have been lost or perhaps scrubbed so I’m not sure why an e-mail came from them the next day reaffirming they reason they were so hesitate about reactivating suspended accounts but they stressed that they were truly serious about having a “healthy ecosystem” for digital advertising. Yeah, Google, cry me a river about how virtual righteousness you all are!

May 6, 2025 e-mail (partial screen capture) from Google Ads about my website still violating their policies.

I’m not sure when “Sujata”, the Google Ads g Tech for “Customer Experience” got involved but he (they) was/were there by May 14. That was the day when I was told that the issue about why my account was suspended and what was wrong with my Shopify website got elevated to a “concerned team for further investigation”. I responded that afternoon that I was looking forward to hearing from them but not anymore of their “circle vagueness” the next time they contacted me.

May 14, 2025 e-mail (partial screen capture) from Google Ads; My response to them on May 14.

The next day, May 15, Sujata got back to me and told me that I was approved for running ads with Google. I thanked them and told them that I planned to re-start my stopped 2024 ad campaign within several days.

May 15, 2025 e-mail (partial screen capture) from Google Ads; My first response to them on May 15.

I waited several days, as suggested, to let my products be “re-approved” by Google and they were cleared and no longer had “limited visibility” but incredibility my account was still suspended and I couldn’t start an ad campaign. I expressed my belief that the situation was backwards, that my account should have been reinstated and then my products re-approved.

My response to Google, (probably my first) on May 19, 2025.

Google responded to me the next day through Sujata and tried to play some sort of internal bureaucratic division game that they were from Google Merchant Center and had cleared me but that people from Google Ads were the ones that still had my account (which was with Google Merchant Center from what I understood) suspended and Sujata and crew/bots couldn’t really make that decision. My response back to them on May 20 was showing my serious frustration, as the situation had now been strung along for almost three weeks. I thanked Sujata for the partial victory we had achieved so far but reminded him/them that “partial victories don’t win wars.” I got pretty “salty” with my language in this reply so be forewarned.

May 20, 2025 e-mail (partial screen capture) from Google; My response to them on May 20.

There was another e-mail exchange between May 20 and May 27 but I no longer have that exchange in my Gmail account (by the way, I only have a Gmail account to advertise on Google), I believe Google scrubbed it later and I didn’t forward it to my home e-mail right after I sent it. I think Google Ads came back with their standard bot speak about something still needing to be fixed but without any real specifics and I unloaded on them. I repeated my threat from the year before about contacting my state’s Attorney General’s Consumer Fraud office AND my Congressional members about how Google’s suspension of my Google Ads account greatly hindered my Shopify store’s visibility because Google still controlled about 90% of the U.S. internet browsing market and I ended my little rant with that Google’s MONOPOLY MUST CEASE (all in caps). A few days past while my “appeal” was under review and then on the clear sky morning of May 27, the internet clouds parted and I was forgiven. I could resume an ad campaign with Google Ads.

May 27, 2025 e-mail (partial screen capture) from Google stating that I could start running ads with them; A more generic e-mail (partial screen capture) stating the same thing a bit later in the day.

I have no real idea why Google changed its mind on me advertising with them. My hopeful nature is that actual humans, such as “Sujata” and perhaps a couple of others, looked at things, scratched their heads on why my account was suspended in the first place, and corrected a year old wrong. My more cynical side thinks it was because the political winds had changed. May 2025 had a new POTUS in D.C. and the Red Team in control of both houses of Congress and a story like mine of Google’s suspension of a small (very, very small) business from a red state whose former governor was now the Secretary of Homeland Security might draw a tiny bit of attention in both my state capitol but also in the U.S. one. I may be having some serious self-delusions but I do find it interesting that Google appeared to clear the decks of my whole situation after I played my best “bad cop” with them. Or maybe the Google AI brain reminded a couple of humans at the company that I had some money left to spend with them and perhaps they could even get some more out of me if they allowed me to run ads. I will never know what actually happened but I started a new ad campaign on May 27.

And Google Ads does work, even if its late in my particular seasonal selling adventure! The basic fact is if Google throws enough…stuff against the wall for a business, some of it is going to stick. The metrics that I’ll show don’t really look very effective in the number of times ads were shown versus the number of actual “clicks” by people but it far exceeded anything I had experienced with my little gig store to that time. It also provided more learning experiences for me that hopefully are fruitful later this year and early next year.

The first sign of increased activity was an “abandoned checkout” on the evening of May 28 for some chemically-free grown yellow corn for home grinding. I think the potential buyer balked at the shipping cost of getting three pounds of “merchandise’ to the East Coast from South Dakota, given that we live in an Amazon-driven, subsidized “free shipping” consumer world, but I tried to sweeten the pot by telling the story of this particular corn, such as it having been grown on an active farm that had been in operation by the same family for 150 years but that obviously didn’t change the situation. I also offered to throw a few bucks cash discount into the box to him but that didn’t work either. However, the next day, May 29, I got an order from right here in my home metro for a double order of wild common milkweed seeds and that started a fairly regular series of various orders over the next ten days or so. We will return to wild milkweed seeds later in the essay.

An e-mail from Google Ads in nearly mid-June (partial screen capture) showing my May, 2025 stats. All of the ads (“impressions” here) would have run during the five days between May 27 and May 31 as well as the clicks from the ads, with the highest overall (you will see later) on May 28/29. The “CTR” (Click Through Ratio) we will talk about a bit later.

The orders started drying up after June 5, with only two coming in between that date and June 10 when I got my last current one. I had also cranked down the amount of money that I was spending per day (more on that in a bit) so this was not surprising with very few ads being shown. June is also generally the last month that garden seeds are sold until late in the fall when the cycle starts up again. Many large on-line garden seed companies are running discount ads by June and later in the summer, in home improvement and other types of physical stores, a person can pick up bunches of “generic” (brands that typically don’t have much of an on-line presence) seed packets for cheap as both seed producers and retailers try to clear unsold seed because within a few months, the producers will start packing this year’s output for next year’s seed selling season.

One of the things that surprised me during this active order time was that over half of mine were for one item only. This might not be too surprising because people may be cautious of a new on-line store and try it out by only spending a small amount of money in a test run. I quickly figured out that sending the one items that could get “skinny” enough to fit into a padded envelope and still fit through the USPS envelope “slot” was a way to get by cheaper on postage, although with the purchase of such an envelope, the profit margins were barely there. There were several bulkier one item orders where I actually lost money on the whole deal but will perhaps get a repeat customer next season that will order more than one thing. Small scale retailing is a gamble, either on-line or in a “brick and mortar” location, and there is a reason why a majority of actual retail revenue is concentrated in only a very small percentage of big retailers. The theory of economies of scale does play out. One note about Amazon and other “fulfillment” type of businesses. They are not actually true retailers but are “facilitators” of thousands of vendors who supply their warehouses with multitudes of various products. I suspect that many of the smaller vendors who sell through Amazon go out of business because they just can’t achieve a market share for their items or their items are too unique to really catch on much in the current consumer society. Amazon doesn’t really care about such vendors because the company knows there will always be more wanting and waiting to get into an Amazon “fulfillment” center. Amazon and other such companies take their cut from floundering on-line companies just as they do from successful ones. They weren’t the first to have a soulless business model, just ones that truly figured out how to do it in a big way on the internet.

I ended up spending more money than what I had left over in my account balance after they stopped my first ad campaign in April of 2024, although I haven’t seen an invoice for this additional amount yet. Perhaps it will just show up on my next credit card bill. How Google and other on-line advertisers score things for money is basically “New Speak” to most people on the planet. I suspect a person truly has to be immersed in it daily or grown up in it to fully understand it all, nowhere on the Google Ads site have I seen a detailed explanations of how all the metrics fit together for a billing. There are basically four main metrics that Google Ads tracks that go into some sort of recipe for the amount of money they will charge you in the end. You tell them some basic stuff, such as how much you want to spend a day and for how long to run an ad campaign but it doesn’t seem to turn out that way in the end.

The four metrics are “impressions”, which basically are the number of ads shown to people, “clicks”– how many times someone actually clicks and opens an ad, “Click Through Ratio” which I think is a percentage of seen ads that are actually acted upon, and “conversions”– the number of actual sales from people using the ads. I believe Google Ads would still get paid if only “impressions” happened and no one ever clicked on an ad but their math tells them at least some people will look at an ad and then Google will start getting feedback on which products get the most clicks so they start featuring those more to get additional clicks. I think the Click Though Ratio (CTR) and conversions are the most important metrics when it comes to charging a business for advertising, although as I said, I can’t find an actual breakdown on how these translate to how much Google charged me.

There appears to be two other metrics that develop from these major ones, although they may be just for analyzing the effectiveness of an ad campaign and not related to actual billing. One is “conversion value” which is the revenue value for a conversion and mine for the two ad campaigns (we’ll get to why two campaigns were going at once in a minute), as of today, is “21.38” but I don’t know what that actually means. I don’t believe it is an actual money value or a percentage. I suspect that this value is low. The other analysis secondary metric is “Actual ROAS” or return on ads spent. The example that they give is that anything above 100% would be more money made than money spent on ads. Mine, as of today, is only 9.17% so in a profit only mind set, my ad campaigns were losers. However, most of this happened at the end of the garden selling season so the same number of “impressions” done in January may have far different results. If nothing else, it’s a useful learning experience and knowledge/wisdom only comes with experiences so if such learning doesn’t bankrupt (not the legal usage here) a business, it probably produces knowledge to use again at a later date. We’ll see.

The reason I had two ad campaigns going at once between May 27 and June 12/14 is that unknown to me, Google Ads restarted my April 2024 effort (supposedly $6 a day for 30 days) at the same time I started a new campaign on May 27, 2025 at $10 a day for 10 days. Or at least I thought it was only going to be for ten days. I basically killed the new campaign on June 12 when I dropped the cost per day from $10 to $0.01, It was only then that I truly figured out that the old campaign was actually running as well, as my total cost continued to increase, and thus, I effectively killed the old campaign on June 14 by dropping its cost per day down to $0.01. Even with two campaigns going at once, and given the parameters that I had set up, my highest cost per day should have been $16 and when that was reached, in my mind, Google Ads should have stopped showing any more ads for the day but in actuality my highest cost per day was on May 29 at slightly above $32 so I need to go through some YouTube videos during the off season to learn more about all these things Google Ads does and how they get the final costs they are going to charge you because the company itself doesn’t seem to present such information in an old fogy way of accounting.

My last 28-day running “click” summary captured from my Google Merchant Center account on June 15, 2025. The “organic” category on the right are clicks that didn’t come from the Google ads.

Lastly, I said we would return to my “Wild Common Milkweed Seed” story. It ended up being that this gathering (instead of an actual planted effort) during the late summer of 2023 from my “wild” garden on Thor’s farm was the number one product viewed (by far) during my late May/early June 2025 ad campaigns with Google Ads. Perhaps it was the cheap price (I offered 3 grams of a mix of loose and floating seeds for $1.99) or the product description story from my catalog that I think they actually showed in the ad, or more likely that people like Monarch butterflies and know that this species likes to lay eggs on milkweed plants. I had to reload the “supply” twice to restock my listing which is a bit of a messy job with separated floating milkweed silk (I tried to do 2 grams of loose seeds and 1 gram of floating seed) as I created my bagged mix after taking seed from dried pods.

I found it rather ironic that my most hit upon product was something that I’ve never actually grown but perhaps I’ll start some milkweed in containers next spring. I’m not sure if the people who bought the milkweed seed a few weeks ago will get big enough plants by the time that this year’s Monarchs are laying eggs but hopefully the seed planted in 2025 will come up for the 2026 season. I have wild milkweed growing in my home garden that pops up in various locations every year without me doing anything except not pulling the plants out as weeds. I hope my milkweed seed customers have a little patience for next year, especially if they set some of their “floaters” free on a breeze, maybe with some kids or grand kids participating. If I generated some smiles in 2025 by offering milkweed seeds, it was worth spitting away a few stray milkweed silk that landed on my face in my garage while I prepared my packages 😊.

A double order of wild milkweed seed heading to a suburban Chicago address, early June, 2025.

If you like this series of essays on Substack, please spread the word. It’s always fun to get new subscribers.

The on-line vegetable seed and corn for home grinding store is open.

https://dakprstreamseed.us/

Next time: Playing in the Dirt, 2025: Part Two