Google Ads rejections or disapprovals

Troubleshooting tips for cases where your Google Ad campaigns using reverse proxies are coming back as rejected.

404/403 errors

403/404 errors on proxies usually are returned from the source domain as our proxy technology does not return 404s by itself.

Previous cases we have seen have been related to the source domain blocking requests for Google bot user agents, or blocking requests with certain tracking parameters in the URL.

Cloudflare

Sites that use the Cloudflare service for hosting of their domain or DNS is a common source of this issue where we see 403 errors for requests to proxies from Google Advertising bots. They options in place in place to block this proxy traffic since they know which IPs are owned by Google, and will explicitly block Googlebot user agents from other IPs.

How we can assist you

We can provide some assistance to debug this via our logs, we would need examples of each of your Proxy destination URLs with any tracking parameters that are added from your Google campaigns (UTM, tracking params, etc).

Then:

1. Let us know you are resubmitting so we can enable storage of your logs temporarily

2. Resubmit the campaign(s) to Google for approval

3. Let us know the timeframe (date and time) that the campaign came back as rejected again and any message from the rejection that mentions the error (404 vs 403) so we can inspect the logs to observe the same error on our side

Remedies

For this 403 issue, you can check first with the source domain to confirm if its hosted through Cloudflare. If it is, mostly likely this is the case of the 403 errors. In this case, the customer would need to whitelist the IP addresses of our proxy servers to allow this traffic through or disable the security setting in Cloudflare that is blocking the requests.

If not hosted through Cloudflare, and we have confirmed they are blocking specific User agents from our logs, the customer would need to work with their IT team or hosting provider to whitelist our IPs.

Malicious or Unwanted Software

We have seen cases where reverse proxies (and landing pages) get flagged by Google for Malicious or Unwanted Software. Normally this error is related to hosting phishing, malware, or other types of code within a website.

We have protections platform-wide to prevent malware from entering our actual platform code or instances. To date, we have never had a case of malware on our platform. We stand behind our product, so if there ever was a case of malware on our platform, we would resolve it at high priority.

If a Malicious or Unwanted Software rejection is received for a reverse proxy, it can be one of two causes:

Valid errors

Since we do not control the content on the proxied page, and since it is a reflection of the source domain, we cannot control or fix a malware issue if it is actually present on the source website. We don't recommend creating a proxy for a site that is showing a malware issue, since the issue will be reflected on the proxy.

False positives

We have also seen cases where proxies are repeatedly flagged for Malicious or Unwanted Software when they are submitted to Google for ad approvals. But upon inspection of the proxy and source domain, no actual malicious code is present on either.

In these multiple customers' cases, these errors required contacting Google directly. Once this support issue was raised with their team and escalated, the Google team was able to remedy the error. In these cases no actual updates were required on the reverse proxy to remedy the issue.