Creative Disapproval Reasons in Google Ad Manager

The three states a flagged creative can be in

Ad Manager reports a policy-violated creative in one of three states, and the difference between them decides whether there is anything worth doing.

Disabled for policy violation

Google has permanently disabled the creative. There is no path back for that creative — fix the violation and traffic a new one.

Paused for policy violation; re-scanning

The creative is not serving while Google re-scans it. If the violation is gone it clears automatically. Google states that re-scan frequency depends on several factors and cannot be expedited.

Cleared; eligible for serving

Google has determined the violation no longer exists. The creative still has to be reactivated by hand — clearing does not resume delivery on its own.

The first state is the one that changes how a team should work. Disabled is permanent for that creative — there is no edit that revives it, so the fix always ends in trafficking a new one. That makes the order of operations matter: correct the underlying problem first, then build the replacement, because a replacement trafficked before the cause is understood is simply the next creative to be disabled.

Why the same reason has three different names

One rejection can reach you worded three ways, and the wording depends on which door it came through rather than on what happened. The Ad Manager interface shows a human-readable reason. The Ad Manager SOAP API returns a CreativePolicyViolation enum value — v202602 publishes eighteen of them, and 13 of the reasons below map onto one. Programmatic demand reports it in the Authorized Buyers vocabulary, which is different again.

This is worth knowing because the three vocabularies do not line up one to one. Malware is a single idea in the interface but two distinct enum values, one for the creative and one for the landing page — a distinction that tells you which team owns the fix and is lost the moment someone retypes it as “malware” in a ticket. In the other direction, several reasons that get thrown around daily have no enum value at all, so an integration polling the API will never see them. Each page below records the enum value where one exists and says nothing where one does not.

What this covers

This covers the technical and trafficking reasons — the ones you fix by changing a tag, a URL or an asset. Google's full policy catalogue also includes content categories (weapons, tobacco, gambling, adult, healthcare, elections and more), which are decided on what the ad says rather than how it is built, and some of that documentation sits behind an Authorized Buyers partner login. Those are deliberately out of scope here rather than paraphrased from memory.

Every reason name, threshold and enum value on these pages carries the Google source it was verified from, with the date. The causes and fixes are practitioner guidance and are marked as such.