Click & destination
Automated ad clicking
- Ad Manager API value
- SELF_CLICKING_CREATIVE
What Google's rule says
Authorized Buyers states that the ad automatically redirects the user to a landing page without a click, or reports a click when one was not made. The Ad Manager API exposes the same condition as SELF_CLICKING_CREATIVE.
What actually causes it
- A creative that navigates on load, or after a timer, instead of on a user gesture.
- A click tracker fired on render rather than on interaction, which inflates clicks without any redirect.
- An oversized invisible click layer that captures scrolls and taps meant for the page.
- A test or demo build with an auto-advance still enabled.
How to fix it
Confirm that the only path to the destination runs through a real user gesture, and that the click tracker fires on that same gesture rather than on load. A creative that reports clicks it did not receive is caught by this reason just as a redirecting one is.
The part that is not obvious
The reason covers two behaviours that feel unrelated: redirecting without a click, and reporting a click that never happened. Grouping them tells you what Google is actually measuring — not navigation, but the honesty of the click signal — and it means a creative can trigger this while never moving the user anywhere. A pixel fired at render time is enough. That is a quiet failure mode in creatives where the tracker was wired to impression events for convenience, and it will look in reporting like an unusually strong CTR rather than like a fault.
Related reasons
Reason name and API value verified against Common ad disapproval reasons — Authorized Buyers Help on 30 July 2026 (Ad Manager SOAP API v202602). The causes and fix above are practitioner guidance, not Google policy text.