A disapproval is not an administrative inconvenience. It is a pause on your revenue channel, and in regulated categories that pause is measured in weeks rather than hours. The sectors most exposed are heavily represented across the National Capital Region: dental and healthcare practices, legal services, insurance, and businesses selling into or alongside the public sector. An Ottawa marketing agency working in those categories spends real time on policy, and the accounts that avoid downtime are the ones where that work happened before launch rather than after a rejection.
Verification Comes Before Everything Else
Google requires advertiser identity verification, meaning documentation of the legal entity and of the party paying for the ads. Several categories require further checks on business operations as well.
Difficulty is not the issue. Timing is. Verification takes days, and beginning it after your campaigns are built means the launch date was never real. Ask when verification was completed, not whether it will be.
The Categories That Need Approval Before Ads Serve
Four groups account for most of the delays local advertisers run into.
- Healthcare and medicines. Google restricts promotion of prescription drug services, including online prescribing and telemedicine, and you have to apply before ads are eligible to serve. Rules covering addiction services, clinical trial recruitment, and pharmaceutical manufacturers differ by country, so a campaign cleared in one market may not run in another.
- Financial services. Additional advertiser verification applies in some countries, and the list is revised periodically, which makes this a per-market check rather than a settled answer.
- Legal services. Restrictions vary by jurisdiction and by the type of service advertised, which matters for firms advertising across the provincial border.
- Government-adjacent messaging. The misrepresentation policy treats implied official affiliation seriously, and copy suggesting you are an official channel for a public service is a recurring cause of rejection.
Targeting Restrictions Are a Separate Problem
Approval of an ad says nothing about whether you can target it the way you intended. Google’s personalized advertising policy limits audience building on sensitive categories including health conditions and financial status.
An approved ad can still be barred from using a remarketing list assembled the wrong way, and your account will show nothing more informative than weak delivery and a rising Cost Per Click (CPC). Design audience strategy around that limit from the start. Retrofitting it after a rejection usually means rebuilding your measurement setup as well.
Structure So One Disapproval Cannot Stop Delivery
This is the part any PPC advertising agency Ottawa businesses are evaluating should describe without preparation.
- Never leave a single ad in an ad group. A disapproval on the only ad stops delivery for that ad group entirely.
- Keep a conservatively worded fallback in every ad group so something continues serving during review.
- Stage new creative rather than replacing everything at once, so a policy change surfaces on a fraction of your account.
- Separate campaigns by regulatory exposure, so the restricted part of your business cannot take the unrestricted part offline with it.
French Creative Doubles the Review Surface
Bilingual delivery is standard practice for an Ottawa marketing agency, and it adds a second review surface rather than duplicating the first. French ads go through policy review independently and can be disapproved on their own.
Claims that survive review in one language occasionally do not survive translation, particularly superlatives, guarantees, and anything reading as a medical outcome. If you serve the Quebec side, provincial language obligations apply as well. Those sit outside Google policy and are worth reviewing with counsel.
The Payoff of Reviewing Before Launch
Policy review belongs in the build, not in your incident response process. The difference between those two positions is measured in weeks of lost delivery and in a Cost Per Lead (CPL) that spikes every time a campaign restarts and re-enters the learning period.
The diagnostic takes ten minutes. Open your account, filter every ad and asset by disapproved and limited status, and count what is not currently serving. Most accounts in these categories find something. The question worth putting to any PPC advertising agency Ottawa firms already retain is how long it has been sitting there, and why the account team was not the one to raise it.
