To keep ads safe and appropriate for everyone, creatives are reviewed to make sure that they comply with Google Ads policies, Google Ad Manager policies and other exchange policies. Most creatives are reviewed within one working day. Your creative won’t serve if it’s rejected during creative review.
How creative review works
After you create or edit a creative, the review process begins automatically. All content in your creative is reviewed, including your assets and landing pages. During this process the creative's status will be 'Pending'. This usually takes less than eight hours. At a minimum, this review has to be complete before your creative can start serving. When the creative's status is 'Pending', you can check the review start time to estimate how long the review will take. Learn more about how automation is used in content moderation.
If your creative passes the review, its status will change to 'Servable' or 'Approved' and it can start serving. If any issues are found during review, its status will change to 'Rejected', which means it can't serve. If a creative is rejected, feedback will be provided with information on what you can do to get your creative approved.
After a creative is assigned to an active line item, it may be subject to additional review by Google and other exchanges with a review process. Creatives that include restricted products or services may be manually reviewed before they can serve. Manual review typically takes one working day.
When you make changes to an existing creative, your creative is automatically submitted for review, and the process begins again.
When can a creative serve?
- Serving can start when the creative status is 'Servable' or 'Approved'.
- Serving continues during the rest of the review process, and only stops if the creative is rejected.
What Display & Video 360 and other exchanges review
Creatives are reviewed by Display & Video 360's creative review team and by other ad exchanges that have their own review process. At a minimum, each creative is checked for:
- Malware
- Fourth-party calls
- HTTP cookies
- Technology declarations
- Landing page quality, language and content
- SSL compliance
- Restricted products and services
- Other policy compliance concerns
For more information, see Google Ads policies and Creative approval process by exchange.
Reasons why the creative review process restarts
Changes that don't restart creative review
- Creating or saving a draft
- Editing the creative's name
- Adding or editing notes
- Arabic (Modern Standard)
- Bulgarian
- Chinese (Simplified)
- Chinese (Traditional)
- Croatian
- Czech
- Danish
- Dutch
- English
- Filipino
- Finnish
- French
- German
- Greek
- Hebrew
- Hindi
- Hungarian
- Indonesian
- Italian
- Japanese
- Korean
- Malay
- Norwegian
- Polish
- Portuguese
- Romanian
- Russian
- Slovak
- Spanish
- Swedish
- Thai
- Turkish
- Ukrainian
- Urdu
- Vietnamese
Review statuses
There are two types of reviews that a creative can go through. Display & Video 360 review is automatic and required for all creatives. Exchange reviews only start when you assign a creative to a line item that targets an exchange with its own review process. Learn more about the statuses for each review below.
Display & Video 360 review starts automatically when you create or edit a creative.
Learn how to check the status of creatives.
Exchange status
Exchange status only applies to exchanges that have their own review process. If an exchange doesn't require additional review, the creative is sent to those exchanges as soon as it's approved by Display & Video 360.
About reviews and rejection reasons for special creative types
Video creativesVideo creatives (VAST/VPAID) have an additional set of validations. Common causes for rejection for video validation include:
- The creative isn't working properly and can’t be previewed in Display & Video 360.
- The video duration could not be found.
- Multiple video lengths are assigned to a rotation. Exchanges require that each line item has video assets that are approximately the same length (within 10%) in rotation. For Campaign Manager 360-hosted and third-party hosted videos this can happen if there are videos with different durations (15s and 30s) included in rotation, or if the primary and default assets are different lengths.
- There's a blank video tag. For Campaign Manager 360-hosted videos, this can happen if there's no active ad associated with the video creative. For third-party hosted videos, this can happen if the VAST tag is blank or doesn't declare a duration.
If your creatives are managed in Campaign Manager 360, you can find out what time the creative was last synced.
- Open the creative.
- Click Creative status.
- In the Creative summary section, check the Campaign Manager 360 sync time.
A creative may be rejected if it's associated with a Campaign Manager 360 placement that:
- Isn't active
- Has no assigned creatives
- Has no assigned ads
- Is out of the date range set for the campaign
- Has no valid clickthrough URLs
- Uses targeting but doesn't have a default ad
- Includes tag key-values with macros that aren't supported in Display & Video 360
If you're not sure why your creative is rejected, contact Google Marketing Platform support and please make sure that you note your creative's Campaign Manager 360 placement ID.
Creatives assigned to line items for Programmatic Guaranteed deals must meet Ad Manager policies. In addition, the publisher also reviews the creative to make sure that it meets their own policies and specifications. If a creative assigned to a Programmatic Guaranteed deal doesn't meet a publisher's requirements, an additional stage, Deals creative rejections, appears in the creative's Creative status tab, along with the name of the publisher that rejected the creative. Contact the publisher for details about the required changes.