Adwords campaign rejected. For Google Matomo javascript is a Malware

General questions
21

Thanks, I just write them the text. I hope they will open it.

22

Hi,

Google just write me That they Block the Site and i can use analytics. They don’t open it!

So what can we do here?

They press us to us Analytics and not Matomo! What is the next steps here.

23

Just to give everyone an update. Our 60 Google Ads accounts were re-instated today. However, they will not allow us to continue using Matomo/Piwik. We had to remove it from all websites, then wait for their support team to do a manual review because their scanners kept saying it was still on the websites. Our ads were shut down for 17 days. Lots of upset customers, but at least we are back up and running.

This is very unfortunate and I feel terrible for the team at Matomo. It appears that anyone using Google Ads will not be able to use Matomo and run Google Ads at the same time.

@matthieu & @Lukas I’d like to thank the entire Matomo team for the nearly 10 years we were able to use the software. Best of luck to you guys.

24

Hello Everyone, thank you for reporting the issue here. It’s very concerning to us that Google Ads is wrongly marking Matomo as malware.

We’ve contacted Google Ads team via their contact form,
and we’ve also filed a complaints via the complaint form: https://support.google.com/google-ads/contact/aw_complaint?authuser=1

Google Ads wrongly detects our analytics software as malware causing us to lose many customers.
There is not enough space in this field, please our statement here: https://matomo.org/faq/troubleshooting/antivirus-program-or-malware-checker-or-google-ads-claim-that-matomo-js-or-piwik-js-are-malware-what-can-i-do/#statement
Context: dozens of users/customers of our product have contacted us over the last 2 weeks and reported that Google Ads was forcing them to remove our product from their website, because Google Ads claims that the “piwik.js” (or “matomo.js” file) is malware. This is wrong and causes us to lose many customers. this js file is the official JavaScript tracking client for Matomo Analytics. This file has been deployed on the internet on 1 million websites without any problem, and it does not contain any malware!
See forum reports at Adwords campaign rejected. For Google Matomo javascript is a Malware - #22 by SH-WB
Thank you for your quick action.

We hope they will reply within a few days. If not, we’ll need to take further actions. Let us know if you are also able to contact your Google Ads support team and ask them to escalate this issue to the Google Ads product team.

25

Thanks Matthieu, same problem here with our local government customers (> 400 tracked websites) unfortunately. Never get a real answer on what’s wrong with the code. Only answers that they are so sorry for us and the only solution is to remove tracking code. Unbelievable and frustrating. Hope you can make more impact at support of Googl!

Twan

2 Likes
26

We have now taken the tracking code out of all website that we use! After many emails with google support they just claim that the Matomo code was Malware!

So take Action dear Matomo Team when it’s not too late. You can’t wait weeks for Google answer.

Take the case to law. Good luck.

1 Like
27

We are currently in contact with Google Ads by email, and hope they will keep replying and take action soon! I also encourage you all to contact your Google Ads support specialist, and let them know about the issue for example in these words:

Hello, I am reporting an issue affecting us, with our account: the Matomo product we use is 100% safe and not malware! We would really appreciate you to escalate to the Google Ads product team/engineers so that Matomo Analytics is again marked as safe product, as it has been for the last 10 years. We are losing our valuable web analytics data due to this issue.
Learn more about Matomo: https://matomo.org/about/. They are 100% legit and safe project with a lot of trust established. Please get back to us as soon as possible.

This is just a suggestion but it would help if you wrote this to your support, gives us more chances to be heard! Thanks all.

28

Again (4th time) a response without any answers from Google (in Dutch), this time from Jeanine instead of Bram. They say that they won’t dive into technical background of problem because that’s not their expertise! But they just keep claiming that they are right and that it’s for our security and usability, therefore they block Matomo. Can you believe it…any progress on your side?

29

Hi everyone,

To bring the case to Google I will need to send them screenshots and any evidence. Would you please be able to send me screenshots showing messages and screens for Google detecting as malware?
Any evidence you have will be very useful. Could you help and send this to me at hello@matomo.org and let me know here? Thank you for your help and stay well!

30

Hi, I sent you an email. But not sure if it’s helpfull since they only say the flag is raised on the words “Piwik” en “HeatmapSessionrecording”.

31

@Twan_Meijerink I’m in contact with someone at google (not in google ads team…) who is willing to help. But i need evidence and you can help me. Can you please send me

  1. a screenshot of your initial contact where google ads says Matomo is malware
  2. a screenshot of your conversation with google ads where you try to explain it’s not correct and they made a mistake
  3. your google ads account ID

With this info we can start moving things forward.
Looking forward to hearing from you at hello@matomo.org

Also to you @SH-WB and @TonyR and @remco and @cike76 and @MrTux could you please send the 3 infos above? Thanks for your help

32

Hallo,

okay. Send you now the info.
Thanks and good luck.

33

I’ll send all documentation I have.

I also claimed this fact to the official Dutch ACM ’ an authority of fair market-trading’, and they where highly interested, even the fact they didn’t hear this complaint before. I recommend everybody to file in an abuse complaint to their local official market watchdog, to add some international heavy weight into this fight.

34

Hi Everyone, To help with the investigation, could you please let us know:

  • What version of Matomo were you using at the time?
  • is the plugin Heatmaps & Session Recording activated?
  • do you still have a copy of the piwik.js or matomo.js file at the time where they contacted you? if so could you email us at hello@matomo.org

Looking forward to your answers, Thanks,

35

My adwords campaign rejected too. matono.js is original from matomo/piwik.js at 4.x-dev · matomo-org/matomo · GitHub (copy from here). Version MATONO 3.13.4, plugin heatmaps or Session Recording not activated.

Sent complaint to google, reply:
Dear —,
my name is Boris and I am responding to your email regarding disapproved ads due to malicious or unwanted software (Google Ads account —).
I did investigate your issue and passed it to the Technical Departament for manual review. Now it could take approximately 3 working days to recieve the outcome, which you will be informed about straight after. I believe we will solve this problem and your ads will be able to run again soon.
In case of any futher questions please do not hesitate to reply this email. We will be happy to help you.
Kind regards,
Boris

38

All my Adwords were also suddenly rejected this month. After several emails trying to establish with Google what the exact issue was they came back with an answer that the analytics must be “inline to the domain”. Now I have installed Matomo as a sub-domain to each domain I want to track, the Adwords adverts are now approved. Just edit slightly and it goes to the “under review” status.
Very inconvenient to not have all websites under one Matomo install but how can you argue with the Google behemoth!

Cheers,
Adrian.

39

Hi @AApollo,

Thanks for the info. Would it be possible to forward the E-Mail discussion with support to hello@ matomo.org ?

40

@AApollo
could you please forward us your email conversation with Google Ads so we can also use it for our internal push to Google Ads team? That will be very helpful!

Also to help you btw, you may still be able to setup Matomo on the subdomain as a proxy to your main Matomo instance tracking all your sites, learn more here

41

Any update on this? One of my clients is also experiencing this issue. Fortunately he’s the only one using Google Ads, so nobody else is impacted, but it’s concerning that Google would take such an aggressive approach against an open source project.

42

To make our case more clear at Google Ads, they want us to provide the following information about the issues:

  • URL of your website where you had the issue
  • Google Ads Campaign ID
  • Google Ads customer ID
  • Support case ID

-> Would you please be able to send us this or some of this info? send us at hello@matomo.org

Thanks,