Adwords campaign rejected. For Google Matomo javascript is a Malware

I’m also affected. Will send details in the next 48hrs.

Any idea of a timeline here Matthieu as I would like to re-engage Google ads asap and the only way to do that may be to remove Matomo which would prevent the Google ads team seeing/investigating this.

As I’ve not heard back by email or through the forum I’ve now removed Matomo and replaced with GTM until this gets resolved as I need to push on with the campaign. I hope you managed to work this out with Google or make any changes to avoid the false trigger.

We are still struggling to make progress with Google.
But there is a Google employee trying to reach the right people inside Google ads team… it’s a mission to get answers.
To make our case more clear at Google Ads, you can help us by providing 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 info?

I’m sorry to hear it’s a struggle, however I’m not surprised.

I’ve provided the account details and a response from Google that specifically shows that Matomo is the cause, both by email previously, however I did not receive an acknowledgement.

We’ve forwarded your details (and others) to our contact at Google who’s trying to escalate it to the right team/person at Google/Google Ads in charge of this detection. It’s taking a long time, Google is too big. If we don’t make progress this way, we’ll have to change tactics eventually. Stay tuned…

Any progress Matthieu?

We are still in talk with Google with the existing cases.
Everyone who haven’t yet reached out to us please do now: contact us by providing 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 info?

It seems that maybe the issue is now less frequent than before, but to be confirmed.

For anyone who have contacted us and have got a reply from us, we will eventually follow up and still work on getting this resolved with someone at google trying to help us (VERY Difficult to reach out the right people :expressionless: )

All my Adwords were also abruptly rejected this month. Following multiple emails trying to determine with Google what the exact problem was they came back with an response that the analytics must be “inline to the domain ”. Now I have built Matomo as a sub-domain to each domain I want to control, the Adwords adverts are now allowed. Only edit slightly and it goes to the “under review ” place.
Very inconvenient to not have all websites under one Matomo install but how can you argue with the Google behemoth!

I’ve had a site that was rejected by Google back in March 2020, and now again this week. The message both times was:

Policy violation detected – Malvertising in landing page.
Because of the sensitive nature of policy violations, Google is unable to provide additional information related to the alert beyond what’s available in the Ad Manager UI.

I developed the site, but a radio conglomerate and another party are doing all the advertising, so I don’t have access to the AdWords account. Since I don’t have access to that, and since I’m not getting answers from the media companies, I don’t yet know that Matomo is the issue.

Since my sites run the bare minimum of 3rd party (jquery, bootstrapcdn, matomo, and google fonts/analytics), it seems likely they’re flagging Matomo. Hopefully I’ll get an answer at some point.

I’ve verified that my matomo.js is pristine.

I wish I could say I’m surprised that Google would flag a privacy-centric, open source competitor as malvertising.

After several months the problem is always the same. This should be reported to the Commissioner for Competition of the European Commission.

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I can confirm that Google was in fact tagging our client’s site as containing malvertising due to using Matomo. They have now confirmed that that was the issue, and they have lifted the ban on advertising, but I’m guessing it’ll happen again. And I wouldn’t be surprised if we suffer similar consequences in other important areas, like SERP.

Thanks for your work on this and other issues, Matthieu.

Hi Ramesh,
can you please reach out to hello@matomo.org with the following info:

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

Also please note you can still have all your website under one Matomo, by using the Matomo tracker proxy script, please see this FAQ for the info: https://matomo.org/faq/how-to/faq_132/ <- this will be a better solution for you!

Looking forward to receiving your details by email (this helps us as we’re building a case and already have 6 confirmed reports - need yours too!)

@mkindred can you please reach out to hello@matomo.org with the following info:

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

we need everyone with the issue to contact us with these details so we can get a resolution. Thanks!

Update: we have heard back from Google Maldvertising team and they have said they have “fixed some issues” on their end, and it seems the issue is FIXED.

if you still experience this issue from August 2020, please leave a reply here!

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I have this error 25.08. It’s not fixed ((

It’s still happening. Last week two websites got Google Ads campaigns suspended because of presence of matomo.js
Forwarding you all the details.
Hope it can be resolved someday. Anyway I’ll implement proxy…

Dear Matthieu, I’ve got response from google ads, my case was related to the domain itself that I used to host matomo. That domain was already banned by some reason.
Support said “we have it all under same policy - malware” so it was not related to matomo.js at all. Anyone who is still getting “Policy violation detected” - you can request more details from google support and make sure that it is not about Matomo.
Matthieu, looks like you did it, we can safely use Matomo!

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NOT FIXED
Campaign rejected on 21/09/2020. :frowning:

Sorry to hear @LaMantis_Disseny - just sent you an email to gather more info. Thanks for your patience.