Tried to run a Web2App campaign on iOS and our whole account got rejected.

I love sharing success stories because, sure, they position me well as a consultant. But honestly, the posts that deliver the most value in my opinion are the ones where I show my fails — and today is one of those days.

What you are seeing in the screenshot is basically Google playing roulette with a client’s business (a social casino app, ironically enough).

I’ve been running a purchase-optimized campaign since November 2023!!! Optimizing according to best practices and gradually growing it into our largest and best-performing acquisition campaign for new paying users.

Then last month, I tried to run a web2app campaign on iOS and our whole account got rejected due to an issue with the registered domains (bulls*** in my opinion).

We had no activity during 4 days and after solving this stupid issue, the campaign went back to normal spend but as you can clearly see in the screenshot, it didn’t get back to the previous performance in terms of CPA.

Now Google emails us saying performance is collapsing due to “cannibalization with other campaigns” — which sounds wild given this thing has been running for 2 years with stable performance and magically turned destructive overnight 😂

I’ve checked everything — network mix, creative CVR, ad group spend and nothing changed. It feels like Google slapped a red flag on the account and stopped sending quality traffic.

I don’t know if someone has seen this before but it is the first time I’ve seen a shift this brutal without any internal trigger. Now, we are relaunching because in UAC land, we literally control nothing so relaunching + praying to God is the best option we have 😂😂😂

Hope none of you ever have to deal with this 🙏