Our campaign was spending ₹77 a day against a ₹200 budget. Not zero — a trickle. Nothing in the account said anything was wrong: the keywords were enabled, the budget was there, the ads were “approved.” It took the diagnostics run to surface the real state: the campaign's primary_status was LIMITED with eleven eligibility reasons, and both live ads carried the status Google shows as Eligible (limited) — internally, APPROVED_LIMITED.
The cause was two words. Both headlines contained the phrase “Google Ads.”
The trademark trap, plainly
Google's trademark policy restricts the use of trademarked terms — including Google's own product names — in ad text. Tools that audit ad accounts, agencies that manage them, and anyone whose product is about Google Ads all naturally want that phrase in the headline. Google doesn't disapprove the ad; it approves it limited, which throttles where and how often it serves. The ad runs just enough that nothing looks broken.
That's what makes this trap expensive: it presents as weak demand or low bids, so the instinctive fixes are to raise bids or widen keywords — paying more for a ceiling that policy, not the auction, is holding down.
How to check your own account in two minutes
Find “Eligible (limited)” in the Status column
Ads & assets → Status
Hover it and Google names the policy holding the ad back.
Check for “Limited” at campaign level
Campaigns → Status
The campaign row carries the same flag when its ads are throttled.
Scan your ad text for brand names you don't own
Google, Meta, Instagram, Shopify — anyone’s. If a trademark is in a headline or description, you’ve likely found the cause.
0 of 3 checked
What to write instead
Describe the category, not the trademark. Ours became “We Run Your Search Ads” and “Free PPC Account Audit” — same meaning, no trademark, full eligibility. Keywords are a different policy area than ad text: bidding on a trademarked term is generally allowed; putting it in the headline is what gets limited. And if you resell or genuinely partner with the trademark owner, there's a formal authorization process — but for most advertisers the fast path is copy that doesn't need permission.
The part that stung
When we wrote replacement ads that same night, the first draft of the new copy made the identical mistake — “Google Ads” in two headlines — and had to be withdrawn and re-filed before it went live. Policy traps recur because the words are the natural ones. That's an argument for checks that run on every change, not on the day someone remembers.
Admiral caught this on our account — the LIMITED status, the eleven reasons, and the two ads carrying it — and filed the fix as a one-click proposal. It runs the same check on every sync of yours.
Run the free audit