About the creative review process

To keep ads safe and appropriate for everyone, creatives are reviewed to make sure they comply with Google Ads policies, Google Ad Manager policies, and other exchange policies. Most creatives are reviewed within 1 business day. Your creative won’t serve if it’s rejected during creative review.

Tip: This article describes the creative review process for all creative types except for YouTube videos. Learn about that process in YouTube videos in YouTube & partners line items.

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 8 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 1 business 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:

For more information, see Google Ads policies and Creative approval process by exchange.

Reasons the creative review process restarts

Any update to creative content or landing page will restart the creative review process. (This includes changes to assets, landing page URLs, tracking URLs, and appended HTML.) Keep this in mind when you're making edits to more than one creative assigned to the same line item. If you make a change to every creative assigned to a line item, that line item won't have any servable creatives for up to 8 hours or more.
For creative formats that support drafts, the creative review process will start or restart when you publish. Creating or saving a draft won't restart creative review.
Creative review also restarts when you submit an appeal.

Changes that don't restart creative review

  • Creating or saving a draft
  • Editing the creative's name
  • Adding or editing notes
Supported languages for manual review
  • 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 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 status

Display & Video 360 review starts automatically when you create or edit a creative.

Display & Video 360 status What it means
Pending The creative is still being reviewed or is still a draft and hasn't been published yet.
Servable The creative is approved for serving, while awaiting additional review.
Approved The creative is approved for serving. Note: Approved creatives are still subject to recurring reviews.
Rejected There's an issue with the creative that must be fixed before it can serve.

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.

Exchange status What it means
Pending The creative is still being reviewed, or hasn't been sent to the exchanges with their own review process yet.
Servable The creative is approved for serving on at least one of the exchanges that require their own review.
Approved The creative is approved on all exchanges.
Rejected The creative is rejected for serving on at least one exchange.

About reviews and rejection reasons for special creative types

Video creatives

Video creatives (VAST/VPAID) have an additional set of validations. Common causes for rejection for video validation include:

  • The creative is not working properly and can’t be previewed in Display & Video 360.
  • The video duration is not 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 is a blank video tag. For Campaign Manager 360-hosted videos this can happen if there is no active ad associated with the video creative. For third-party hosted videos this can happen if the VAST tag is blank or does not declare a duration.
Creatives synced from Campaign Manager 360

If your creatives are managed in Campaign Manager 360, you can find out what time the creative was last synced.

  1. Open the creative.
  2. Click Creative status.
  3. 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:

  • Is not 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 does not 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 be sure to note your creative's Campaign Manager 360 placement ID.

Creatives assigned to Programmatic Guaranteed deals

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 it meets their own policies and specifications. If a creative assigned to a Programmatic Guaranteed deal does not 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.

Data-driven creatives

Because data-driven creatives can contain many variants, reviews for these creative types take more time. Data-driven creatives take about 26 hours (24 hours for standard creative review, with an extra 2 hours for variant review). Learn more about data-driven creative review
Data-driven creatives can't serve if any variant is rejected. All variants must be either servable or approved to serve.

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