If you violate any policies within the categories below which pose a heightened risk to our users or our platform within any ad, ad component, or product you will have “three strikes” before we suspend your use of Microsoft Advertising services, in our discretion. If you are under a strike penalty, as defined below, you will not be able to login to your account through Editor or the Mobile App, but you may access your advertiser account(s) through the Web UI. We determine strike penalties based upon violation of any of the following policy categories (i.e., a group of individual policies which relate to the same type of violation), or any other violations that may pose a risk to the safety or security of our services, customers, or consumers.
- Ad Requirements
- Disallowed Content
- Extensions
- Intellectual Property
- Legal and Privacy
- Media Formats
- Product Ads
- Relevance and Quality
- Restricted Content
- Text Guidelines
Strike One
Upon Strike One penalty, we will suspend all ads, including any associated ad components, within the impacted advertiser account. If you have multiple accounts which violate policy, we may apply Strike One to each account independently. We will attempt to notify you with the details of the violation and the impacted account(s) with instructions on how to redress the violation.
Strike Two
We may issue a Strike Two penalty as follows:
- After you successfully redressed a Strike One penalty, you violate the same policy category on the same account within one year from the date of rehabilitation of the violation that triggered a Strike One penalty, or
- You violate the same policy category as another of your accounts currently under a Strike One suspension.
Upon Strike Two penalty, we will suspend all ads and ad components within the impacted advertiser account, and we will prevent the Manager Account from creating new accounts under the same Manager Account for the duration of the penalty. The advertiser will receive an email with the details of the policy category, the account(s), and Manager Account impacted.
Strike Three
We may issue a Strike Three penalty as follows:
- After you successfully redressed a Strike Two penalty, you violate the same policy category within one year from the date of rehabilitation of the violation that triggered a Strike One penalty, or
- You violate the same policy category as another of your accounts currently under a Strike Two suspension.
When we issue a Strike Three penalty, all your ad accounts will be suspended immediately and without further warning. All content contained within the Manager Account will become read-only. You will be able to log in and access your account information, but you will not be able to edit, add, modify, or delete any content contained therein. We will notify you with the details of the policy category, the account(s), and Manager Account impacted, with instructions to redress.