The suspension email lands with bureaucratic finality: "Your account has been disabled for invalid traffic" or a policy violation. Panic follows, then forum diving, then — for most people — mistakes. Here's the roadmap that respects how the process actually works.
Hour one: read the named reason
The email names a category — invalid traffic, policy violation, or appeal denied after review. The category determines everything downstream. Do not reply to the email, do not create a new account (that's the fastest route to a network-level ban), and do not submit the appeal in the next ten minutes. Draft nothing while angry.
Day one: the honest forensics
Reconstruct what the reviewer saw. Traffic sources: did you buy any, exchange any, or receive an unusual spike from a referrer you don't recognize? Placements: any unit that could generate accidental clicks? Content: anything borrowed, borderline, or policy-adjacent? Account hygiene: family members, shared office network, a developer who "tested" the ads? Write the timeline down — dates, sources, changes. The appeal rewards specificity and collapses under vagueness.
The appeal, done properly
One submission, in the appeal form, in clear English (or your account language), structured as: what happened (your best factual account), what you found (the specific cause if identified), what you changed (concrete actions taken), and why it won't recur (specific safeguards). Honest uncertainty is fine — "we cannot identify the exact source of this bot traffic; here is the timeline and what we've done anyway" reads far better than a confident story that doesn't survive scrutiny. One appeal. If it fails, the response usually invites one more after meaningful changes; treat that as a review of your changes, not a lottery ticket for resubmission.
While you wait — and if it's over
Keep the site alive and clean; suspension review sometimes includes a look at current behavior. If the ban stands after appeals, alternatives exist (other networks, affiliate, products), but the same behavior that triggered the ban will trigger the next one too. The publishers who recover — either through reinstatement or a clean restart — are the ones who actually fixed the cause, because the detection is patient and it remembers.
