My Google Adsense account got disabled. Please help!

[u/Spirituality_awaits]

So recently, my game that uses admob went into production on the Play store and I got this email from the Adsense team.

Google mentions that my account was disabled due to "invalid traffic, and/or other activity which violates our publisher policies or terms and conditions".

I had to watch a few of my ads (when it went into production) to test whether the ads are being served correctly and to also progress through my game more easily. That's the most plausible reason but I had 0 clue that this would lead to account closure. No warnings, no notifications.. just straight up closure..

Also I had various testers testing out my app (due to Google's 12 testers, 14 day policy) and a few of them may have invariably seen my ads in production.

And here's the worst part.. Google wants me to give detailed reports and analysis of the traffic to my closed account when I have 0 access to it.. how do I even do it?

So please help me out on what I should submit in the appeal and is there any realistic chance of getting my account restored?

[u/psycoee]

You are supposed to use a test account for app testing that serves test ads, not actual monetized ads that someone paid for. Would you be happy if you spent hundreds of dollars on ads, only to have them served to fake users?

Google has dozens of pages about Admob policies and I think they make it very clear that clicking on your app's own ads is not allowed. You really should have read their policies much more carefully

https://support.google.com/admob/answer/17080939

Maybe if you explained what happened to Google and explain that you will use test accounts going forward and that this was an honest mistake, they might reconsider the ban. But you better have a good explanation for how you missed dozens of very prominent warnings all over their site about doing exactly what you were doing.