How to Stop Google Ad Notifications

Tired of your inbox overflowing with notifications from Google Ads every day? We've all been there. While some alerts are useful, most are just noise that distracts you from the actually important work of managing your campaigns. This guide will show you exactly how to take back control, stop the unnecessary notifications, and only get alerted about the things that truly matter.

Why You’re Getting So Many Google Ads Notifications

Google Ads sends notifications to keep you informed about your account activity and to encourage you to take actions it believes will improve performance. While some are essential, many are just generic recommendations that may or may not apply to your specific goals. Understanding these types is the first step to taming them.

Generally, notifications fall into several buckets:

Performance alerts: Updates on significant changes in clicks, impressions, costs, or conversions.
Recommendations: AI-powered suggestions to change bids, add keywords, or create new ads. These are often the biggest source of notification clutter.
Disapproved ads and policy alerts: A truly important category. These notify you when an ad violates Google's policies and needs immediate attention.
Billing: Critical alerts about payment failures, expiring credit cards, or budget updates. You'll definitely want to keep these on.
Campaign maintenance: Suggestions for things like fixing ad groups with no active keywords or adding new audiences.
Reports and insights: Occasional emails with custom reports, search term insights, or information about new features.

The goal isn't to turn everything off but to be selective. You need to know about a disapproved ad or a failed payment immediately. You probably don't need five emails a week suggesting you raise your budget.

How to Stop Unwanted Google Ads Email Notifications

Your primary battleground for managing alerts is the notification settings panel inside your account. This is where you can specify exactly which types of emails you want to receive. The process is straightforward and only takes a few minutes.

Step-by-Step Guide to Customizing Email Alerts:

Log in to Your Google Ads Account: Go to ads.google.com and sign in.
Navigate to Tools and Settings: In the top menu bar, click on the wrench icon labeled "Tools and settings."
Open Preferences: Under the "Setup" column, select "Preferences."
Go to the Notifications Tab: On the left-hand navigation menu of the Preferences screen, click on "Notifications."

You’ll now see a comprehensive list of every notification category, each with a toggle switch. This is your command center for controlling the flow of emails. Let's break down what each section controls.

Understanding the Notification Categories

For each category, you’ll typically have three choices:

On: You'll receive all emails - both critical and optional - for this category.
Off: You won't receive any optional emails. However, Google will still send you critical alerts regarding policy and billing to ensure your account stays active and compliant. You cannot disable critical alerts.
Some categories may feature a dropdown with options like "All Notifications" or "Only Critical." Choose "Only Critical" to get the "Off" behavior.

Here’s a practical guide on how to handle each category:

Billing:Keep this ON. These emails alert you to accepted payments, payment failures, credit card expirations, and other critical financial updates. Ignoring these can get your ads paused, so they are essential.

Campaign maintenance:This category includes alerts about things like experiments ending or keyword insertion issues. It's often safe to turn this OFF if you proactively manage your campaigns. If you heavily rely on automated experiments, you may want to keep it on "Only critical alerts."

Disapproved ads & policy alerts:Leave this ON. This is arguably the most important notification category. You need to know immediately if one of your ads gets disapproved so you can fix it and get it running again. This is not a category you want to miss.

Recommendations:This is a primary source of notification overload. It includes alerts for personalized tips to improve performance, like adding keywords or trying new ad formats. We highly recommend turning this OFF. You can always review recommendations directly in the "Recommendations" tab of the Google Ads platform at your own convenience.

Reports:This sends scheduled reports and keyword search queries directly to your inbox. If you have custom reports scheduled to run, you’ll need this turned on for those reports to be emailed. If you do your reporting elsewhere, you can turn this OFF.

Google Ads research & offers:This category covers email surveys, promotions, and invites for beta programs or user research. It's generally safe to turn this OFF to reduce non-essential communication.

Performance announcements & new features:Turn this OFF. This is another marketing-focused category where Google promotes its own new features or announcements. Useful information, but you can find it on your own time without clogging up your inbox.

Once you've made your selections, your settings are saved automatically. You should see a significant decrease in emails within 24 hours.

A Note for Manager Accounts (MCC)

If you manage multiple Google Ads accounts through a Manager Account (MCC), you have two layers of control:

Manager Account Level:

You can set notification preferences for your MCC account itself, which usually relate to notifications about the sub-accounts you manage. Follow the same steps above while logged into your MCC.

Sub-Account Level:

Each individual account under your MCC has its own notification settings. You must navigate into each account to customize its specific alerts. A key time-saver is that when you link a new account to your MCC, there is an option to apply your manager account's notification settings to the new linked account, which simplifies onboarding.

Creating Your Own Custom Alerts with Rules

Instead of relying on Google's default (and often noisy) alerts, you can take control by creating your own. Automated rules let you set up custom notifications based on performance criteria that you define. This shifts you from reacting to Google’s suggestions to proactively managing your own anomalies.

For example, you could create a rule that emails you if:

A campaign's Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) increases by more than 20% in one day.
Yesterday's ad spend for a specific campaign exceeded your daily target.
A high-performing keyword's impressions suddenly drop to zero.
A campaign's conversion rate drops below a certain threshold.

How to Set Up a Custom Rule Alert:

Go to "Tools and settings" > "Bulk Actions" > "Rules."
Click the blue "+" icon to create a new rule.
Choose the rule type. For alerts, you will often use "Campaign rules," "Ad group rules," or "Keyword rules."
Define your Action: Set this to "Send email."
Define your Condition(s): This is where you set the performance logic. For example, Cost > 100 or CPC (avg.) > 5. You can layer multiple conditions to get very specific.
Define the Frequency: Choose how often you want the rule to check for your conditions (e.g., daily, weekly, once). For tracking anomalies, a "Daily" check using "Previous day's" data is very effective.
Name your rule and click "Save."

By creating your own rules, you get tailored insights delivered to your inbox, while all the generic recommendations from Google are silenced. This is by far the most powerful way to manage your notifications.

Managing In-Account Notifications

Besides emails, Google also serves pop-up notifications and alerts within the platform interface itself. These are most often related to the "Recommendations" feature. While there's no single switch to turn these off, managing them is simple:

Dismiss Recommendations: When you see recommendations in your dashboard, you can click on each suggestion and press "Dismiss" if it is not relevant. Regularly dismissing irrelevant suggestions can sometimes teach the algorithm what you don't care about, helping to reduce clutter over time.
Stay on Top of Policy Issues: The red banner alerts that appear at the top of your screen are typically for serious issues like billing problems or disapproved ads. Address these as soon as you see them to clear the alert.

Final Thoughts

Clearing out notification clutter in Google Ads is about more than just a cleaner inbox, it's about reclaiming your focus. By selectively curating your alerts in the "Preferences" panel and creating custom rules for the KPIs you truly care about, you can transition from being overwhelmed by noise to being informed by valuable, timely data.

While fine-tuning those notifications is a great first step, managing insights across all your platforms individually can still feel like a reactive chore. At Graphed , we help you connect all your marketing data sources - including Google Ads, Google Analytics, Shopify, and social platforms - into one place. This lets you build real-time dashboards with simple conversation, giving you a holistic, live view of performance so you spot trends and get answers instantly without waiting for an email alert from any single platform.