I am only posting this because I found a bug in Google’s account ID logic. If you encounter this bug, its very difficult to rectify, especially since there is no direct phone or email AdSense support – only online forums.
Whats the bug?
So an AdSense account is tied to a main google account. This could be your G Suite email, like user@domain.com or generic Gmail google account like user@gmail.com. The account is then associated with a website, say www.domain.com. A website entity can only be assigned to a single account. So here is the bug occurs:
- You setup G Suite for business so you can use Gmail with your own domain, lets call this domain foo.com and your G Suite login/account is bob@foo.com.
- Over time, you decide to show ads on your foo.com website, so you signup for AdSense using your bob@foo.com google account.
- Everything works great, your making money showing Ads.
- One day you decide you dont want to use Gmail for email services, you want to move your foo.com email service to another party. So you go into G Suite and cancel all G Suite for foo.com. At this point, your bob@foo.com google account is deleted.
- A few months go by and forgot about the AdSense stuff, so you try to login to AdSense… But WAIT.. your AdSense login was bob@foo.com google account, which doesn’t exist now, so you cant login.
- You assumeall accounts are deleted that are associated with bob@foo.com so you create a new free generic gmail account, like bob.foo@gmail.com.
- You create an AdSense account for bob.foo@gmail.com and associate it with your foo.com website. When you do this, Google analyzes your site and says to check back in 24 hours.
- The next day you get an email from AdSense that looks like this:
The problem is none of these options will help you because its IMPOSSIBLE to login to AdSense as bob@foo.com. You are now in this paradox where google has an old invalid account preventing you from creating a new AdSense account, and there is no way to delete the account, nor is there a way to easily contact Google to have them fix this anomaly.
What do you do?
After many AdSense forum posts, someone (presummably from Google) sent me a link to a hidden form submission page:
https://support.google.com/adsense/contact/cant_log_in
This page gathers basic info, though it still lacks the option to describe whats really going on, then sends to a human at Google. I recommend in the box where it asks about browser issues, type in an explanation of the bug.