Anybody else have issues using a PO Box for your payment address with an Adsense account?
I ran into an issue today myself and it was a bit of a shocker to me. I decided to write a brief (lol) article about my experience to try and help others to avoid what I ran into.
A bit of background information: I have 2 adsense accounts: 1 personal and one for a business, and have had these accounts for several years each with no problems. I decided to form an additional business and open a new business adsense account for one of my websites recently. This is where I ran into a problem:
My personal and first business account both use my PO Box as their payment address. Sounds normal right? “Payment” address is where a check should be mailed to if I wanted to get paid by check.
I applied for the new business adsense account using the same PO Box as my other accounts. The next day I received an email stating that my account was approved. I logged in to my new account, created ads and placed them live on my site. Everything was working fine…..
At the same time that I opened my new account, I was also moving my site to a new hosting company because of other “issues” I was having (it seems they all come at the same time). Earlier today I added a new plugin to my wordpress site (the same one which I just moved to a new host and opened the new adsense account for) and when I checked my site to make sure there weren’t any compatibility issues, I noticed my adsense ads weren’t displaying. Shiaaaaaaaaaaat!
I deactivated the plugin, deleted it and still no ads. Not only that, but the plugin kept re-appearing in my admin dashboard of my site! I worked on that site for about an hour and I couldn’t get rid of the plugin and thought for sure that it was causing my ads not to display.
After finally getting rid of the plugin, I checked the site and the ads were still not displaying. I decided to log in to my new adsense account, thinking there may be a message for me, especially since there were messages already there in red reminding me to set up my payment method and submit my PIN.
Well, when I went to log in I was taken to the sam application confirmation screen that I already submitted, pre-filled out. I thought something may have happened to my old application or some sort of glitch, so I clicked to submit it again, the same way it was the first time. I figured that the application was already approved once, so it had to be some sort of glitch, right?
Next, I checked my email messages…… there was a message that after reviewing my recently approved account they have “disapproved my account” because I have used a PO Box address (which was on the original app when it was first approved….). It said to click on the included link to submit a valid address. I clicked on the link but guess what? Since I already resubmitted the app a few minutes prior with the SAME info, now I couldn;t access my account again, which I don’t have btw! There’s no way to get back into the account if it doesn’t exist!
I guess I’ll have to wait to hear back from them on my second application……..
As I was writing this short (lol) article, I received an automated email back from them saying that they found an already approved account with my email address…. If I already have an account, why can’t I log in to it anymore? I’ll update this article as I proceed through the hoops but as a suggestion to all, if you have a PO BOx listed as your payment address for your adsense account(s), change it right away so you don’t get your account closed down!
UPDATE: Shortly after originally writing this article (which was after consecutive requests for help in the Adsense Support Forum), I was contacted by a helpful Google employee who assisted me in getting my account straightened out.
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