“Up to X euros to launch your campaigns.” The offer is real, Google does run it, and almost everyone who receives it misreads what it is. A Google Ads credit does not reduce what you have to invest. It pays you back afterwards, if you invested what was required, within the time allowed. The nuance looks small. It decides who keeps the credit and who loses it.
A credit, not a discount
Google's own wording leaves no room: “These offers work like advertising credits. They are not discounts or refunds.” In practice, your advertising budget stays fully due. The credit lands on your account once the conditions are met, and it pays for future clicks.
Think of a fuel refund rather than a free tank. You pay for the fuel, you drive, and if you drove far enough within the window, Google credits you enough to drive a little more. Nobody paid for your departure.
The line nobody reads
This is the most important sentence in the whole documentation, and the one articles on the subject keep skipping. Google writes that promotional credits cannot be used to pay for charges incurred before they are applied, and cannot cover the minimum spend requirement itself.
In other words: the threshold you must reach to trigger the credit is paid entirely with your own money. The credit does not fund itself. An advertiser counting on it to absorb part of the threshold finds out at invoice time, and that is exactly the miscalculation that leads to spending more than planned.
Three eligibility conditions
The offer targets new advertisers, and the three conditions stack:
- An account created less than 14 days ago when the code is used. Google adds a nuance: most offers must be applied at sign-up, and only some give you 14 days after creating the account. The 14-day window is a maximum, not a guarantee.
- A valid payment method saved on the account.
- No previous Google Ads advertising for the same business. This is the condition that rules out most candidates: opening a fresh account for a business that already advertised does not restart eligibility.
The first one deserves a pause, because it reverses the usual order of things. The 14-day window starts at account creation, not when you receive the code. Creating the account “just to see what it looks like”, then spending three weeks preparing a serious launch, burns the window before the first euro is spent.
Three clocks run at once
The mechanism chains three independent deadlines, and each one can cost you the credit:
- 14 days between account creation and using the code.
- 60 days to spend the credit once it is applied to the account.
- Up to 35 days of eligibility verification once the conditions are met, before the credit actually appears.
The third one surprises the most: between meeting the conditions and seeing the credit, more than a month can pass. An advertiser who sees nothing after two weeks usually concludes it did not work, and stops. That is the most ordinary way to lose a credit you had earned.
Your payment setting changes the rules
This is the most overlooked part of the subject, and it changes what you actually have to do. Google applies three different treatments depending on how you pay.
- Automatic payments: the credit shows on the billing summary under “Active Promotions” within the verification window. Costs incurred before the credit arrives, or after it runs out, are still charged to your payment method.
- Manual payments: Google recommends paying slightly more than the required amount, because delivery can stop before the balance is fully used. And one detail that costs money: VAT has to be counted in the spend threshold.
- Monthly invoicing: account setup must be complete before the code is applied, because later configuration changes invalidate the offer. In exchange, credit left unused in the month carries forward to the next one until spent.
The VAT line deserves a stop, because it changes everyone's maths. A threshold calculated excluding tax gets missed at the tax-inclusive invoice, and a missed threshold cannot be recovered afterwards.
Five different credits, only one is a promotion
Seeing a credit on your account does not mean your promotion arrived. Google applies several types of adjustment, and mixing them up creates the belief in a credit that is not there:
- One-time credit: the promotional code, valid only for future advertising costs, and non-refundable.
- Invalid activity: refunds for clicks and impressions generated by bots or automated tools.
- Overdelivery: granted when Google served your ad too often and went past your daily budget.
- Overcharge: on manual payment accounts, when advertising costs exceed the prepaid balance.
- Excess credit: a negative balance kept for later use, depending on the country.
A reading direction that surprises: with automatic payments a credit reduces your account balance, while with manual payments it increases it. The same event displays in opposite directions depending on your setup.
What a credit does not fix
A credit speeds up an account that works. It builds nothing. When a launch goes wrong with a credit, the cause is almost always one of these three, and none of them is solved with extra money:
- No reliable conversion measurement. Without it, the credit funds clicks nobody can evaluate. That is a prerequisite, not an optimisation. A properly built tracking setup comes before the first euro.
- A generic landing page. The credit pays for the visitor's arrival, not the conversion. Sending paid traffic to a homepage funds visits that nothing is waiting for.
- An account with no structure. A single campaign mixing every intent learns badly, and an algorithm that learns badly over 60 days of credit will still learn badly after.
One calculation shows where the threshold gets lost. Take a 500 euro threshold. In France, at 20 percent VAT, reaching 500 euros of spend means 600 euros including tax. An advertiser tracking the balance tax-inclusive and stopping at 500 euros has actually spent 416.67 euros excluding tax: the trigger is missed by 83.33 euros, while the bank statement shows exactly the amount the offer announced. It is the most common scenario, and it cannot be recovered afterwards.
Four rules that are not negotiable
The official policy sets limits nothing works around, and each one costs the credit to those who ignore it:
- One credit per customer. Using several promotional credits per customer is explicitly listed among unauthorised uses, and so is reselling credits.
- No retroactive application: Google cannot grant promotional offers retroactively. Finding the offer after you launched is worth nothing.
- No reactivation: expired promotional offers cannot be reactivated or modified. A missed deadline is final.
- No refund: if you disable your account before spending the credit in full, the remaining balance is not refunded.
And the penalty for working around this goes beyond the credit itself: repeated violations lead to account suspension, and potentially to the suspension of every linked account. Opening several accounts to stack offers is the fastest way to lose all of them.
Verdict
- Take the credit if you were launching anyway: it is money added to a plan that already exists.
- Do not build your launch around it. The threshold comes out of your budget, and the 14-day window starts at account creation, not when you are ready.
- Prepare the ground before opening the account: conversion measurement, landing page, structure. Fourteen days go fast when everything is still to be done.
- Compute your threshold tax included, and on manual payments plan a little extra: missing the trigger by a few euros is the most ordinary failure.
If you are preparing a launch and want to know what must be in place before the first euro, that is what I frame in a Google Ads engagement, and I set the target with the target CPA calculator.
