Google Ads for Loan Companies in Kenya: Policy Guide

Google's advertising policies apply extra scrutiny to personal loans, particularly short-term, high-cost products. This can include requirements around disclosure of representative APR, repayment terms, and — depending on the product and market — formal certification before ads are allowed to run at all. Building a campaign without first checking current policy requirements is the single most common cause of unexpected suspensions.

Focus keyword targeting on searches with clear commercial intent tied to your actual licensed product — "business loan Kenya", "SACCO loan requirements", "asset finance Nairobi" — rather than broad emotional or urgency-driven terms that increase both cost and policy risk.

• Build tightly themed ad groups around one loan product per group.
• Avoid broad match on high-risk terms; use phrase and exact match for control.
• Maintain a negative keyword list to exclude job-seeker and scam-related searches that waste budget without ever converting.

Compliant ad copy states what the product actually is, avoids guaranteed-approval language, and is transparent about eligibility and cost. This isn't just a policy requirement — transparent copy also produces better-qualified clicks, since it filters out borrowers who wouldn't have qualified anyway.

A landing page for a paid campaign needs the same disclosures as the ad itself, clear eligibility criteria stated before the application starts, and visible licensing information. Sending traffic to a generic homepage that lacks these elements increases both policy risk and application abandonment.

Cost-per-click for competitive loan-related keywords in Kenya typically runs from KES 30 for lower-competition, product-specific terms to KES 150+ for broad, high-competition terms like generic "loan" searches. Most licensed lenders scaling a serious acquisition programme budget from KES 150,000 to KES 500,000+ per month once campaigns are proven.

Google updates financial-services advertising policy periodically, sometimes with limited notice. A dedicated monitoring process — reviewing policy centre updates monthly and auditing active campaigns against current requirements — prevents the account-level disruption that catches unprepared advertisers off guard.