Google Ads from Iran: what Google itself has written
On its own country restrictions page, Google writes that because of OFAC sanctions, Google Ads is not available to advertisers in Iran, and that Iran cannot be targeted as an advertising destination either. For a business whose customers are inside Iran, that means Google search advertising is not on the table at all, rather than being difficult.
- Lesson 5 of 8
- Intermediate
- Free, no signup
The question that has to be answered before the budget
The left branch ends here; the right one continues, but its cost is not only money.
The people who need to see this ad, where do they live?
Google Ads is not on the table
- Google writes that sanctioned countries cannot be targeted
- so a foreign account does not solve this either
- the same budget goes to the organic slot and to the channels
The route exists, and this is what you accept
- an account is not available to an advertiser based in Iran
- while physically in that country, signing in is not possible
- suspension, in Google's own words, has no grace period or exception
- promoting a product based in the region removes customised support
This figure is about Google search advertising and does not generalise to other channels. The branch lines quote Google's country restrictions page, and that page has a date.
Last checked: Facts and tool names in this lesson are re-checked against their sources on this date.
First, what Google itself has written
This lesson stands on one page: Google's official help article on Google Ads country restrictions. Whatever you have heard in the market about this subject carries no weight against the text of that page. Four things written there that concern you directly:
- Google Ads is not available to advertisers in a list of countries and territories, and Iran is on that list.
- An account based in such a location is suspended, and the page states plainly that no grace periods or exceptions are possible. A manager account is suspended too, and the accounts it manages may be suspended as well.
- Even if your account sits elsewhere, while you are physically inside one of those countries you cannot sign in to Google Ads. The help centre and policy centre remain open without signing in.
- Those countries cannot be selected as a targeting destination either; a campaign targeting one stops running.
That last point is what ends the discussion. If your customer lives in Iran, a Google search ad will not be shown to them even from a foreign account, because the destination itself is outside the targeting list. There is also a sentence on that page that gets less attention: someone located outside these regions who promotes products or services based in the region is not eligible for customised support or account optimisation.
We read that page on the date of this lesson and are reporting its text as it stands; these are one company's policies and companies change their policies. Before any decision, open that page yourself.
So who does advertise on Google from here
We are not denying the market reality: there are advertisers working with Google Ads from Iran, and almost always through an intermediary. That usually makes sense for businesses whose customers are outside Iran: exports, technical services for foreign clients, digital products with a global audience. For a shop in Tehran selling to Tehran, no arrangement solves it, because the problem is not only holding an account, the destination cannot be targeted either.
We do not sell this service on this site and we do not teach how to get around a restriction. What we can do is name the risks from that same official text, because whoever decides should know what they are accepting:
- The account is not in your name. The email, the password and the ownership sit elsewhere, and in practice you have to trust that party again every month.
- Suspension, by Google's own text, comes with no grace period and no exception. So the bad scenario is an account closed overnight and campaigns stopped, not a warning and a chance to fix things.
- A prepayment balance is at risk in that same scenario; Google writes that it will try to refund unused balances to the extent it is legally allowed, which means there is no guarantee.
- The advertising data, the campaign history and every month of learning stay inside an account that is not yours.
Our position: if your customers are outside Iran and the margin per sale covers these risks, that is your decision and we pass no moral judgement on it. If your customers are inside Iran, the discussion has no subject, and continuing it only costs time and money.
When search advertising is worth the friction
A search ad has one property no other channel has: the demand already exists. Someone typed a phrase, they are looking for something right now, and you are simply put in front of them. That is why it is expensive, and why it works on commercial phrases with buying intent rather than on educational ones.
Three conditions have to hold for the trade to pay off. First, the margin per sale has to be known and large enough to absorb several clicks that lead nowhere. Second, the route from click to purchase has to be short and countable; if a click leads to a phone call and three days of back and forth, measurement gets hard and you are spending in the dark. Third, the landing page has to deliver what the ad promised, or you are buying the most expensive click available so that somebody can close the tab.
And one point rarely made here: a search ad does not create demand. If a person does not yet know what their problem is, or does not know the name of the solution, they are not searching for it and your ad will not find them. That is the work of Instagram, a channel and content. To understand which phrases are searched at all and with what intent, the keyword research lesson is a better starting point than opening an ad account.
A search ad and an organic result buy two different things
One buys speed, the other buys permanence. For this market, the first pan is not available at all.
A search ad
- it brings traffic on the first day
- the placement can be chosen
- the day the payments stop, the traffic goes to zero
- for an Iranian destination it is not available at all
An organic result
- it takes months to take shape
- the place cannot be bought, it has to be built
- it stays in place after the spending stops
- you have less control over the timing
There is no cost or click rate number in this figure, because none has been published for this market and we do not invent one.
The same budget, somewhere it fits
For a business whose customers are inside Iran, the money that was going to be spent on search advertising has two sensible destinations, and both are slower. First, being seen in those same search results without an ad. The ad slot is not available, but the organic slot is open, and unlike an ad, the page does not vanish from the results when the payments stop. If you want to hand that work to someone, our SEO service page is what we do.
Second, the channels whose audience is already there: Instagram for being seen, and a Telegram channel for explaining and delivering files. These do not catch existing demand, they build it, and that is why their answer comes later.
Let us be honest that the swap is not free. A search ad brings traffic on the first day and SEO takes months; somebody who needs a sale tomorrow is not rescued by SEO. In exchange, what SEO builds stays after the payments stop, and that is what makes it the better trade in this market, since the first option is not available at all.
If you really are going in, write these down first
Suppose your customers are outside Iran and you have made the decision. What knocks most new advertisers over is not the campaign settings, it is the few numbers they did not write down first.
Put four numbers on paper: the margin per sale, how many of every ten people who make contact actually buy, the ceiling you are willing to pay for one lead, and the budget that could burn entirely without shaking the business. The third number comes out of the first two, and it is the one that tells you when to stop. Without it, stopping is always postponed until tomorrow.
Then three questions that are not numbers: through what route the money is paid and how stable that route itself is, who owns the account when this is over, and what you lose if the account is closed tomorrow. The payment layer is a lesson of its own and is covered with official sources in the payments path of this section. The sentence that always applies: anything that works only for as long as somebody else wants it to has to be written into your plan as temporary, not permanent.
What to write down, and what is not a plan
Write it down
- the margin per sale, in your own numbers
- how many of every ten contacts become a purchase
- the ceiling you will pay for one lead
- the stop condition: at what number you switch the campaign off
These are not a plan
- a cost per click figure you heard in a video
- a promise that the account will never have a problem
- a budget whose loss would shake the business
- starting before you know what the landing page says
This list does not replace legal advice and passes no opinion on the legal standing of any route.
The fast path, with AI
The question most people put to a model is how much Google Ads costs, and that is the wrong question: the right answer has not been published for your market, and if a model gives a figure it made it up. The right question is what one customer is worth to you and where your ceiling sits. That can be computed from your own numbers, and a model is fast at exactly this arithmetic and at turning it into a decision list.
- Collect your own four numbers: the selling price, the cost of goods, how many purchases come from every ten contacts, and the budget whose loss would not shake the business. If you do not have the second number, the whole exercise is an estimate and you should stop there.
- Write down where your customer is, because that one line decides whether the discussion continues at all. If the customer is inside Iran, the work ends here and going further only takes your own time.
- A cheap Flash class model is enough for this arithmetic, because the work is multiplying, dividing and ordering. The current pick is listed in the AI section of this site. Keep the expensive model for reading the result back.
- Run the recipe below. It carries two constraints you must not remove: bring in no outside number, and offer no way around a country restriction. If the output contains either, reject it on the spot; the model knows nothing about your legal exposure and carries none of it.
- Turn the output into one page with the stop condition written at the top, and keep that page beside you. The only value of this exercise is that on a bad day the decision has already been made.
Copy-ready recipe
I run a {type of business} and my customers are in {country or region}.
My numbers:
Selling price per {unit}: {number}
Cost per {unit}: {number}
Out of every ten people who make contact: {number} buy
Budget that could burn entirely without causing a problem: {number}
Rules:
- Bring in no outside number. Cost per click, industry averages and global benchmarks are forbidden.
- Propose no way around country restrictions or terms of service.
- If I did not give you a number you need, ask for it; do not guess.
1) Compute the margin per sale.
2) From the conversion rate, say what one contact is worth and the most I can pay for one contact.
3) With the budget above, say how many contacts I can buy at worst before I hit that ceiling.
4) Write a stop condition in one sentence that I can check once a week myself.
5) List five things I have to measure before starting, and beside each one what becomes undecidable without it.
6) At the end, say which of my numbers is the weakest and why.Before you trust the output: The output of this recipe is arithmetic, not permission. Three things are outside a model's reach and stay yours to decide. First, legal standing and account risk: a model neither interprets terms of service for you nor carries the consequences, and if it offers a suggestion in that area, throw it away. Second, the stability of the payment route, whose subject lies elsewhere and has nothing to do with the question solved here. And third, the conversion rate you fed it: if that number was a guess, the entire output rests on the guess and its precision is only cosmetic.
AI in this kind of work
On this subject AI does one thing well and two things badly, and both of the bad ones are tempting. Well: computing what a customer is worth from your own numbers and building the list of what to measure. Badly: telling you what advertising costs, because no figure has been published for this market, and validating a plan you wrote yourself, because models tend to agree with you.
Tools that actually help
- Claude It holds the no outside numbers constraint across a multi line calculation and, when a number is missing, is more likely to ask than to invent. Iran is on neither of Anthropic's two supported country lists; we read that on Anthropic's own page.
- Gemini It reads Persian natively, so a Persian table of numbers needs no translation. Note that the AI features inside Google Ads itself are a different thing and are not reachable at all without an ad account. Google's own page says the app runs in over 230 countries and territories, and Iran is not on that list.
Where it backfires
Two specific risks. First the number: ask what a click costs in your industry and you get an answer with a figure, a confident tone and no source; that this happens is not our guess, Anthropic keeps a page in its own documentation for reducing exactly that. The second risk is worse because it looks like help: a model tends to endorse your plan. OpenAI writes avoid sycophancy into its own model spec as an explicit goal, and the fact that it needs to be a goal tells you what the default behaviour is. If you want an opinion, ask it to attack the plan and give three reasons it fails, rather than asking what it thinks. And one clear boundary: do not ask a model to find a way around country restrictions; it is not reliable, it carries none of the risk, and we do not teach that on this site.
Sources: Anthropic docs: reduce hallucinations OpenAI Model Spec: avoid sycophancy Anthropic: supported countries and regions Google: where Gemini Apps are available
Where this advice stops
Four things are not here. First, no price: no cost per click, no suggested budget, no conversion rate. No such figure has been published for this market, and for other markets it moves with industry, season and competition. Second, this lesson is not a campaign setup guide; it is the decision before the campaign, and if the decision comes out positive, Google's own documentation is your next reference. Third, on intermediary routes we have named the risks only and give no guidance on carrying them out; do not read this as legal advice either. And fourth, what we quoted is the text of one Google help page on the date of this lesson; company policies change, and the only valid source for tomorrow is that same page on your tomorrow.
From our own work
The same hole you meet in Google Ads is there in the advertising data tools, and we run into it every day. Our own rank service fetches search volume for every keyword, and at the top of rgb-rank/includes/tools/keyword-enrich.php we wrote down that for Persian and for Iran the only path that returns data is a Google Ads search volume request without location_code and with language_code=fa. Which means a Persian keyword cannot be attributed to Iran, only to the Persian language. Keyword difficulty does not exist on that path at all: in the same note we recorded that calling bulk_keyword_difficulty and keyword_overview without a location both return an Invalid Field error, which is why the difficulty column for a Persian keyword is deliberately left empty instead of holding a guessed number. The conclusion that matters for this lesson: Iran's absence from Google Ads is not only a policy page, it is in the data too; so any report showing a cost per click figure for your industry in Iran took that number from somewhere else, and where that somewhere is remains unknown.
Real follow-up questions
What about YouTube or the Google Display Network?
All three are run from one Google Ads account, so the same account restriction and the same targeting restriction apply; the page we quoted in this lesson says these rules apply to all Google Ads products. A different ad format does not change the access question.
What about a company registered outside Iran?
That is a legal question and we do not have the answer; what we can say is what Google's page says: physical presence in a sanctioned country blocks signing in, and promoting a product based in that region takes you outside customised support. Corporate structure is something to settle with your own legal adviser and by reading the terms of service, not with an educational article.
So there is no paid advertising for an Iranian audience at all?
No, this lesson is only about Google Ads. Paid advertising exists in media that have an Iranian audience, from a sponsored post in a page or channel to local ad networks. What is not available is the specific advantage of a search ad: reaching someone exactly at the moment they typed the relevant phrase.