It seems that advertisers are able to still use some emojis in their Google AdWords ad copy.

Here is a copy of the AdWords emoji.

Emojis are against Google’s policies in AdWords, and in conjunction with that, most emojies are disabled in AdWords, similar to how they are also disabled in the Google organic search results.  But after we broke the story about emojis being used in Google’s Product Listing Ads, Google made an explicit change to their policies the next month, to ban emojis from being used in Store Names.

These particular emojis can get past the approval process in some cases.  The lightning bolt is the one we have seen, and it works not only for the title, but also the description lines too.  The emojis use the emoji character code to display properly.  And the lightning bolt is one of only a few emojis that have been getting through.

I am surprised there isn’t a whole ban on all emojis, or why this one slips through in some (but not all) cases.

The organic search results also had their own issue with emojis showing up too, and in full color in some cases.  They were showing up in Google Search results in titles, URLs and descriptions.  But after two months, Google pulled the plug on them.

If you do decide to try it, use it at your own risk, since it is against the AdWords rules.  And if you do get it approved, a competitor could spot it and report it.  I wouldn’t be surprised if the lightning bolt suddenly becomes an automatic disapproval in the future though.