Google Ads in Vietnam 2026: Registration, Billing, Compliance

Google Ads works fine in Vietnam. Your card is what doesn't.

I'm Mike, and I work on the payments side at YeezyPay. Most of what I know about a country comes from the moment something breaks — a declined charge, a frozen account, a media buyer messaging at 2am because the budget stopped clearing. Vietnam is unusual in that list. It isn't a restricted market and it never really was. Google has a registered Vietnamese company, it issues local VAT invoices in dong, and it pays tax into Vietnam's foreign-supplier portal like any domestic vendor would. And yet Vietnamese advertisers hit payment walls constantly.

That gap — open market, broken payments — is what this piece is about.

Vietnam has 85.6 million internet users and Google holds roughly 95% of search. The demand side was never the problem.

The market, in numbers worth trusting

DataReportal's Digital 2026 Vietnam report puts the country at 85.6 million internet users out of a population near 102 million — 84.2% penetration, up about half a million year on year. There are 137 million mobile connections, which works out to 134% of the population. YouTube reaches 62.1 million people there. Facebook and Zalo both sit around 78–79 million.

For search, StatCounter measured Google at 94.72% share in Vietnam as of August 2026, with local browser Cốc Cốc at 4.44% and Bing under half a percent. That's a measured figure, not a forecast, which is why I'd cite it over anything else in this space.

Ad spend estimates are messier and you should treat them that way. Research & Markets put Vietnamese digital ad spend at US$4.94bn in 2025 heading to US$5.39bn in 2026. Statista, working from a narrower definition, put digital at roughly US$1.29bn in 2024. That's a fourfold gap, and it's a definitional disagreement rather than one of them being wrong. Anyone quoting a single confident number for this market is quoting a methodology they didn't read.

One figure you'll see everywhere that I'd throw out: the "Google 28.4%, Meta 19.2%" ad-market-share split. I couldn't trace it past marketing blogs citing each other. Don't build a business case on it.

What actually changed: Google now sells to Vietnam from Vietnam

This is the fact most English-language guides still miss, and it changes almost everything downstream.

Google Vietnam Company Limited was registered on 31 May 2023 with its head office in Ho Chi Minh City. On 1 March 2025 it became the official seller for Vietnamese customers, replacing Google Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd. in Singapore. On 1 April 2025 the contractual rights and obligations for Vietnamese advertising customers formally transferred across.

So a Vietnamese advertiser today is buying from a domestic entity. Invoices come in VND. They carry 10% VAT. And to get a compliant e-invoice you need to hand Google a valid Vietnamese tax code, the registered company name and the registered address — matched exactly.

The tax number nearly everyone still gets wrong

If an article tells you Google Ads in Vietnam carries 5% foreign contractor tax, it's describing a world that ended in mid-2025.

Here's the honest chronology. Historically, cross-border digital ad services from a non-resident supplier fell under Foreign Contractor Tax under Circular 103/2014/TT-BTC — typically 5% VAT plus 5% CIT on advertising services. Decree 126/2020/ND-CP, Article 30.3, then made banks and payment intermediaries responsible for withholding tax on behalf of offshore suppliers that hadn't registered in Vietnam. That's the mechanism behind a lot of mysterious bank-side deductions. Circular 80/2021/TT-BTC set the operational rules from 1 January 2022, and the foreign-supplier e-portal went live in March 2022. Google, Meta, Microsoft, TikTok, Netflix and Apple all registered on it.

Then VAT Law No. 48/2024/QH15, passed 26 November 2024 and effective 1 July 2025, raised VAT on services supplied into Vietnam by foreign suppliers without a permanent establishment from 5% to 10%.

Period	Who billed you	Tax treatment	Can you credit it?
Before Mar 2025	Google Asia Pacific (Singapore)	FCT regime, ~5% VAT layer	Awkward — no local VAT e-invoice
From 1 Apr 2025	Google Vietnam Co., Ltd.	Local VAT e-invoice, 10%	Yes, with a tax code and non-cash payment

That last column is the part worth reading twice. Since 1 April 2025, a Vietnamese company with a tax code can credit the 10% input VAT on its Google Ads spend — provided the payment is non-cash and traceable to the company. Decree 181/2025/ND-CP, effective 1 July 2025, lowered the threshold for that non-cash payment requirement from VND 20 million to VND 5 million. Bank transfers and cards, including prepaid, all qualify as non-cash instruments.

Scale that. On a VND 500 million monthly ad budget, the 10% VAT is VND 50 million a month. If it's creditable, it's a timing item. If it isn't, it's a real cost of roughly US$24,000 a year on that budget alone. I'll come back to why this matters for the agency-account decision, because it's the single biggest reason a Vietnamese-registered company might be better off not using one.

The rules that govern advertising in Vietnam now

Two instruments replaced the old framework, both recent.

Instrument	Effective	Status
Law on Advertising 16/2012/QH13	2013	In force, as amended
Decree 181/2013/ND-CP	2014	Repealed 15 Feb 2026
Decree 70/2021/ND-CP	15 Sep 2021	Repealed 15 Feb 2026
Law 75/2025/QH15	1 Jan 2026	In force
Decree 342/2025/ND-CP	15 Feb 2026	In force — replaces 181 and 70

What matters in practice:

• Cross-border advertising is defined in primary law for the first time. Law 75/2025 covers foreign organisations and individuals using systems outside Vietnam to serve ads to Vietnamese users.
• Foreign advertisers not operating in Vietnam must engage a Vietnamese advertising service provider. Foreign entities that do operate locally can advertise their own goods and services directly. For everyone else, local intermediation moved from convenience to statutory requirement.
• 24-hour takedown. Decree 342 empowers the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism to demand removal of infringing ads within a day, addressed at advertisers, platforms, telcos and ISPs. Ignore it and access gets restricted at the network level.
• Prior notification. Cross-border ad service providers notify the ministry 15 days before starting activity — name, transaction name, registered head office, main server location.
• Format caps. Decree 342 limits non-skippable online video ads, widely reported as the five-second skip rule.
• Criminal liability for advertising violations was strengthened. It used to be an administrative matter almost exclusively.

One more thing that trips up older guides: the Ministry of Information and Communications no longer exists. It was dissolved on 18 February 2025 and merged into the Ministry of Science and Technology, with advertising oversight handed to the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism. If your compliance doc names MIC as the regulator, it's out of date.

There's also a White List and a Black List, published by ABEI. The White List covered 301 newspapers and e-magazines, 1,381 aggregated information sites and 953 social networks at launch in March 2023, growing to around 4,000 verified properties by March 2024. The Black List named 403 websites in January 2024. Advertisers and agencies are prohibited from working with blacklisted sites. White List placement is encouraged rather than required.

Why Vietnamese cards fail on Google Ads

Four causes stack on top of each other, and they're all documentable.

Biometric lockout. State Bank of Vietnam Decision 2345/QD-NHNN, effective 1 July 2024, required biometric verification for online transfers above VND 10 million per transaction. Circulars 17/2024/TT-NHNN and 18/2024/TT-NHNN went further: from 1 January 2025, banks must suspend or limit online transactions for holders who haven't updated biometrics or whose ID has expired. The corporate deadline was pushed to 1 July 2025. Over 38 million accounts got verified within three months of rollout. If yours lapsed, you simply cannot pay. Google's own Vietnam help page tells cardholders to update biometric data with their bank, calling it a requirement for all cardholders in Vietnam as of 1 January 2025.

International use switched off. Many Vietnamese-issued cards ship with cross-border e-commerce disabled by default. It's a toggle in the banking app, and most people don't know it's there until a charge fails.

Domestic-only routing. Under Circular 19/2016/TT-NHNN, from 1 January 2020 card transactions carrying international-scheme BINs must route through an SBV-licensed switch — in practice NAPAS. A NAPAS-only domestic card will never authorise a Google charge. No amount of retrying fixes that.

The FX regime. Vietnam prohibits pricing and settling domestic transactions in foreign currency. Paying for imported services counts as a current transaction and is permitted through authorised credit institutions with supporting documents — but individuals face hard limits. The cash FX purchase cap runs to US$100 per person per day under Circular 20/2011/TT-NHNN, and Circular 20/2022/TT-NHNN, effective 15 February 2023, tightened the permitted purposes for one-way transfers abroad. A registered company has a clean legal path here. A freelancer largely doesn't.

How a declined card turns into a suspended account

Here's the loop I see more than any other, and it's almost entirely self-inflicted.

A card declines. The advertiser assumes the card is bad, so they add another. That one declines too, for the same underlying reason — biometrics, or the international-use flag, or NAPAS routing. They add a third. Maybe they borrow a colleague's card. Somewhere in there, Google's risk systems stop seeing a payment problem and start seeing a fraud pattern.

Google lists the triggers for a suspicious payment activity suspension explicitly: stolen card numbers, using another person's identity for invoicing, multiple new cards in quick succession, declined payments, chargebacks, and unclear card ownership or billing details. Read that list against the four failure causes above. A Vietnamese advertiser fighting a bank-side block will generate three or four of those signals inside a week without doing anything dishonest.

My honest opinion, after watching this play out across a lot of countries: the suspension isn't punishing what you did, it's punishing the shape of what you did. Google can't see your bank's biometric queue. It sees four cards in five days.

For scale, Google's 2025 Ads Safety Report — published April 2026 — records 8.3 billion ads blocked or removed and 24.9 million advertiser accounts suspended during 2025. That's actually down roughly 36% year on year, and Google credits Gemini-based review with cutting incorrect suspensions by 80%. The system is getting better. It's still not going to guess why your card failed.

Verification: what Vietnam-specific documents Google accepts

Advertiser verification asks organisations for two things: registration documents, and a government photo ID for an authorised representative.

For Vietnam specifically, Google accepts a Business Registration Certificate, an Investment Registration Certificate, or an official letter from a government department carrying full name, address and date. For the representative: passport, national ID card, driving licence or permanent residence card.

The rules on document quality are stricter than people expect. Colour images only. Unexpired. No photocopies, no screenshots of a screen. And the details must match your payments profile exactly — not approximately, exactly. A company name with a different legal suffix, or an address that's been updated with the tax office but not with Google, is enough to bounce the submission.

Timelines: roughly 30 days to respond to the request, roughly 30 days to complete it, and review usually lands within five working days, occasionally stretching to 30.

If you don't have an ERC yet, that's the starting point — Vietnam's enterprise registration certificate typically issues in three to seven working days, and the enterprise code doubles as your tax code, which is the same number Google needs for the VAT e-invoice.

Verticals: where Vietnamese advertisers actually get blocked

Two layers apply at once, and they don't agree with each other.

Vietnamese law, under Articles 7 and 8 of the Advertising Law, bans outright: goods and services banned from trade, tobacco, spirits at 15% ABV or above (wine below 15% is allowed in print and e-press only), prostitution, weapons and ammunition, pornographic and "reactionary" products, and toys harmful to children. Pharmaceuticals, medical devices, cosmetics, food supplements and chemicals need pre-clearance from the Ministry of Health or the relevant ministry before the ad may run at all.

Then Google's own policy layer sits on top:

Vertical	Status in Vietnam, 2026
Offline gambling	Prohibited — Vietnam is on Google's restricted list
Online lottery	Newly permitted from 24 June 2026 for entities authorised as Vietlott agents, with certification
Social casino games	Group 2 certification requirements apply
Crypto exchanges and wallets	Not permitted — Vietnam isn't an approved target location
Pharma, supplements, cosmetics	Ministry pre-clearance required under Vietnamese law before running
Spirits ≥15% ABV	Banned under Vietnamese law regardless of Google policy

The crypto line is the strangest thing in this entire article, and it's worth spelling out.

Vietnam passed a Law on Digital Technology Industry on 14 June 2025, effective 1 January 2026 — the first standalone law of its kind anywhere — and it formally recognises crypto assets as a category of digital asset. Resolution 05/2025/NQ-CP, dated 9 September 2025, launched a five-year controlled pilot for issuing, trading and supervising crypto assets, and the Ministry of Finance started accepting crypto trading service licence applications on 20 January 2026.

Meanwhile Google's cryptocurrency policy still doesn't list Vietnam among approved targeting locations. The approved set nearby runs South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and the UAE. Vietnam isn't on it. So you can now get licensed to run a crypto exchange in Vietnam and still be unable to advertise it there on Google. I'd expect that to change, but I wouldn't build a launch plan around when.

The agency account question, answered honestly

Vietnam already has a dense local market for renting Google Ads accounts — search thuê tài khoản Google Ads and you'll find providers quoting MCC access in dong. The demand is real and the logic isn't wrong: sub-accounts sitting under an established manager account inherit billing history, higher thresholds and better escalation paths, and the advertiser skips the card-decline problem entirely because the manager account pays Google.

Here's the part most providers won't tell you.

If a Vietnamese-registered company routes its spend through a foreign manager account, it doesn't receive a Google Vietnam VAT e-invoice against its own tax code. That means no input VAT credit on the 10%, and a much harder argument for deducting the cost against corporate income tax. Under Decree 181/2025 it also needs non-cash payment evidence in the company's own name for anything at or above VND 5 million.

So the real comparison for a Vietnamese SME isn't "agency fee versus Google's fee." It's "agency fee versus 10% recoverable VAT plus a clean deductible expense." On most ordinary verticals, that maths favours paying Google directly and fixing the card.

Who the agency route genuinely fits:

• Individuals and unregistered sole traders with no ERC and no tax code — there's no VAT credit to lose, and the FX rules are hostile to them anyway.
• Affiliates and media buying teams with real account-churn risk, where continuity of spend is worth more than an invoice.
• Foreign advertisers targeting Vietnam, who now face a statutory requirement to engage a local advertising service provider under Law 75/2025.
• Anyone needing scale beyond what biometric-gated Vietnamese cards will authorise in a day.

Who it doesn't fit: a registered Vietnamese company running an ordinary vertical with a working card. Pay Google, take the invoice, credit the VAT.

Two risks to name plainly. First, cross-contamination — if enough sub-accounts under one manager account violate policy, the manager account and everything under it can go down together. That's a reason to ask a provider how they screen who else is in their MCC, and to treat a shrug as an answer. Second, and this one is non-negotiable: several providers in the Vietnamese market openly advertise cloaking as a feature. That's a direct Terms of Service breach. A provider selling it is telling you what their other clients are doing inside the same manager account your campaigns would sit in.

A worked example from our side

We onboarded a Ho Chi Minh City performance team last year — e-commerce, entirely legitimate, a registered company with a valid tax code. They came to us convinced they'd been shadowbanned by Google. Four cards in six days, all declining, then a suspicious-payment-activity suspension on the main account.

The actual cause was two settings. The company's authorised representative hadn't completed corporate biometric verification, which had a 1 July 2025 deadline they'd missed by weeks. And their primary card had international transactions disabled. Neither problem was visible in Google Ads. Both were visible in the banking app in about four minutes.

We funded their agency sub-accounts to keep campaigns running while the appeal moved, and they fixed the bank side in parallel. The interesting bit is what happened afterwards: once the direct billing worked again, they moved most of their spend back to their own account and kept only the higher-risk testing budget on the agency side. That was the right call, and it's the one I'd give most registered Vietnamese companies. They wanted the VAT invoice, and they were entitled to it.

Two things I couldn't confirm

I'd rather flag these than guess.

Monthly invoicing in Vietnam. Google publishes global eligibility criteria — a registered business at least a year old, an account in good standing for six months, and spend of at least US$5,000 a month in any three of the last twelve. It does not publish a country availability list. Whether Vietnamese accounts qualify isn't stated in official documentation. Ask your rep rather than trusting a blog.

USD-denominated accounts. Everything reported since the April 2025 entity transfer says Vietnamese billing addresses now settle in VND. Google hasn't published an explicit statement about whether legacy USD accounts persist. If you're running one, don't assume it's permanent.

A checklist before you spend

1. Confirm your ERC is current and note the enterprise code — that's your tax code for the VAT e-invoice.
2. Complete biometric verification with your bank, for the individual and, if applicable, the corporate account holder.
3. Enable international and online transactions on the card you'll bill.
4. Check the card is on an international scheme BIN, not a domestic-only NAPAS product.
5. Check your daily transaction limit against your intended daily spend, then raise it.
6. Match your Google payments profile to your registration documents character for character.
7. Enter your tax code, registered name and registered address so Google Vietnam can issue a creditable 10% VAT invoice.
8. Check your vertical against both layers — Vietnamese law first, then Google policy. They don't overlap neatly.
9. If a payment fails, stop. Diagnose it at the bank before adding a second card.

That last one is the whole article in a sentence. Nearly every Vietnamese suspension I've looked at started as a fixable bank setting and became an account problem because someone tried the obvious thing three more times.

Vietnam isn't a hard market. It's a well-regulated one with a payments layer that breaks for specific advertiser profiles — and once you know which profile you are, the fix is usually smaller than the panic.

Last verified: September 2026. Vietnam's advertising framework under Decree 342/2025 is new and implementing guidance is still landing, and Google's country-level gambling and crypto lists move several times a year. Check both against current sources before acting.