Adwords URL Policies

[greghill]

Hi. Newb here, and still trying to figure things out.

I have seen numerous statements that Google has a policy that the display and destination URLs must match, however I cannot find anything that says so in the policy pages in Adwords Help. Has this policy changed or is it posted elsewhere and I'm just missing it? In reality, I have an ad with differing URLs and it is running fine. For example:

Disp. URL - merchantsite.com
Dest. URL - mysite.com (which redirects to the merchant site)

Also, here is a snippet from Adwords Help:

"...we monitor and don't allow the following:

* Redirect URLs: Ads that contain URLs that automatically redirect to the parent company.
* Bridge Pages: Ads for web pages that act as an intermediary, whose sole purpose is to link or redirect traffic to the parent company.
* Framing: Ads for web pages that replicate the look and feel of a parent site. Your site should not mirror (be similar or nearly identical in appearance to) your parent company's or any other advertiser's site."

Redirect URLs - like I stated above, I'm doing it. Is it that they just haven't caught it yet?

Bridge Pages - sounds like a typical landing page where you get the customer to click through to the merchant. Isn't that what everybody is doing?

Framing - where could they possibly draw the line between "similar" and not?

These all sound to me like common practices by many affiliates. Are they just getting away with it or am I misunderstanding? Any help clarifying my newb understanding would be greatly appreciated.

gh

 

[Linda Buquet]

I'm with you Greg, I don't really understand. It does appear some of them get away with it until they get manually reviewed or something.

 

[FDC]

Ya, i also find it interesting because you see all these marketing infomercials and books that tell you how you can make loads of money online without a website- presumably through AdWords.

 

[greghill]

I found the answer to my first question .. don't know how I missed it.


"Your display URL must accurately reflect the URL of the website you're advertising. It should match the domain of your landing page so that users will know which site they'll be taken to when they click on your ad."

I have an adgroup that violates this policy, so I'll fix it, but I really wonder why Google doesn't slap me since it would seem to be an easy catch for them.

 

[Anomaly]

I found the answer to my first question .. don't know how I missed it.


"Your display URL must accurately reflect the URL of the website you're advertising. It should match the domain of your landing page so that users will know which site they'll be taken to when they click on your ad."

I have an adgroup that violates this policy, so I'll fix it, but I really wonder why Google doesn't slap me since it would seem to be an easy catch for them.

Hi Greg ...

They would've caught you eventually ... it's better that you fix it before they catch you, because once they catch you for it once they keep a very very close eye on all your urls ...

My other other thought is that your display url did match the url that the customer eventually landed on ... which might technically have let it slide through .... but of course, with adwords policy, only one display url from the same site is shown on any one page, so you would've been missing out that way if someone had big higher and showed the same display domain.