I tried to run an adwords campaign for an affiliate program that I’m promoting. I wanted to have the person viewing the ad click on it and take them directly to the landing page of the product I was promoting. That’s where the trouble began!
For those of you who don’t know, Google AdWords has two URL fields that you need to fill out when creating an adwords ad – the Display URL and the Destination URL. I built an example of an ad below:
What I wanted to happen is to have my website address in the Display URL and my affiliate link as the Destination URL. This created a problem as every ad I created was rejected by Google. Bastards. I thought that this was what CPC marketing was all about! LOL. I checked their policy and it states:
Display URL
“This is the URL displayed on your ad to identify your site to users. This URL displayed is limited to 35 characters; it need not be the same as the URL your ad links to, but it should be an actual URL that is part of your site”.
Ok, that made sense to me? So what Google is saying is that the Display URL can be different than the URL your ad links to. But I still got rejected. I searched (using Bing) for some guidance on this. I found that it was all over the map – some people had the same problem while others could have their affiliate link in the Destination URL.
Totally confused I did some more digging around the Google AdWords site and found this:
So as not to mislead users, the display URL should give users a clear idea of the website or landing page to which they will be taken when they click on an ad. Display URLs must:
- Indicate who owns the destination URL, but does not need to match the actual destination URL of the landing page exactly.
- Appear to be a viable website address. It must include the appropriate extension such as ‘.com,’ ‘.net,’ and ‘co.uk,’ but ‘www’ and ‘http://’ are not required.
- Represent a website. The display URL also cannot be an email address. For example, ‘flowers@flowers.com’ would not be allowed.
- Comply with editorial policy, which will be discussed in later topics.
Here is an example of a correct and an incorrect display URL:
Correct:
Destination URL: bigbookstore.com/new/a-c.htm
Display URL: bigbookstore.comClicking on the ad takes users to a page within the bigbookstore.com website. Even though the display URL is different from the destination URL, it accurately represents where the user will be taken when he or she clicks on the ad.
Incorrect:
Destination URL: http://www.amazon.com/home.html/104-7002842-259
Display URL: bigbookstore.comThe display URL bigbookstore.com does not accurately represent the site to which the user will be taken, which is a page within the amazon.com domain. This is improper use of the display URL. An ad with this display URL would not be approved.
Nice! In one place, Google is telling us we can use different URLs and in the other they say that it isn’t allowed. In the end, I created a landing page on my site in order to use Google AdWords. I’ll let you know how it goes!
Until next time…Bing!
Geoff
2 Comments
Good article and keep writing.
Thanks!
It’s very nice post about Google Adwords Mistake.