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Adwords Makes Yet Another Change to the Display URL PolicyPosted by Amber on January 26, 2009 in Google AdWords |
According to Google, advertisers are only allowed to have one domain name per ad group in their ad texts. You may no longer have multiple domain names for each ad text in your ad groups.
Advertisers today are allowed have an ad group with multiple domain names in each ad which include multiple display and destination urls. For example, currently in my shoes ad group I CAN have 2 ads running, both going to a different domain name, destination URL and therefore containing a different display URL:
Ad Group: Shoes
Ad text #1:
Title: Lot’s of shoes
Description: Nike shoes for sale.
Display URL: www.nike.com/womens
Destination URL: www.nike.com
Ad text #2:
Title: Lot’s of shoes
Description: Puma shoes for sale.
Display URL: www.puma.com/womens
Destination URL: www.puma.com
However, starting February 24th, 2009, Google Adwords will re-review all advertiser ads and disapprove any ads that contain multiple domain names like mentioned above.
Moving forward, you must have a separate ad group for each of your unique domain names.
Example:
Instead of the above, you will have to structure your campaigns like this:
Ad group: Nike
Ad text #1 display/destination URL: Nike.com
Ad text #2 display/destination URL: Nike.com/Womens
Ad group: puma
Ad text #1 display/destination URL: puma.com
Ad text #2 display/destination URL: puma.com/Womens
You get the point. The reasoning behind this update is the standard reason from Google, “to provide more relevant information and a better user experience”. If you don’t already have alerts set up in your Adwords account for disapproved ads I would recommend setting them up now. To do this just go to the ‘my account’ tab in your Adwords account, click on ‘account preferences’, under ‘notification preferences’ click ‘edit’. From here you can go to ‘notification topics’, under disapproved ads alerts and select your preference for online or email alerts.
If you prefer not to be notified this way, once the new policy takes place, you can go to the tools section, and click on ‘disapproved ads’ to get a list of all the ads that do not follow the display URL policy.
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January 27th, 2009 at 3:36 am
Hey Amber,
thanks for the heads up.
How would we go about split-testing new domains for CTR, then? If we include the same keywords in two different adgroups, Google is going to show only one of the two ads, isn’t it?
January 27th, 2009 at 7:22 am
@Vittorio, you are correct, now Google will only show one of the two ads if you go about it that way. I think what you will need to do is create two separate ad groups for your keywords. Run one ad group for a couple of weeks, then pause that ad group and run the other ad group for a couple of weeks, then see which domain is getting the better CTR. Does that make sense?
January 27th, 2009 at 8:32 am
Hey Amber,
yes, it does.
From a statistical standpoint it would be better to have the two ads run one against the other during the same time frame, but unfortunately that is no longer possible.
Thanks for letting me know about this major change, though!
January 27th, 2009 at 8:47 am
Great news! This should be a major improvement of using trademark terms in the URL line. It won’t prevent it, but it will make it much more difficult to administer. Maybe that post about TM’s in the URL line had an affect??
January 27th, 2009 at 9:50 am
@Tyler, keep in mind advertisers will still be able to use a http://www.domain.com/trademark extension in their display and destination urls.
May 12th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
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