Adwords Makes Yet Another Change to the Display URL Policy

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 24^th, 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.