AdWords Adviser

Archive for January 18th, 2010

Don’t miss a word of this if your AdWords ads send people to a blog hosted on a public domain like Blogspot or WordPress. Google have recently made a very important change to the rules concerning the domain name that you display within your ad.

The fact of the matter is that a display domain name like  blogsplot.com/blue-widget that would have recently been perfectly acceptable, now has to include your sub-domain in the ad, for example, adviser.blogspot.com/blue-widget.

Okay, you’re probably thinking, what a pain it’s going to be to check all your ads to make sure the display URL conforms to the new rule. But, if you really think about it, this rule change actually makes good sense.

Imagine, for a moment, how many independent blogs there are on domains like Blogspot and WordPress – thousands right! Isn’t it proper that each should be independently identified rather than lumped together under Google’s good name?

Now keep in mind that this new rule change only applies to public domains like Blogspot and Wordpress. Imagine your ads destination URL was something like, newsletters.adwords-adviser.co.uk/ a  display URL of adwords-adviser.co.uk would still be acceptable. 

How Does This Rule Change Effect You?

If you’re like me and you send visitors to your own hosted blog, then you need not make any changes to your ads. But, if you send visitors to a publicly hosted blog like Blogspot or WordPress, then you’ll need to update all your ads soon.

Google will probably give you a certain amount of slack, so there is no need to panic. But in a week or two you can bet that they will start disapproving ads that don’t comply with this new ruling.

 Resources Used In Writing This Blog

Policy Adjustment For display URLs
The display URL (the URL that appears within the ad itself) shows potential visitors to a site where they’ll land when they click on an ad.

Google Tightening Rules On Adwords Display URLs
If you use Google Adwords as part of your search engine marketing then you may be interested in some small changes that Google has made in relation to the display URLs.

AdWords Display Url Policy Adjustment
In case you missed it, AdWords made a slight policy change on display URLs this week. You have to include the sub-domain now. So if your destination URL is blue.widgets.com, you have to display that, and not use widgets.com.