Display URL Policy Change: what does it mean?
So april 1st has come and a lot of Adwords advertisers are being confronted with the new display url policy change. From now on Google will be enforcing that the display URL will be the same as the destination URL. So does this mean there is no room to play anymore?
In previous months publishers were getting more and more creative in using the display URL to their advantage. For example when www.domain.com is already taken by an ad, they would use www.domain.co/m or www.domain.com.uk as the display URL so as to avoid the double serving rule. So now Google is finally taking action.
When looking at some examples in the Adwords Help Center posting about this topic, it seems they are being very strict:
For example, the following would be acceptable:
- Display URL: www.google.com/adwords
- Destination URL: www.trackingurl.com/google123
- Landing page URL: www.google.com
However, this example would be unacceptable:
- Display URL: www.google.com/adwords
- Destination URL: www.trackingurl.com/google123
- Landing page URL: www.trackingurl.com
Quite straightforward, isn’t it? But the second example already shows more space for creativity:
For example, the display URLs below would be acceptable for the landing page URL of http://sub.google.com/miscellaneous, as the top-level domains match:
- sub.google.com
- google.com/extratext
- www.google.com/extratext
So the main thing seems to be that display URL ‘domain.com’ should go to destination URL ‘domain.com’. But everything before (a subdomain) or after ‘domain.com’ can be different between display and destination URL. For example you are promoting a product and the destination url is www.domain.com/strangedescription.htm then the display URL could still be product.domain.com. Or www.domain.com/product. Or domain.com/anything-product-related … as long as domain.com goes to domain.com!
Tip: You do not see the URL product.domain.com being used very often, but I have found that it usually converts very well.
