Google is making a policy change for Adwords ads that is likely to make waves in the internet marketing community. As of April Google will require the display url of an ad to match the destination url exactly.

Here is what Google says:

Important Change to URL Policy Enforcement
Starting in April, display URLs for new ads will be required to match their destination / landing page URLs, without exception. Please adjust your URLs accordingly when creating new ads.

Wow – that is going to make a big impact on a lot of folks – mostly affiliate marketers who use these ads to shill other peoples products, but it will also affect people that just don’t have short urls for their landing pages – especially deep interior pages.

Take for instance you are using a long-tail keyword to sell a certain brand and model of shoe, you want to take that customer to that exact page on your site, odds are it will be a lengthy dynamic url such as:

http://golfshoestore.com/shopdisplayproducts.asp?catalog=6912&mfg=Oakley

Now how are you going to fit that in your ad’s display url? I believe Google does not allow redirected urls to be sued so its not like you can just create a shortened redirect url to solve this either.

Very interesting – I am going to have to hop around and see what others are saying about this.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 6:12 pm and is filed under Adwords. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.