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.

These tags will emphasize to Adsense what portion of your page Adsense should use to find relevant ads:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>
GOOD CONTENT HERE
<!– google_ad_section_end –>

You can also block off sections that you do not want to be picked up by Adsense by adding a (weight=ignore) to the start tag:

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>
BAD CONTENT HERE
<!– google_ad_section_end –>

This is handy for blocking out headers, footers, sidebars, menus or whatever portions of your site don;t use your desired keywords. This can also come in handy when you post something on a blog that all of sudden changes all your ads to something wacky.

Be careful though – if you don’t provide enough content within the tags you will actual lose relevancy and may even get stuck with Public Service Ads.

Read more on section targeting from Google

If these tags are working for you – here is a great post to read, it’s a few years old but all the tips are still valid ways you can use to increase ad relevancy on your site.