In adwords it’s been the case for some time that there can be only one instance of a display URL in use on the listings at any one time and that traffic clicking your advert should (regardless of tracking link hops) end up on the same domain as the display URL of your advert.

Some people have been legitimately (and not so legitimately) using alternate destination URLs for individual keywords, these have often been totally different domains to the display URL of the advert and it seems Google has had enough, So coming sometime in mid February Google will be making changes to ensure this is no longer allowed so it’d be wise to start reviewing your accounts to ensure that all individual keyword URLs are pointing to the same domain as your ads.

Excerpts from Google’s Notification :

“As you are aware, we require that your ad’s display URL match its destination URL (the URL of your landing page). Keyword URLs are also considered your Destination URL. We do not allow ads with display URLs that redirect to different destination URLs.”

The above is fine and established practice now.

“Keywords will be disapproved if they bring users to pages that are different to your Display URL.”

But above where it says “pages” it could be taken that traffic cannot even be sent to different pages on the same site depending on your display URL folder names !? and how you interpret the wording, for example your display could be “domainx.co.uk/Special-Offers” yet a keyword such as “blue blah offers” may have a URL that goes to “domainx.co.uk/Blue-Special-Offers” .. which would be a different page to the display URL ..

I’m thinking that Google will say this is fine and that I’m just being pedantic but I’ve emailed for clarification to be sure. *Update* In response to my questions our very nice Google rep replied with “As long as the domain is the same for your keyword destination URLs there will be no issue. So, the examples you give would be totally acceptable”

“Going forward, all display URLs within an ad group must be for the same top-level domain.”

This is going to affect some people, Two different sites could be 100% relevant to the keywords in an adgroup I guess so I don’t see the reasoning behind this for a change to be made unless it’s a quality score issue and Google doesn’t want to or can’t score two or more sites being sent traffic from the same adgroup and apply a median costing if the scores are different !?

“Additionally, in an effort to provide more relevant results and a higher quality experience for our users, we have made the decision to no longer allow multiple domains within a single ad group.”

Most people’s adgroups will already focus on one domain but for those who send traffic to different domains via two or more ads or by using the keyword URL feature you will now need a separate adgroup for each destination domain. I don’t see how this affects relevancy, an advert is shown in isolation to the user they don’t know whether it’s just a single advert in an adgroup or one of ten, they do the search and that search triggers the ad, the user sees the advert and clicks it and goes to site..

I really don’t see what difference to the user does it make if they go to site A or site B !?.. as long as they go where they expect to and the destination matches the display URL it makes no difference to the user.

Google are now saying you can still run the ads but not in the same adgroup, so you’ll now have to have two (or more!)adgroups with the same keywords but different ads, display and destination URLs… this seems a step backwards to me, it will be more work for advertisers and more server space for Google, however no doubt some new pricing differential will kick in and we’ll be paying handsomely for the privilege of two or more lots of the same keywords in an account.

“Please note that this amendment to our policy applies to all advertisers, regardless of previous exceptions or acceptability of any campaigns. While we understand there are legitimate use-cases for multiple domains within one ad group, we ask that separate ad groups are created for any given domain.”

Basically this is no exceptions regardless of past history or present needs however legitimate so we are all going to in the same boat! It’s early days so no doubt further clarification will come but for now there are a few weeks to trawl accounts and identify occurrences and get ready to make the changes.