{"id":122,"date":"2012-03-11T21:02:26","date_gmt":"2012-03-11T19:02:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.adwiserhq.com\/blog\/?p=122"},"modified":"2012-03-15T21:25:21","modified_gmt":"2012-03-15T19:25:21","slug":"make-sure-your-adwords-destination-urls-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.adwiserhq.com\/blog\/make-sure-your-adwords-destination-urls-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Make sure your AdWords destination URLs work"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you&#8217;re only advertising a certain website, and not managing it yourself, odds are that at one point one of the URLs your ads point to will not work. It happened to me, after a few years of no such issues whatsoever.<\/p>\n<p>That is a violation of <a title=\"AdWords destination URL policy\" href=\"http:\/\/support.google.com\/adwordspolicy\/bin\/static.py?hl=en&amp;page=guide.cs&amp;guide=1316546&amp;topic=1626336&amp;answer=1310892\" target=\"_blank\">Google AdWords Destination URLs policy<\/a>, which states, among others, the following:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Your website can&#8217;t be under construction or link to an error page.<\/li>\n<li>Your destination URL can&#8217;t return an error status code beginning with a 4 or a 5 (such as a 405 error).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>If you&#8217;ve been careful enough, you&#8217;ve asked your webmaster to make sure the website does not return an error status code for a page which does not work, or which no longer exists.<\/p>\n<p>I for one, when I&#8217;ve noticed that on E-Commerce websites products get moved, or they get deleted, and I was not notified by the shop manager that they&#8217;ve moved or they&#8217;re no longer sold, I asked the developers to redirect the broken URLs to a search results page, which checked for products matching parts of the old URL. If http:\/\/example.com\/widgets\/blue\/nice-blue-widget-medium-size.html was not available, the server redirected to http:\/\/example.com\/search\/nice+blue+widget+medium+size, and hopefully something similar was found, and a penalty was avoided.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>That worked fine until the day when the search engine was tweaked, a product name contained some unusual characters, and the search threw an error in the application and we promptly got a message from AdWords stating that four ads were disapproved. I was numbstruck, as I knew that repeated violations can lead to domain suspension and even the suspension of that account, and any other related accounts.<\/p>\n<p>So I left everything, remembered good old <a title=\"Xenu, the link checker\" href=\"http:\/\/home.snafu.de\/tilman\/xenulink.html\" target=\"_blank\">Xenu, the link checker<\/a>, a <em>reliable<\/em>, <em>fast<\/em>, and above all <em>free<\/em> application and put it to some good work.<\/p>\n<p>I created an ad report, and a keyword report (make sure to include the destination URL in the keywords report, it&#8217;s found in the &#8220;attributes&#8221; section of the metrics), took all the URLs I found there, excluded duplicates (you can easily do that in excel), and saved as a text file.<\/p>\n<p>Then I opened Xenu,\u00a0 and in its options I made sure I had the maximum depth set to 0 (I did not want Xenu to crawl all my links on the website, I only wanted that URL list checked). Then, I also checked &#8220;treat redirections as errors&#8221;, and in the Report area I asked it to report &#8220;redirected URLs&#8221; as well. I did that because I wanted to find the former pages which redirected to a search as well. I want my ads to point precisely to the page they&#8217;re supposed to, which is the most relevant page for that ad, not a search result page, because I need the highest quality score possible (and the lowest cost) for a certain keyword.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.adwiserhq.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/xenu_options.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-123\" title=\"Xenu crawling options\" src=\"http:\/\/www.adwiserhq.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/xenu_options.png\" alt=\"Xenu crawling options\" width=\"403\" height=\"350\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.adwiserhq.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/xenu_options.png 403w, http:\/\/www.adwiserhq.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/xenu_options-300x260.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 403px) 100vw, 403px\" \/><\/a>Very quickly I found the broken URLs and also the redirected ones. The broken URLs were reported as <em>not found<\/em>, and the redirected ones had a status of <em>object permanently moved<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-124\" title=\"Broken and redirected URLs\" src=\"http:\/\/www.adwiserhq.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/broken_urls.png\" alt=\"Broken and redirected URLs\" width=\"168\" height=\"71\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">By right clicking the troublesome URLs I could copy them to the clipboard, and then search for them in my Ad and Keywords reports, so I could identify the ads and keywords to which they belong.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" title=\"Xenu - Copy URL\" src=\"http:\/\/www.adwiserhq.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/xenu_copy_url.png\" alt=\"Xenu - Copy URL\" width=\"318\" height=\"159\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">Then I found the corresponding new URLs and replaced them, making sure that all the ads and keywords now point exactly to the URLs they&#8217;re supposed to.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, in an ideal organization, all parts whould work in sync, but a little prevention is always welcome, and can avoid serious consequences.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s how I did it, and I still do it, periodically. If you know a faster way of achieving the same results, I&#8217;d be glad to hear it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you&#8217;re only advertising a certain website, and not managing it yourself, odds are that at one point one of the URLs your ads point to will not work. It happened to me, after a few years of no such issues whatsoever. That is a violation of Google AdWords Destination URLs policy, which states, among [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-122","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-google-adwords","7":"entry"},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Make sure your AdWords destination URLs work - AdWiser<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"AdWords destination URLs must work at all times. 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