Don't want to bore you Internet Marketing pros out there, but here is my story.
I started on Monday 3/17/08 with a Commission Junction 123inkjet campaign using Google Adwords pointing to a url with a 301 redirect. Things went ok for a couple of days as I experimenting with keywords. Two nights into the campaign I got my first click. Cool, I paid .50 and earned $1.92 (I was shooting for 100 clicks in a week).
Not bad..back to the keywords. Then, on 3/19 I noticed my impressions halted. All of my new keywords went inactive with minimum bids of $5.00 & $10.00.
I added a keyword with some random keystroke characters and the minimum bid came back as $5.00. OK - now I am new at this, but I knew something was up.
This morning I finally found out what happened. Google posted the below notification on my Adwords account.
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. Here is the link from Google with more details.
Apparently the new policy requires that your Ad domain exactly match the destination domain of the landing url. They want the user to know that the URL in the ad will be the URL they will get if they click the ad.
Now I can appreciate why this is being done. But it would have been nice if Google was more explicit in explaining this in Adwords. I am sure it is buried deep somewhere in the recently updated TOS documents. But for this new Adwords user is was not obvious at all.
Maybe I was foolish to have tried this approach or maybe I should have used another means of traffic other than Google Adwords.
An Affiliate wanna be learns his first lesson.
Ray
I started on Monday 3/17/08 with a Commission Junction 123inkjet campaign using Google Adwords pointing to a url with a 301 redirect. Things went ok for a couple of days as I experimenting with keywords. Two nights into the campaign I got my first click. Cool, I paid .50 and earned $1.92 (I was shooting for 100 clicks in a week).
Not bad..back to the keywords. Then, on 3/19 I noticed my impressions halted. All of my new keywords went inactive with minimum bids of $5.00 & $10.00.
I added a keyword with some random keystroke characters and the minimum bid came back as $5.00. OK - now I am new at this, but I knew something was up.
This morning I finally found out what happened. Google posted the below notification on my Adwords account.
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. Here is the link from Google with more details.
HTML:
https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=47173Apparently the new policy requires that your Ad domain exactly match the destination domain of the landing url. They want the user to know that the URL in the ad will be the URL they will get if they click the ad.
Now I can appreciate why this is being done. But it would have been nice if Google was more explicit in explaining this in Adwords. I am sure it is buried deep somewhere in the recently updated TOS documents. But for this new Adwords user is was not obvious at all.
Maybe I was foolish to have tried this approach or maybe I should have used another means of traffic other than Google Adwords.
An Affiliate wanna be learns his first lesson.
Ray