Google Adwords Warning - wasting money on broken destination urls
January 18th, 2008
A friend of mine has just discovered he has wasted nearly $2000 on Google Adwords. The only reason he discovered this is that I happened to click on one of his Adwords ads and was taken to an error page.
In other words he has paid $2000 for people to land on an error page. Not a good investment.
The problem is that Google Adwords appends a tracking code to the destination url.
So rather than sending clickers to http://www.yourbusiness.com/23/12/ they get directed to something that looks like http://www.yourbusiness.com/23/12/?sa=l&ai=B6Rzo78ePR5LSGZSopATQn8noCPK.
This can be a problem with some web servers and content management systems (the popular Mambo / Joomla for example).
The big issue is that when you create the ad in the Google Adwords administration system and test the ads from there, the landing page works just fine. I wonder how many millions of dollars are being wasted by the combination of Google Adwords and content management systems?
I have read on another blog that Matt Cutts from Google is investigating putting dummy tracking code in the test ads so what you see is what you get. This would be a great development for advertisers.
I suspect it will also lead to an outcry because Adwords customers will realise their ads have never worked properly, their prospects being directed to the wrong page.
In the meantime I suggest that you do live testing of your Adwords ads. Set up a campaign for some cheap keywords and then test the urls that are presented in the real ads.
If you get error pages or the wrong page convert the content management system generated pages to flat html and then change the destination urls in the Google Adwords ads to these html pages.
My friend has asked for an account credit from Google. I’ll update this post on the outcome. I don’t like his chances, but you never know.
Sphere: Related ContentCategories: Google |
The very same thing happened to me. My business tanked and my google bills got higher. One of my pages hit counter shows 1/4 the traffic that Google has charged me for. After some research, I found out how to remove the gclid code that google was tacking on. Got to my account, then to account preferences and then under tracking disable the autotag. How mine got turned on, I have no idea because I didn’t do it. But turning it off solved the problem. It still doesn’t explain how Google can allow this to go on for so long and I am still waiting for the refund of the large amount of money they owe me. I have a way too many search words and campaigns to go in and manually check all of my ads…Google should have a system for picking this up..maybe they don’t want to?
I’ve had the same problem with our ads. We use 3dcart who tried to help, but what amazed me was how unhelpful the google people were. Since they clearly know about the problem, the only thing they said was that if I received a 404 message then there must be a problem with my hosting provider. I had given them the destination url I was using, all they had to do was click on it to see that it is works and is a valid page, but no. I have made the change Nancy suggested (thanks) and hope that will solve the problem.
I have something that may be related - I started using adwords a few weeks ago. Initially it worked, but then my account was “disapproved” intermittently for having a non-responsive URL.
I had friends and contacts check the URL from all over UK and other countries, all with no problem,but the guy at AdWords (are they REALLY in Leeds UK??) said that they could not get my site from their computers.
Now the problem is no longer intermittent, but “solid”. For over a week my adwords campaign has stalled “disapproved” due to a “faulty URL”.
The support centre in (Leeds?) are telling me that their technicians have checked and there is nothing wrong at their end. So is everyone else having a problem because their computer DOES see my site? (including customers who buy product but come from other sources!)
I’m looking into ADSENSE!