Ok I'm not the most experienced Marketer on the net. I admit that I don't know how everything works. But this one takes the cake. I placed an ad with adwords the other day and if I do say so myself, it was a well put together ad. Good Key words, good bid on them, so on and so forth. This afternoon I open my email to find an email from Google saying that my ad was disapproved. The reason they gave was because they said "the back button was not enabled." To begin with I don't own the site, I have no control over how the webmaster set up the site and how it interacts with the different browsers. Now If somebody would explain this to me I would appreciate it very much. How could this be a valid reason for disapproving my ad. I'm pretty sure about the following. When a link is clicked, one of 3 things can happen. It might open up a new browser, (where the back button wouldn't be active because that would be the first window opened for that browser opening.) Or if they were using Netscape or one of the other multi tabed browsers and depending on how the user set up his preferences, a new tab would be opened (where the back button wouldn't be active in the new tab, because that would be the first instance for that tab.) Or If the user set up his preferences differently, it might open another window and we're back at option 1. The only other thing I can think of that could cause this problem, would be if the webmaster set it up to disable the back button on all of the browsers any time the web site was opened. Now I figure that there are some very capable coders out there, but to code this, to effect all browsers would entail some deep codeing and I can't see any way that this would be of benifit in any case so this seems to be reaching. I was going to paste the actual disapproval information from the disapproval page but it has been removed. Further checking has shown that the ad has been removed also. I guess they can't follow my logic. I responded to their disapproval through the feature on their disapproval page and explained what I've put here and I guess they didn't like my explanation. I am just about as confused as a person can be about this issue. I wonder if anybody might be able to explain to me why this happened the way it did and why I feel like I've got something very hard deep in a very uncomfortable part of my anatomy.
Some sites do indeed annoyingly try to 'break' the back button with some javascript code or other nonsense that stops you backing out of their site to wherever you were before... and since just about all browsers understand javascript, it works on pretty much all of them and has nothing to do with browser settings. It should be easy enough to test the site you're promoting, visit the site after visiting somewhere else first, then try using the back button to get back to where you were. I can understand and approve if Google does not allow this behaviour from its advertisers.
Thanks Berserker for the info about the jave scripts. I was unaware that it was such a simple thing. Considering this, I guess I can understand how blocking the back button could be be an issue but that is not the case in this instance. I took your suggestion and went to the google search page put in something for it to search for, then went to the site that was disapporved and guess what. I had no problem using the back link at all. In fact I checked this by doing the test you suggested a number of times and had no problem with the back button at all. So this is one for the boards.
Last week I added over 3000 keywords to a campaign. All pointing to the same landing page. Two of the keywords were disapproved because "the back button was not working". All the rest were approved! I added the two keywords again, and this time they got approved. Looks like the 'back button check' is not foolproof.
Can't say I've ever had this problem. Probably worth reporting to Google if it's erranous. Original poster, try re-adding your Ad.
rleeq, From what H20 says, sounds like Google can and does make mistakes, so you should just try re-submitting like alur3n suggests.