I originally posted this in the General Marketing forum, but received no replies so I thought I'd try this forum. Our company has hired an Internet Marketing Consultant to handle our PPC advertising. When I search using our keywords on Google the resulting AdWords ads have the Display URL showing our company URL (www.ourcompany.com), but the destination URL always begins with http://ourcompany.marketingconsultant.com/. From that point on, any link I click on the destination page goes to an ourcompany.marketingconsultant.com URL. Basically the marketingconsultant's website is a mirrored copy of our company's website. So to my question: Isn't there a Google Display URL / Destination URL matching rule that this method violates which in the end will either lead to a low Quality Score and even a Google Slap? Thanks, Bill
If the destination url doesn't make it look like you're being sent to a totally different site, it probably doesn't transgress the adwords rules - but it raises a lot of other questions - why they are doing this? For tracking? - there are a lot of other more simple ways of doing this, and if they haven't screwed down the robots txt to ensure that the mirror site can't get indexed, you'll have a huge problem.
I've been told they're doing it for tracking purposes, but like you say there are easier ways of doing this. Looking at the page source(s) they appear to have done the robots meta tag corectly (<META name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">) I would have thought that having the display domain as: ourcompany.com and the destination url end up at: marketingconsultant.com it would be a clear violation of the latest google rules. I need to keep looking into this. Thanks for the comment, Bill
Hi Bill 1) I dont think Google will mind and would give you a lower PR/score 2) I agree there are better ways of doing it then what your IM consultant has recommended...query him/her as to WHY? Plz update us too!
Thanks. There are some other questions I have for the "experts", like sending specific product name results to generic pages (keyword - Widget gets sent to a generic products page where the user has to scroll well beyond the fold to find the Widget product rather than being sent directly to the Widgets product page). And we're paying good money for this. I'll let you all know what I find. Bill
Hi Bill, IMO Google could invalidate the ads as they are going to a different URL than is shown - when / if the account goes under periodic review Google will more than likely disable the ads. I have no idea why he's done this, unless he has some really good site conversion improvement tools which are only licensed to his domain. Have to say though that I don't think this is the case from what he's been telling you However, by doing this he's almost tied you into using him - he's in control of all your conversions, and if you do change provider you'll lose all your built up Quality Score. On the 2nd point - sending specific keywords to generalised pages with the product below the fold - a bad idea for conversions. Keywords should be split into very tight ad groups and then linked to individual landing pages - not only is this good for PPC (i.e. Quality Score AND Conversion Rates), but it also ends up creating a nice set of pages that is perfect for SEO - the two methods of search marketing can work REALLY well in tandem if you have the correct person to run it all for you...