Google Violating Ad Editorial Guideline, Nothing really informative here. Options

[whitemark]

Came across this adsense ad -

Blog Ads
Learn how you can earn money by blogging. Put AdSense on your blog!
www.blogger.com

(Landing page of above ad)

According to the adwords editorial guidelines - "Your Display URL must accurately reflect the URL of your website. If your actual destination URL link is too long for your ad, use a shortened version (such as your homepage) that meets the character limit for this field."

I clicked the ad only because the URL was blogger.com, and I wanted to check out their landing page, which incidentally was on Google.com and I had already seen through this ad (I click on all Google ads to analyse it) -

Blog Ads
Have a blog? Earn revenue from relevant ads - Try Google AdSense
www.google.com/adsense

Talk about poor user experience ...

[JohnMu]

But that doesn't mean Google put the ad there :-)

I can run adwords for your site and nobody would know that it wasn't you. Of course if I run bad ads, then Google might remove them sooner or later, but I can do so for at least a few days until Google manually discovers them.

I ran a series of ads for a v7n-site just for fun, nobody knew that it wasn't the site owner who put them there . A fun week filled with funny ads for $10, why not see how it goes, I learned a bit about how Google handles these things, so it wasn't wasted.

One thing I did notice with those ads however was that when Google manually checked the ads (and marked some as not matching the content shown), they CLICKED on all of them (the whole group of 20 ads went from 0 clicks to 1 click and a little bit later they sent the mail). I thought that was kind of cheap, but perhaps that's normal.

John

PS seeing how they both target Adsense, it might also just be someone out for the "adsense signup-referrer bonus". Pretty certain actually. They can put the final destination URL into the adwords and usually get away with it, even if it is redirected through a referral tracker or similar (lots of affiliate sites do that, almost all of those ebay ads are affiliates).

This post has been edited by softplus: Mar 1 2006, 05:12 PM

[whitemark]

No it isn't a re-direct or spam ...

Here's the adsense URL of the same ad found using the Google Adsense Preview Tool:

CODE

http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/iclk?sa=l&ai=BxodR-B8GRLjYHI_IOYzuoZwFs73CFJ3Xip8BwI23AYDbNRABGAEgsp79ASgMQLgUSKU5UIP- iIz9_____wGIAQGYAaTZggKgAfOK9v4DsgEMZWtzdHJlbWUuY29tyAEB2gExaHR0cDovL2Vrc3RyZW1l
LmNvbS9waHBsYWJzL2FqYXgtbGluay10cmFja2VyLnBocJUCOV4OCg&num=1&adurl=http://www.google.com/services/adsense_tour/&client=ca-pub-3067059563042255

As you can see. the adurl is http://www.google.com/services/adsense_tour , and not to any redirect script ... (the &client=ca-pub-3067059563042255 is appended at the end of all adsense ad URL generated from my adsense preview tool; yours could be different. The page where I first found the ad -> http://ekstreme.com/phplabs/ajax-link-tracker.php )

seeing how they both target Adsense, it might also just be someone out for the "adsense signup-referrer bonus". Pretty certain actually.

Not sure about that. Unlike Amazon, Google doesn't give you a simple affiliate ID to create your own links. Their referral URL is generated automatically through a javascript code that displays the referral button and the URL which looks like this -

CODE

http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/iclk?sa=l&num=0&adurl=http://www.google.com/adsense%3Fai% 3DBrQRfECcGRJnhKpDGOYf0tJ0F2ZvSFKvFnc4BxY23AQAQASCH7_0BQLQSSJw5UI3dibMBoAGXlcj9A
8gBAoACAZUCHmQOCg& amp;ai=ButliECcGRJnhKpDGOYf0tJ0F2ZvSFKvFnc4BxY23AQAQASCH7_0BQLQSSJw5UIOi6p_8____
_wGgAZeVyP0DyAECgAIBlQIeZA4K

This URL also tracks the source page from which it was clicked. Each time the google adsense referral button is generated, an 'impression' for it is updated in the adsense database. Now, even if you somehow manage to use this URL in some ad, and your visitors do click it and join, you will not be credited with it because Google will know that it didn't generate any 'impression' for the referral button. It will most probably raise a flag to have it human reviewed ...

[JohnMu]

Hmm, so either someone is doing Ads for Google or Google is doing the ads themselves .... (scratches head)

Actually, I think it probably has to be Google. "Google" as part of the ad is a copyrighted term that is bannd for other users (unless they have a manual exception from the Adwords crew). I tried to use "Google" as part of my ads for my GSiteCrawler and they repeatedly (automatically) flagged it for removal from the ad (or has that changed lately?).

So..... the next time you see it, send them a complaint - click on "Ads by Gooooooogle" and "Send Google your thoughts on the ads you just saw", then choose "Report a violation". It won't change much, when Google makes the rules, Google makes the exceptions . But it's a neat find none the less!

John

[GuyFromChicago]

I tried to use "Google" as part of my ads for my GSiteCrawler and they repeatedly (automatically) flagged it for removal from the ad (or has that changed lately?).

Nopem it hasn't changed. I ran into about a week ago while trying to promote the book, The Google Story.