New competitor took top spot, broke rules doing it

Is it worth reporting or just let it slide?

[whoisgregg]

One of my best performing creatives was always in the premium position even though I bid less than my competitors (by my estimation). I checked the serps today and a new competitor has taken the top spot and shifted all the ads back to the right column (no premium listings while G sorts out what the user likes best). All fine so far, competition can't be avoided...

The frustrating part is, the new advertiser's creative violates the Adwords TOS, specifically their display URL is ImAgreatMarketingURL.com when the actual destination URL is LongBoringCompanyNameThatHasNothingToDoWithProduct.com (not actual urls, btw)

What do you think is the best action to take:

Go tattle to adwords support? (You can tell I don't enjoy this idea.)

Make new creative for my campaign that uses better looking URL?

Do nothing and wait for google to catch it on their own?

Thanks in advance for any advice!

[stevenmusumeche]

I'm not sure that's against the TOS. I believe as long as your own the display URL, it can be different from the actual URL.

[Lokutus]

I'd complain.

One of my competitors was running two different ads simultaneously, at different bid prices, pointed at the same site. He pulled this off by pointing one ad at www.hisdomain.com and the other ad at [hisdomain.com....]

I complained which resulted in G stopping him from doing this. At one point, via a second site, he had three ads appearing in the first 8 Adwords ads.

What a hog.

[Fischerle]

Don't hesitate to complain, I do it all the time. Google can't possibly have the time and resources to catch everything on their own, and it is up to the honest advertisers to point out abuses. From my experience, Google takes these friendly complaints seriously.

[whoisgregg]

I bring it up because it's an entire section of the Editorial Guidelines (not the TOS, my mistake):
[adwords.google.com...]

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.
The Display URL field cannot be used as another line of ad text.

(Emphasis mine)

Seems straightforward enough to me that it's worth mentioning. I'll compose a message in the morning for adwords support. Thanks all!

I can't seem to make an https link clickable, sorry.

[whoisgregg]

Interestingly enough, the particular ad that brought this to my attention is no longer showing. So unless it shows up again tomorrow morning, I'm going to figure that Google caught it. :D

Of course, now that I know about this, I looked at a group of other advertisers and about one in ten seem to be using inaccurate display urls. However, their inaccurate URL's aren't actually 'marketing copy' urls so I don't think it is that big a deal to point it out to Google.

I couldn't care less if 'bigbluewidgets.com' had a display URL of 'blue-big-widgets.net' ... it was only 'Get-Your-Blue-Widgets-Here.com' that annoyed me.

[Syzygy]

What do you think is the best action to take:

*Go tattle to adwords support? (You can tell I don't enjoy this idea.)

This is business, right? So send an email to adwords support and remember...

We're in brawl with no rules.

Paul A. Allaire, Chairman & CEO, Xerox Corp

Syzygy

[whoisgregg]

It is business, which is why there was a decision to be made. The main motivation for not complaining would be to take advantage of the opportunity to use a better 'marketing language' display url that would increase my CTR.

Update, it turns out G didn't pull the ad, they just ran through their daily budget really fast. Writing that email... :)