I know their are quality checks for landing pages, so I'm curious how a 301 redirect might affected this.
Also related, if you add site A to your competitor filter, but not site B, would the above ad be displayed, since site B page is the one where it would really land? What about vice-versa, if site B was added to the filter list, but not site A.
Does anybody know what effect would happen if an ad had site A as its display url, and site B as its landing url that then 301 redirected for tracking to site A?
It's very common to use this technique to track clicks, place cookies, etc - so there's really not an issue since the eventual landing page URL is the display URL.
However, there are two things to keep in mind:
1. Are you breaking the back button (or making it difficult to click back to the search page)?
2. If the display URL was site A, then there would be an issue as your users are landing on a different site - so you are doing it the correct way.
As for how the competitive filter works, I'm not sure if it's based on the redirect URL or just the eventual landing URL - that's an interesting thing to find out. One competitive filter could potentially block every ad from an agency/platform which uses the same domain for redirects.
