Moving Domains, will Site Targeting follow?

How do I make sure my advertisers Ads show on my new URL?

[pholmstr]

How do I ensure that advertisers that are using site targeting to show Ads on my site will still show Ads under my new domain? I am already planning on taking these steps:

- Use Google Webmaster Tools to move domain
- 301 Redirects to new domain

When I look at my Adsense reports, about 50% of my income is coming from Placement based Ads. eCPM is higher by a factor of 10x.

So I obviously don't want to kill all those Ads off, but I think this move is best for the long term branding of my site.

Any help would be great! Thanks!

[netmeg]

This doesn't seem like a good idea.

If your advertisers are targeting you by domain, and you put a 301 up, I'm not entirely sure that targeting will still work (or be within Google's TOS - seems like that could be used for all kinds of nefarious purposes if it was)

And if you just switch over to the new domain, your existing advertisers won't know you have switched. Unless they're targeting you by category, but even then you'll probably experience a dip - could be weeks, even months before it all comes back.

Gotta say - if I were making a fair sum off AdSense on this site, I wouldn't do it.

[BigDave]

Sounds like you are in for a dramatic short term drop in income. I hope your reason for changing domains is worth it.

I don't think there is any way to "make sure" those ads are moved to the new domain, without the advertisers targeting your new domain.

[pholmstr]

Why would creating 301 redirects to a new domain be in violation of Google's TOS? They are targeting me because they think my site's content is relevant to their Ads, not because of the name of my domain.

It would be a nice feature in Adwords if Advertisers would be notified that a URL they are targeting is being redirected to another domain and would they like to continue advertising on the new domain.

This is something that would be very straightforward (automatic) if I were working directly with Advertisers. If the whole point of Adwords/Adsense is to make creating direct partnerships unnecessary, then supporting these features only makes sense.

[netmeg]

yea, but suppose I pick up a lot of placements on one domain, and then suddenly decide I want to divert those placements to another, entirely unrelated domain for however long I can get away with it. I could conceivably burn up a lot of advertiser money that way.