I (attempt to) promote products in countries outside the USA via adwords. However my ads are continually rejected for "inaccurate display url" because google apparently can only spider/view a url from the US. But since most of these offers are not available in the US, US visitors are redirected to another url.
If google is going to offer advertising outside of the US then why can't/won't they view the urls as they are actually seen in the targeted country?
I work with many smaller ad networks that have the capability to do this.
Your only bet is to explain that to the support (live person). Google should have the ability to use proxy for the given country (at least manually).
I've tried explaining it multiple times to support via email and phone and they just can't seem to understand it. All they do is repeat the script they've been given in typical google-robot-speak which is that the "display url must match the destination url."
Apparently they just don't train their support people very well. More than once I've had ads disapproved for the same display/destination url issue because the rep didn't know what a tracking url was. They kept parroting the rote response. Twice I've had to send them the link from the google support pages explaining what a tracking urls is before they'd approve the ads.
If the support people don't know what a tracking url is you can be sure talking about IP addresses and geo-location is like speaking to them in Chinese.
My hope is that maybe AWA will see this and get it addressed by those higher up the food chain. I'm sure fixing it would be cheaper than all of the money they're losing out on because of this issue.
Google should have the ability to use proxy for the given country
this preview tool leads me to believe that they do:
www.google.com/adpreview
so you're redirecting visitors from the usa, on your landing page, to something applicable to them... and G isn't crawling you from the target area, so they're crawl is getting redriected too? does seem weird that G would want you to make the user experience worse to comply with their need to crawl. something tells me there's something else in play here - i think G's smart enough to grasp and handle the situation at hand here.
hmmm, not sure what to suggest. are you sure your redirection detection is absolutely bullet-proof and isn't inadvertently redirecting those that it shouldn't?
In the situation I'm referring to, I'm direct linking to offers that are only valid in say, Italy. If people in Italy were to click on the ad they would be sent to the correct landing page (the display url).
The problem is that google is apparently spidering (or viewing) the destination url, but since they're not in Italy, they're getting redirected to another landing page because the offer is not available in the US.
So they think that the destination and display url don't match. But if they were in Italy where the ad would be showing, it would match.
They can't seem to comprehend that for some reason. It just seems to me that if they want to be a player internationally, and since they offer ads in other countries it seems that they do, they need to view the ads as they are intended for the targeted countries.
Like I said, many smaller companies can do it, so I can only assume that google doesn't want to for some reason.
In addition, when you get your ad disapproved, what does the suggestion say?
All adwords support says is that the landing pages need to be viewable from the US or they can't approve them. I guess all of their spiders are US based? They apparently don't have a way for humans to view the landing pages through a proxy either. That and as I said before, the adwords reps don't even comprehend what tracking URLs are so they're totally clueless about proxies and IPs, etc.
The campaign they are in is set to USA. The only reason I can think of is that they are being checked from outside the USA, and they are not using proxies.
Google has reversed the disapprovals, but it meant I took time and effort to sort out something that shouldn't happen.
