Ads wrongly disapproved because of display URL

[La_Valette]

We're seeing several ads being rejected over the last week or so because of AdWords incorrectly thinking their display URL isn't as it should be.

In all cases, the display URL was correct. What happened is that the AdWords system wasn't following the destination URL to its final destination after all redirects were complete, and was stopping at one of the intermediate destinations for some reason.

This has always happened to a small extent, but it seems to have become much more common over the last few days. Previously resubmitting the ads once would generally fix this problem too, but now they're just coming back disapproved again.

Can anyone at AdWords look into this if they're reading this forum?

[Eschatonic]

Why are you redirecting people? Isn't that against the Adwords ToS?

[La_Valette]

Why are you redirecting people? Isn't that against the Adwords ToS?

Of course not. There are many valid reasons for redirects, like statistics collection, ease of management, etc. The requirement is that the destination after the redirect chain is complete matches the stated display URL.

[LucidSW]

There's nothing wrong in redirecting, for whatever reason. But I do recall something about a limit to the number of redirections as in:

Adwords click --> redir1 --> redir2 --> final landing page

That limit may be 6. Of course, make sure it all works properly when you submit an ad.

[La_Valette]

LucidSW: Thanks. I never heard about a hard limit of 6 like that - do you remember where you saw that? (Some client site links might indeed be 7 or 8 deep - it all still loads in a few milliseconds though.)

[LucidSW]

No, I don't. Of course, I may be totally off and remembering something else (too many facts in my head). But if there is indeed a limit, I would have seen it in one of the few forums I read. I did do a quick search just now and found nothing except something related to Adsense tracking. The more redirects you have, the more chance of something going wrong so best to keep it to a minimum.