Wouldn't it make more sense to try a site a few times over a period of six hours to see if it responds before canning an ad that has been running a long time? If the approval process was anywhere near 24 to 48 hours this would not be a problem. However, it keeps getting longer and longer and part of that reason might be having to re-approve ads that shouldn't have to be approved again in the first place.
AWA, if you think this might be a good thing for the Thursday update, please include. Thanks.
P.S. It's also impossible to resubmit the ad WITHOUT changing something in it's content. This makes no sense when the reason it was disable is that the server wasn't responding when your bot tried it.
Tonight Adwords kicked out an ad we have ad running for awhile because it said our server was down. I checked and all is well with the server so I resubmitted the ad. This is such a pain...
Yeah, I know getting disapproved is not the best feeling.
BTW, the most common reason (by far) for ads to be disapproved for 'Destination URL not working' is not that the site is down, but that there is a simple typo in the Destination URL field of the ad. So be sure to verify that the URL has been entered correctly. All it takes is one tiny little error, and a click on the ad gives a 'page not found' error.
Wouldn't it make more sense to try a site a few times over a period of six hours to see if it responds before canning an ad that has been running a long time?...
I am sort of glad to have a chance to speak to this question. (And my comments below are not in response to your question so much, MarkHutch, as they are a general response to lots of similar questions I've seen in advertiser email).
I've noticed that many advertisers think of the AdWords program in terms of their ads alone (which is natural enough of course.) But in reality, there are many, many thousands of other ads being reviewed every day.
An extremely common request is "Please warn me before disapproving my ads!". Well, if we were to do that, it would at least double the time it took to review a disapprovable ad. Multiplied by thousands and thousands, this would really slow things down. And make advertisers pretty unhappy.
The same applies with checking, and rechecking, and rechecking, and rechecking, and rechecking, a Destination URL over a period of 6 hours or so. (Please recall that this is done by humans, not robots - as the site itself has to be reviewed.) Doing this would slow the process down hugely.
And, as a quick scan of threads on this forum will quickly reveal, speed-to-review is a big concern of advertisers, who feel that it is way too slow already.
So while the ideas of warnings before disapproval, and multiple URL checks before disapproval, etc., are really appealing and excellent in theory - they don't lend themselves to working quickly and effectively through a zillion ads per day.
Hope that makes sense.
P.S. It's also impossible to resubmit the ad WITHOUT changing something in it's content. This makes no sense when the reason it was disable is that the server wasn't responding when your bot tried it.
I completely agree with on your 're-submit' point, MarkHutch, and will bring this up with the product folks again.
(Remember, though, it's a human, not a bot... ;))
AWA
