Adwords CTR with Wildcard DNS

[VinnyL]

I see that Adwords is letting certain brands slip through by using a WildCard DNS system and then redirecting to the main site (i.e. a bogus Display URL which reroutes to the main site).

The site using this seems to be a massive adwords advertiser - I don't know if this abuse if overlooked or not.

Just to be clear, they are using the following strategy to increase clickthrough rate.

Keyword.Domain.com as display URL, which rerouted the user to www.domain.com.

Is this allowed? In some of their adverts, I have seen that they maintain the keyword.domain.com format, by simply masking the subdomain and forwarding it to the main domain.

So, I have two questions:

1. Is this allowed?
2. How can I report this to Google, if "No" to 1. above.

My concern is that as an advertiser, my Adrank relative to theirs suffers if someone else uses bogus DNS information to boost their clickthrough rate.

[bakedjake]

A redirect is NOT bogus DNS information.

Google's rule is that the site address specified works. Wildcard DNS would allow it to work. It is NOT in violation of the rules per se.

Now, if the site address shown on the ad does not work, that's a different problem altogether.

Is this allowed?

Yes.

[Shak]

I'd say spend more time worrying about your own stuff, and leave other to theirs ;)

Shak

[elsewhen]

here are the two rules that appear to be related to your question, and they are in the Affiliate Policy section of the Editorial Guidelines:

- Redirect URLs: Ads that contain Display URLs that automatically redirect to the parent company.

- Bridge Pages: Ads for webpages that act as an intermediary, whose sole purpose is to link or redirect traffic to the parent company.

since the redirect is on THEIR domain, it doesn't seem to violate any of these terms.

[eWhisper]

A while ago Google lessened their editorial guidelines for display URLs.

For several months now, one has been able to use a large variety of display URLs as long as the root domain is the same as where the visitor actually lands.

Because it's a lessening of an editorial policy rather than a policy change, Google still has quite a bit of control in rejecting some of the ads which go a bit beyond what seems reasonable.

[VinnyL]

Thanks Guys

Well, in that case, I think we'll start testing the same strategy - it may boost our CTR! :-)