Google has altered a policy on how it treats varying domains in a given AdWords ad group. Moving forward, display URLs within the same ad group must display the same top-level domain.
To illustrate this, Snow Valley provides the following example. This set of display URLs comply with the new policy, because all of them contain the same top-level domain ("example.com"):
- www.example.com
- www.widgets.example.com
- www.example.com/widgets/redwidgets/
- www.example.com/index.html
Alternatively, these URLs cannot live in the same ad group, because their top-level domains do not match:
- www.example.com
- www.example.widgets.com
(That is, example.widgets.com is a subset of Widgets.com, not Example.com.)
The news came with little notice to AdWords users; the policy itself goes into effect on April 1. Advertisers with multiple URLs in the same ad group must reorganize their accounts to prevent their ads from being suspended, Snow Patrol says.
AdWords' breadth has been broadened in the past several months to include coverage on Google News and Google Finance. Google is also experimenting with a feature that enables users to hide ads they don't want — feedback that, if gleaned from all Google users, will likely be integrated into AdWords advertisers' ad relevance ratings.
