Whoa! Thought I Was In Trouble
I have been looking into why one of my keywords had a low “Quality Score” (QS). In researching, it seems like the primary factors in QS are relevancy and Click-Through-Rate (CTR). So I took that keyword and another one out of the existing two Ad Groups and created a new one with a very relevant ad and created a new landing page that has as much relevency as I could jam into it. Put all that together last night and submitted the ad etal.
The response I got back from AdWords was interesting. First, it was immediately rated at a QS of 7 (out of 10). Interesting because that was the value applied immediately. However, this morning I got up and found an email from Google AdWords saying that my ad had been disapproved. Oh no, what is wrong with this ad and the keywords, they were very generic and I would have thought completely acceptable.
Based on that, I started looking through the ad and keywords to see if I could see some problem and then started reading the Terms and Conditions, Editorial Policy and all of the other governing documents (which are only of interest to lawyers because they don’t give you any useful information about this sort of situation). The results were that I was completely stumped.
My last ditch effort was to see if maybe the link to the landing page was causing the problem. Sure enough, when I clicked on the link from the ad, it goes to “Page Not Found”. Now, I know why they disapproved it. This is not really something that they want to support. Why you ask? Well, from what I understand, at least when you initially submit your ad (and any time you edit the ad or links for keywords), there is a check done that the domain is valid and that it goes to a valid landing page. This is to eliminate situations where you insert an invalid or inappropriate landing page after the ad is accepted.
Anyway, fixed the link and sure enough, it was approved. In fact, it only took about 20 minutes for the approval to come back. This was a great lesson (another one) in making sure that everything is working correctly before submitting an ad, campaign, keyword, etc. At the same time, it also pays to not freak out when you get a disapproval. There could be something simple. At least its not an account shutdown situation which has been happening a lot recently. I am hoping to stay out of this scenario.
Take care.