Since an increasing percentage of the users of the AdWords Forum are new affiliates, this article is meant to cover a common misunderstading leading to problems with the Display URL. Basically when you are creating an ad you have to complete 2 URL fields: the Display URL field and the Destination URL field. It is the Display URL field that is shown to a Google Search user, on the search results page, while it is the Destination URL that determines where the user will be taken on clicking on your sponsored link which is another name for an advert.
Figure
* The figure shows the moment a new advert is being created. What is surprising you in the above configuration relative to the 2 URLs?
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After a few days of study, most new affiliates seem to be knowledgeable about the requirement that the Display URL should match the Destination URL. What does the word *match* mean in this context? It means that the domain names associated with the 2 URLs should be identical. The usual problem for affiliates is generally associated with the fact that most of them are registered with one of the major affiliate networks, sush as ClickBank, Commission Junction (CJ) or ShareASale. As a rule, these networks provide their affiliates with affiliate links (or HopLink at ClickBank) that don’t match the website URL of the online merchant. In fact, these affiliate links are tracking URLs, serving statistical and reporting purposes, that redirect to the particular webpage of the online merchant.
And that’s the root of the problem. When your Destination URL is a tracking URL the known rule is simply not true. The Display URL is not supposed to match the Destination URL when it’s a tracking URL. In such cases, the Display URL has to match the URL of your Landing Page which is the webpage the user will be taken to on clicking on your advert displayed on the user’s search result page. Of course, the Landing Page is, in most cases, a page of the website of the online merchant.
* Display URL: HomeLivingStyle.com
ShareASale is one of the popular affiliate networks and the above URLs are the details of an old experimental advert, not in use any more. HomeLivingStyle used to be an online merchant participating in the network. The Destination URL was the affiliate link provided by the network. In fact, it was a tracking URL so that the network was able to keep records of clicks the online merchant received from the affiliate link via the network. It redirected to a product page of the website of the online merchant, namely to a page selling some sorts of electric fireplaces on the HomeLivingStyle website.
The striking thing in the above URL configuration is that the Display URL does not match the Destination URL - because it shouldn’t. When a user clicked on the advert he was taken to:
* Landing Page: http://www.homelivingstyle.com/Berkeley_Corner_Fireplace_Mantel_p/ft-28cm500pch.htm?netid=sas
which was a workable page of the online merchant in those days. It was what we call the Landing Page. Remember, that in fact, the Display URL is supposed to match the Landing Page URL when your affiliate link is a tracking URL. In such cases, the Destination URL is different from the Landing Page. The former only serves tracking purposes while the latter is an actual page on the merchants website.
I am also new to clickbank and intend to advertise / promote my hopelink at adwards, please let me know how to do it.
I understand that the display url should match with the url that the ad connects to in the end. However; this isn’t possible in many of my cases. In several cases the endpoint url is already in use as a display url by other ads. in this case my ad wont be displayed. In other cases I am “Forbidden” by the owner of the domain from using their name in the ad. This includes the display url, (a good example is disney).
How are these problems rectified?
Thanks to all that posted, like many on a search for the holy grail i found this helpful post and although i still feel a Little unclear it has helped.
Some notes on my journey here that i see a lot of people getting mixed up with is the destination URL and the easy thing to do is add another hidden row if you like and that helps explain that part a little better (or so i found) it looks like this
key \/
add title
ad body line 1
ad body line 2
display URL
destination URL ? / affiliate link
land page URL
you can see an added line below destination URL as the hidden land page line, what this does is regardless of your destination URL which can be your clickbank affiliate link or any affiliate link placed into there, what you do s once you press that affiliate link / destination URL is that is your land URL. now as long as your land URL matches your display URL you are fine
you can also use a sub in your display URL if you want as a keyword ex
display URL > www mysite.com/mykeyword
destination URL > www xuxhxy.hgdgjhdmyaffiliatelink.com
land page URL > http://www.mysite.com
or the land page could also have subs like
http://www.mykey.mysite.com or http://www.mysite.com/mykey
and i am sure all of that is OK and what you are looking for is a match with the primary display URL of mysite.com and in the land page the exact same URL of mysite.com
as for the person speaking of a display URL and that not matching the land page URL i am not sure and will need to clarify this but i think a 301 redirect of a URL is fine and is accepted.
so lets say i purchased mysite.com i cold redirect 301 that domain name to yoursite.com. now if i did that i will need to confirm but i think you could then do this
display URL > mysite.com (which has a 301 redirect to yoursite.com)
destination URL > any link i like/ affiliate link
display URL > yoursite.com
but i may b very wrong on this and maybe the good folk here could clarify it ?
HI Pete, A complete newbee here at 57 yrs. Found your article to be very helpful. Could you please spare some time to expand in more detail the part regarding placeing a further hidden line as the destination url. Is this acceptable to Google adwords . I have been trying to create an add to promote a clickbank product without I having a web page initially. Thank you for any possible assistance.
My problem is that my destination URL (for my book on Amazon.com) is way over the 35 character limit that is set for a DISPLAY URL. How can I have the required length DISPLAY URL? I’ve thought of doing something like this: http://www.Amazon-“book title”-”author name”.com, but I don’t know if they’ll take that or not? It worked with Yahoo Sponsored Search, but I don’t know about Google AdWords. Help!!
I am starting to believe a domain name frame redirect is the best solution for affiliates to use. It is basically masking the actual url, but the display url and the url the visitor is seeing both can match. Anyone familar with this method, does google accept this?
Maybe they might not accept http redirection, where the user will actually be directed to and see a different domain name than the advert display url, but accept frame redirection where the url is masked and the user will still see the same domain name in the adress bar as the display url in the advert. Does this make sense for anyone and does anyone use redirection, specifically frame/masked redirection with adwords?
Hi,
Can we use the CB Hop link as destination url in adwords.As that landing page will be used by several people will that affect in our campaign. Our quality score will be reduced to 1/10 due to poor quality content in our landing page right.
Can any one pls hlep me can i use hoplink as my landing page will my ads run fine if i use hoplink as my destination url.
Thanks
This is what I was looking for about the display Url maybe I can get my ad’s up and running now thank’s joe
hi I have he same problem with the URLS.
so what you guys are trying to say is the display URL is going to be your domain name(witch you can have one from godaddy.com)and do the forward thing from your hoplink to your own domain name and the destination URL is going to be the product website?
Hey!I have just started a campaign in adwords and used the vendors url instead of the hoplink provided urls in clickbank. Will I be paid if a customer purchases the vendors product?
I am having a similar issue as the one described by Scott..
“My problem is with an international offer (an image ad). My campaign is set to only run in Australia, and that has a specific landing url.
If you try to click on the ad here in the USA, it says that offer isn’t available here and redirects to a different url. I have tried using the correct Australian url, since that’s where the customer will be clicking from, but it get disapproved as incorrect display url. i suppose i’ll try the USA redirected url, but that seems to defeat the purpose of having it be accurate for the user.”
Except that the offer I’m running is set to run in the US but the editor is checking it from a non-US IP address. How do I know this? After many disapproval’s inputting the US landing page as a display URL the ad finally got accepted when I had input the geo-redirected landing page as the display URL.
Anyone know how to fix this?
This is a very unfair game on behalf of Google… I could give you 20 reasons why… but none the less,, let me explain this in layman terms to those that are still confused…
The idea is that if you show XYZ.com to the person that clicks on the add then the person expects to land on XYZ.com (they really don’t but let’s indulge the G philosophy). So if you DISPLAY XYZ.com and take the person to (DESTINATION URL) something-else.com AND the person lands on something-else.com then they “feel deceived” because they “can’t connect the dots” when they expected to be on XYZ.com.
HOWEVER if something-else.com is a tracking domain and the person who clicked on the advertisement does lands on XYZ.com despite the fact that destination url was something-else.com then “all is good” because you did not hurt their sensitive intelligence to “connect the dots”… your destination URL CAN be something-else.com because the person who clicked on the add never saw something-else.com
Here is the confusion…
MOST people that are not Media Companies (that do get away with all sorts of “****” – I would know, I worked for several of them) do not have the resources nor the knowledge to employ tracking domains in order to DISPLAY XYZ.com after the user actually landed on something-else.com,,,
In reality google has nothing to lose by allowing DESTINATION urls to be the final displayed URLs. The excuse it that the advertising network gets abused,,, (??? and this way it doesn’t ?? )
It is also true that people end up not getting paid for commissions they rightfully earn because of this – depending on the affiliate network (which gives google “clean bill of health” because you can’t really blame google that you did not get paid for something and google can’t say that you will or won’t get paid by the vendor just because they prevented you to actually point people to ACCURATE urls)..
This in turn produced an army of BS marketing “tricks” that serve nothing else then to take money out of naive advertiser’s pockets and again of course “google has nothing to do with that”.
SO on so on…
WHAT YOU CAN DO however,, if you do not know how to use tracking domains and do your own redirects,, and program,, or buy software that would help you with this,,, is this..
Spend more money (yep,, more money to spend) on DISPLAY domain names and use forwarding of those domains to the destination URL. It is true that you can’t track anything if you do that that because you can only forward a domain once and for one URL,, but if you are ok wasting money on non profitable keywords it is a way to circumvent the problem (if you are using clickbank for example)
I wonder if I will get censored for this,,, LOL
@K – Firstly, we’re not Google. We don’t work for Google, and if you’d read this blog in any depth or the blogs of the contributors, especially me and Rich Ball, you’d see that we’re often quite critical of Google. So “censoring” your article for criticism is a strange thing to say. And, FWIW, Google don’t appear to censor articles in the AdWords Help Forum, unless they are abusive, or release personal or sensitive information, or are spam – those all seem reasonable things to censor. Any argument about that?
Secondly, you have missed out the key point. Google does not exist for the benefit of advertisers. Google has made its’ goal to service search users. And search users overwhelmingly hate having the same offers shown repeatedly on a page. Google’s duplicate URL policy (which is what this is really about) prevents multiple affiliates from showing the same offers multiple times. That may not be to the benefit of affiliates – but that’s not what Google is trying to optimise.
If you want to change Google’s mind, rather than just rant, you need to understand why Google has made a decision, and show them that it is a mistake, against the things that Google cares about in its mission statement (search for “Google’s Ten Things” to see what they are).
Your complaint basically boils down to “some affiliate networks use tracking methods that Google says will violate its’ policies”. My suggestion is that you either use a different affiliate network, or ask the affiliate networks to offer tracking systems that work better with the largest paid search vendor on the planet. :)
@astro – Google’s automation is a frequent source of annoyance. Mostly, it works well for the markets that Google makes the most money from. But every so often it throws a significant problem up, which Google Customer Service is poorly configured to help with. Repeatedly denying perfectly valid Display URLs is one, and using incorrectly geolocated IP addresses from which to check, is another.
You could try fixing the problem at the geocoding point. That is, when the IP address is in Google’s range for their various bots, show the content you’d expect a user in your geotarget to see. However, that will run into problems when Google’s reviewers, who are predominantly in the USA, come to take a look – you’ll be guilty of the SEO crime of cloaking.
Yes, it’s a no-win game for geotarget-specific content advertisers until Google genuinely recognises that it is a global operation, not US-domestic, and therefore has to think about tackling these issues globally. In my experience of US businesses (I worked in the US for a decade, for some fairly large businesses), that’ll be a long wait…
“Google does not exist for the benefit of advertisers. Google has made its’ goal to service search users.” – right…
My point was to explain the difference between Display and Destination URLs which is poorly explained where ever you go. It confuses people really badly. I see it all over the place… Plus the “no bridging” policies that CB affiliates are also not correctly informed about for example.
I just found the above article unclear and incomplete,, yet the confusion is very simple and should not be rocket science to explain the problem easily and correctly.
And it wasn’t a rant… it was a factual observation… when you spend 7 figures a year in advertising with google then you observe things a little bit less enthusiastically..
Thank you K… I felt the same. No offense to the writer but I was significantly confused and after reading, it left something to be desired.
I have spent all day trying to work with the display / destination combinations hoping to get approved so that I can make some sense out of all this madness. Right now, none of this makes sense.
I have a proxy domain. They said that the use of proxy domains were supposed to be exempt from dissapproval – yet they keep dissaproving the ad. I then use a domain name that has a javascript redirect embedded and use the same domain name for the display AND the destination – guess what? — STILL DISAPROVED!.
I’m getting pretty fed up with google.
Hello Jezc,
First of all, thank you so much for all the information you’ve given here.
I’ve read your entire post and I still have a question.I would like to know if the following is against adwords toss.
Display URL: mywebsite.com
Destination: mywebsite.com
I then do a URL redirect 301 from my website to my affiliate link. Therefore, the user is redirected to the merchant’s landing page. This strategy would avoid the one top level per keyword rule.
If this doesn’t work, is this the only option?
Display URL: merchant’s website.com
Destination URL: my affiliate link
If the merchant is already bidding for the keyword I want to bid to, that means I will have to outbid him so that my add appears. Am I correct?
Thanks a lot.
Hi Alex. Yes, you’ve understood. If you give a redirection, then the place that the user lands up must be the Display URL, and yes, that’ll usually be the merchant for this type of business. The Google requirement to show a URL in an advert only once for a given search means that you are in a bidding war. And for a new player, with no account history, you will be bidding with a disadvantage. Being a straight search affiliate is not easy. Having unique content, justifying bringing users to a different site, can be made to work, but is a lot more effort than the “info service” books tell you about.
Cheers, JeremyC.
Hi–
I have read all of this and still have a problem.
I work for a non-profit and the domain name is the name of the program. The website is hosted by the parent organization and is very long.
How can I get this to work?
I keep getting: Ad Status: Suspended – Pending Revision, Ad Issue(s): Inaccurate Display URL.
PLEASE HELP!
Thanks!
@SB
I’d say to get another domain with a shorter character amount.
Depending on the program name, I’d go with ‘goProduct.com’ or something similar. Just use one main word of the full product name and some other very short word.
I seem to remember it violates adwords policy if your destination page redirects. I may be mistaken but I can’t face spending more hours trying to work this out.
I originally ran an ad for a Clickbank product but later found out my afilliate link wasn’t working with it. I only discovered this after deleting cookies.
Google should write a 1 paragraph that shows exactly how to advertise Clickbank products an have a link to it that can be found. Then all these discussions won’t be necessary.
I’ve been looking for some other affiliate networks I can work with, I’m fairly new to IM and I found some helpful advice on your blog. I’ve added you to my favorites and have subscribed to your rss feed. Thanks a bunch!
I found your blog on facebook groups. I just added you to my MSN News Reader. Keep up the good work buddy! Look forward to reading more from you in the future.
Help!! I am new to clickbank and Adwords, how do I get the hoplink on my adword ad?!?! I’ve been trying to figure this out for 2 hours now, please does someone know the answer?
Hello to you all. I am a newbee. Even at 57. Trying to get my head around many of these half answered questions. Can some one of recent experiece with google adwords and clickbank experience please show a WORKING example of where the Display URL matches ( is the same as ) the Destination URL with a clickbank affiliate code included, as this seems to be the requirement before adwords will publish for an affiliate. Thank you in advance for any possible assistance.
Hi all again. Am I correct to believe that requirement for destination url to match display url really means that both urls should bring the searcher to the same page on the merchants site. If this is so, how can it be done when I use the clickbank affiliate code. Example please,please.