In Adwords PPC must the browser display URL match the landing URL?

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  • SEO
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Ok I know the rules or at least most of them.. maybe one of you experts can help me out here.
1. I know the domain part of the adwords display url must match the site the visitor is sent to and the rest of the url display url does not have to match.
2. I know that the destination URL must match the domain of the site you are sending the visitor to but not sure of the rest of it..

So here is the question can the browser URL that is visible upon arriving be different from the destination URL logged at adwords...

For example:
display url...mydomain.com/apples
destination url... mydomain.com/index.php/?apples_100049
browser url........mydomain.com/adwords/?apples_100049

See above the domain remains the same but the apparent subdirectory has changed from the root to the adwords directory.

I have read till I am blind for the last year and I cannot to the life of me remember coming across the answer to this very specific question.

This is in no way any form of cloaking, as a human or a spider will receive the identical content.

The six digit attached number is for tracking the individual keywords which is definitely authorized but just not sure about the change before the ? mark...

Has anyone ever done this for a long period on adwords and not had a problem.

Course most of you will recognize the switch done via the old standby htaccess which google is sooooooo familiar with.. and I don't think they have a problem with it... but might piss off the visitor as he is now at a different page...
#adwords #browser #display #landing #match #ppc #url
  • Profile picture of the author Lucid
    Google uses the term URL for the display and destination portions. What they really mean is the domain name. So in your example, the display URL must be

    mydomain.com (or www.mydomain.com)

    as a minimum. The display domain matches the domain of the landing page. That's all they care about. Otherwise, they will disapprove your ad for inaccurate URL.

    This means you can have mydomain.com as the display URL and a destination URL of http://www.someothersite.com?trackin...eotherstuff=xx as long as the user eventually reaches mydomain.com as the final domain after all redirects are done.

    You can use mydomain.com/apples as the display if you wish. In fact, the sub-directory /apples does not have to exist (although that could change in the future) and it doesn't have to be the final destination directory.

    So your example is correct and you should have no problems using it.
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