Ad Approvals Best Practices

Did you know that every single ad you create is reviewed by Google to ensure it abides by our advertising policies? Our ad approval process ensures users see relevant ads that promote high quality content. Our support team reviews ads in the order they’re received and it typically takes one to two business days to review your ad. Submitting a high quality and compliant ad can significantly speed up the review process and get your ad up and running as soon as possible.

If you’re new grantee or a veteran, here are some best practices to understand about ad approvals. There are also a few tips to help you avoid common pitfalls we’ve seen several grantees experience over the past year. We hope these tips will be useful as you embark on new campaigns in 2011.

Ready your campaign
Make sure your ad, ad group and campaign are active. Paused or deleted ads will not be reviewed.

Ready your landing page
Make sure your ads lead to functioning landing pages. Landing pages that are under construction or result in server errors will be disapproved.

Ensure domain matching
Make sure your visible URL is the same domain as the final site you end up on. For example, if your visible URL is example.com, the final site a user should end up on when clicking your ad should be example.com. If the user ends up on differentsite.com, you are violating our Display URL policy.

Check for typos
Check for obvious typos in your URLs. Did you miss a, “.” or a, “ /”? A broken destination URL happens more often than you think.

Avoid exception requests
Submitting an exception request makes it highly likely that your ad will take more time to be reviewed. Think twice before requesting an exception and see if you can modify your ad text to avoid a potential delay or worse, a potential disapproval of your ad.

Avoid excessive capitalization

Don’t use excessive capitalization in your ad text. Common words that are capitalized and subsequently disapproved are, “FREE” or “GOOGLE ADWORDS”.

Hopefully these tips will get your ads up and running with minimal delay! If your ads can’t run due to violations of our advertising policies, you can resubmit an ad that was disapproved for another review. Simply edit and save your ad and it will go through the ad approval process again. If you continue to encounter problems, take a look at the AdWords Help Center or ask for help in the AdWords Help Forum.

Posted by Reid Yokoyama, Ads Quality Operations Team