Thursday, June 19, 2014

Keeping Up With Google: The New Adword Policies


Recently Google announced that they will be updating the AdWords Policy Center for the ever-familiar motivation of enhancing user experience and ease-of-use for advertisers. The changes are set to take place around September, so now is the time to start ramping up your best practices to match the new guidelines. Here’s what you will need to know.

Many Businesses Won’t Need to Worry


According to Google, "Almost all advertisers who comply with our current policies will also comply with the new policies." The main differences will be in restrictions on certain types of products and advertisers such as alcoholic beverages, weapons, etc. Just make sure to read the new restrictions to ensure you are still in compliance.

Ramp Up Your Content Quality


We all know that Google is huge on content quality. Almost every major adjustment is aimed at weeding out spammy content. Now they are cracking down on paid content as well. For those of us who are not marketing dangerous weapons or alcohol, this is the most important update. The are adding a new “Abuse of the Ad Network Policy” section that includes the following prohibitions:

• malicious ads, sites, or apps
• ads promoting sites that offer little unique value to users and are focused primarily on traffic generation
• businesses that attempt to gain an unfair advantage in the ad auction
• businesses that attempt to bypass our review processes
• Content that is designed for the primary purpose of showing ads, i.e. Driving traffic (whether through "arbitrage" or otherwise) to destinations with more ads than original content, little or no original content, or excessive advertising.
• Content that is replicated from another source without adding value in the form of original content or additional functionality, i.e. mirroring, framing or scraping.
• Landing pages that are solely designed to send users elsewhere, i.e. doorway pages, gateways.

Familiarize yourself with the new policies, keep your ads free of user deception and spammy links and you will be fine. For assistance with your AdWords campaigns, you can always call Think Agency, Inc. and make use of our expertise.

photo credit: mark knol via photopin cc