Comments on: How Susan Collins Can Run Her Banned Moveon.org Google Ads

By: Janet Meiners

Janet Meiners — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 16:10:42 +0000

As of this morning your ad is still running. Wonder if the Collins campaign has caught on.

Craig’s idea is smart. What if affiliates tried this tactic? I imagine they would be shut down.

Putting MoveOn’s URL in the display URL is worse than putting their name in the ad itself. It really makes it look like Collins is part of MoveOn. That would make her shudder I’m sure.

Thanks for the trackback.
Janet

By: Craig Danuloff

Craig Danuloff — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 04:13:17 +0000

Thanks for the link to that Google policy. Funny they never mentioned that in multiple phone calls and running up the management chain when trying to get an add stopped. So far, my test continues. We’ll see what happens. I’ll report back here in the comments.

By: Richard Ball

Richard Ball — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 03:47:03 +0000

Your ads actually violate Google’s link policy:

http://www.google.com/adwords/learningcenter/text/18928.html#18937

Eventually, your ads will be disapproved because your display URL does not match your destination URL. Might not happen before you meet your ad spend, though.

Long term, a display URL like susancollins.com/moveon might work.

Also, ad text that reads “Move On” might not violate trademark. Perhaps there was a lack of creativity or experience by the agency that ran these ads? Or, perhaps this was political from the beginning.

I’ll be curious to see if your ads are eventually disapproved for violating the link policy. I’ve seen this happen to numerous accounts but the ads have sometimes been running for weeks before the violation is noticed by Google. You’d think this would be checked by an algorithm and not people.

Nice experiment, anyway.