Lots of Spurious Policy Violations for "Destination not working"

[Dorian Kind]

Hello,

first of all I want to apologize, this is a question that is not strictly about the Adwords API. However, in my experience I've been able to get more valuable information in this group than in the Google Advertiser Community.

So since a few months we've been increasingly experiencing the phenomenon that lots of our ads are being disapproved with a reason of "Destination not working" even though both final URL and final mobile URL work just fine. This is especially notable when creating a large number of new ads over the API, but sporadically also for ads that have been running for a long time but are now being disapproved for the same reason. When escalating to Adwords support, we are usually being told that while the URLs they check do work for them, the only thing they can do is re-submit the campaign for review, which usually doesn't help.

Has anyone been experiencing the same?

Many thanks for any feedback and best regards,
Dorian

[Peter Oliquino]

Hi Dorian,

Seeing that this concern (policy violations) is already beyond the AdWords API team's scope, I would recommend that you, instead, contact the AdWords Community Forum to get more details regarding the policy violations your account is experiencing.

Best regards,

Peter

AdWords API Team

[Zweitze]

I haven't experienced this but I would proceed as follows:

- Check the logs on the webserver, look for all requests asking that URL. See whether the webserver responded 200.
- Don't forget to check the firewall which could have been denying access to certain users/ip addresses etc.
- If you use a Tracking Template look careful into that, make sure that it redirects to the final URL. I can imagine that Google will penalize after finding out requests are redirected to a different URL.

If HTTPS, are you using a well-known CA? Certain CAs are not trusted by all computers on the world. Note: I don't know which CAs Google trusts. BTW I don't think this is your issue, more a theoretical possibility.

Hope this helps.

[Dorian Kind]

Zweitze,

thanks for your thoughts! Unfortunately this is an account that we manage for a client, so I do not have access to the webserver logs or firewall configuration. The URLs are plain HTTP, so that's probably also not the culprit.

Something I forgot to mention is that when I select a random one of these disapproved ads in the web interface and use the "Test" button, it consistently shows that URL does, indeed, work. As far as I know, this also checks for final URL mismatches like cross-domain redirects and the like.

Of course, the fact remains that the Adwords crawler for one reason or another could not access the landing page, but I find it curious that we're experiencing this in a much greater frequency than, say, a few months ago.

Thanks again and best regards,

Dorian