It’s very much to improve user experience and making it more difficult for affiliate sites to abuse trademarked brand names.

Our account manager however granted us an exemption for one of our clients who is using a different domain for the landing pages as a temporary solution. Google Adwords are finally catching up checking all their records to enforce the new rule from the 1st April. Google is using an automated system to search through all Adwords records and all of a sudden disapproved most of our ads.

My personal theory is that they started at A, as our client starts with S and we are half way through May

Main thing, which is annoying – we had an exemption approved, however our account manager is conveniently off on holiday for a few weeks, which makes it difficult to argue. Our CTR has dropped dramatically, as the landing page URL is not very well known, whereas our client’s brand is well known and trusted.

What to do??

I understand Google’s got another rule, and that it allows different display URLs if the shopping cart or similar is hosted on a different domain. Bingo!! Getting this fact confirmed by Google staff was tedious and took us 3 days!

Let’s face it – it’s really in Google’s interest that we can display the trademarked domain name, as it means a lot more cash for them….