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Don’t You Dare

What not to do with your search account

We’ve already nagged you plenty about the things that successful advertisers should do—and it isn’t just cleaning your room or taking out the trash.

But sometimes knowing what not to do is just as important. When it comes to creating and managing your ads, avoiding certain mistakes before you make them can save serious time and headaches down the road. Here’s a quick breakdown of the pitfalls to avoid, which should help you realize a better return on your investment, and help our users see better search results.

Content
Don’t bid on keywords for which you don’t offer content. While these tempting keywords may drive traffic to your site, they will almost certainly fail to convert into sales, not to mention tick off the users who clicked on your ad.Make sure you have substantial content that’s relevant to the keyword, rather than just a picture, search results or a link to another site.

Titles and descriptions
Don’t write titles and descriptions that are confusing, misleading or too subjective. Try to create concise titles and descriptions that accurately describe your site and give users a precise idea of what they’ll find there. Don’t include things like superlatives (”world’s greatest”), gimmicky language (“$$$”), exclamation points or words in all capital letters. Also, be sure to include correct spelling and grammar, write your titles in title case (capitalize the first letter of most words) and write your descriptions in regular sentence case.

URLs
Users need to be able to easily find what they’re looking for on your page, or they may decide to look elsewhere. So don’t submit landing page URLs that aren’t clearly relevant to your keywords or that lead to pages with nothing but ads or sponsored links. Make sure that users will be able to discern between your content and your ads. Avoid submitting landing pages with pop-ups, pop-unders or exit consoles. Make sure all landing pages allow users to use the back button of their browser.

Page Quality and Unacceptable Content
We’re concerned about the quality of our search results, so we try to only show ads that lead to information that’s valuable to users. We don’t accept ads leading to pages with inappropriate, deceptive, redundant or poor-quality content. Likewise, we may not accept ads relating to certain products or services or ads relating to areas of questionable legality. For more details please review our complete guidelines on page quality and unacceptable content.

By following these rules (or, depending on how you look at it, by not following them) you’ll help your account to have relevant keywords, targeted ads and URLs that lead users right to what you offer. It may be one of the few times in life when not doing something can have such positive results.

— Noah Belson, Content Quality Analyst