Google’s new display URL policy is also about brand awareness.
Posted by Riccardo Campaci @ April 24th, 2008 in Search Engine Marketing
As you all know, Google recently updated its AdWords display URL policy. As of April 1st, every display URL inserted in ad texts must reflect the actual destination URL the ad texts lead to. This means that, if for instance, your landing page is http://lab.77agency.com, the display URL of your AdWords ads must be http://lab.77agency.com; a display URL like www.77lab.com will not be allowed by AdWords.
At first sight, this policy update could seem insignificant, but there are several consequences, both from the advertising and promotional points of view. Technically, the update affects every redirect URL, compelling an advertiser to use as a display URL the effective landing page’s URL, not the redirecting one. This gives more relevance to the website URL instead of the website name so as I mentioned before, our URL http://lab.77agency.com would be more relevant than our blog’s title 77lab.
But this is only a superficial consequence since changing a display URL could cause remarkable variations in the effectiveness of an ad text. For example, lets say that we used a specific URL, for months (or even years), in our ad text. The employment of the same display URL for a long period of time could have created a strong awareness on that display URL. We can say that this URL could become an effective brand, easy recognizable by Google searchers.
What happens when we change that display URL? The Internet user, who’s used to the former “URL brand”, will not recognize that brand through the new URL anymore; without recognizing it, they will not click on the ad texts and probably the click through rate will decrease as the surfer’s awareness on that specific URL brand is relevant to its advertising achievement. This could potentially become a problem every advertiser will have to deal with.
My bottom line is that this policy update not only strengthens the promotional and advertising bond between display URL and destination URL, but also points out the importance of a well-known and well-recognizable display URL in order to create persistent awareness of a specific brand linked to that URL.
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