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Best Practices for Ads

Ad content includes the ad title, text, and URLs that are used in the ad.

Managing ads is only one aspect of running an ad campaign. You should also review the best practices for keywords and landing pages.

Use the guidelines in the following sections when creating ad content for your campaigns.

General Guidelines

  • Verify that all content in the ad is spelled correctly.

  • Do not use unnecessary punctuation or symbols. Similarly, do not use excessive capitalization. However, you can capitalize the first letter of each major word within the advertiser’s display URL.

  • Clearly and accurately describe the advertiser’s Web site.

  • Emphasize the unique benefits of the advertiser’s product or service.

  • If the advertiser has multiple areas of service or multiple products for sale, then you should use multiple editorial groups. This practice enables ads to be specific to the keywords that potential customers might use. Different editorial groups can point to different areas within the advertiser’s Web site if the Web site is set up to showcase different areas of the advertiser’s business.

  • A price, special discount, or free offer can be mentioned in the ad, but the same offer must be clearly and accurately displayed on the advertiser’s Web site no more than two clicks of the ad’s landing page.

  • Ads that contain language regarding competitive companies are allowed only if the claim is substantiated on the ad’s landing page. Similarly, ads that contain comparative or subjective phrases such as best, lowest, or #1 are allowed only if verification by a third party is clearly displayed on the advertiser’s Web site.

  • Include calls to action that highlight what makes the business unique. However, ads cannot contain universal call-to-action phrases such as:

    • Click here

    • Link here

    • Visit this link

    • This site is…

    • Other similar phrases that could apply to any ad, regardless of content

  • Ads must not contain offensive or inappropriate language.

  • Ads that contain non-family safe or adult sexual content are reviewed and categorized on a case-by-case basis. Google generally allows ads containing adult themes, such as explicit sexual content, provided that they meet the conditions for Google AdWords advertising. However, other ad networks might not accept such ads, and the ads therefore might appear only on Google pages. Ads categorized as “adult sexual content” are not accepted in certain countries such as Germany and India and therefore will not appear on Google pages for those countries.

Ad Titles

  • The ad title must not contain an exclamation point.

  • Ad titles are not intended to “brand” a business. Therefore, ad titles should contain the business description instead of the business name. Ad titles for locally-targeted businesses should consist of the business location and description (for example, Boston Attorney). Ad titles for nationally-targeted businesses should consist of the business description only since a local descriptor would not be appropriate.

Ad Text

  • Ad text may contain only one exclamation point and must use appropriate punctuation.

  • Ad text should follow logical sentence or phrase form, and business descriptions should form an appropriate grammatical sentence.

Destination and Display URLs

  • An ad’s display URL must match the destination URL and accurately reflect the URL of the Web site being advertised. You can truncate a display URL for space considerations, but it must still match the domain in the destination URL.

  • When submitting ad content, you cannot use the display URL as another line of ad text. It must be a valid domain with a valid domain extension (such as .com or .net).