It’s a fairly common scenario.
You’ve amassed your keyword list with Microsoft Advertising Intelligence, written stellar ads and uploaded your new campaigns to adCenter. You wait a few hours and then perform a few searches for your keywords on Bing. While you find most, there are some you’re not seeing your ads for. You consult the Ad Preview tool and still come up empty handed. You log in to your adCenter account (or open adCenter Desktop Beta or check your e-mail) and find that you have editorial disapprovals in need of attention.
In an effort to help you avoid some of the pitfalls that lead to editorial disapprovals in adCenter, today we’re going to look at some of the most common reasons for disapprovals and how to address them.
THE PROBLEM: Ad Title/Description exceeds maximum character length
For ad titles, the maximum character limit is 25 characters, for ad text it’s 70 – both of those limits include spaces and punctuation. This rejection is fairly common when transferring ads from PPC campaigns being run on other search engines due to formatting differences.
THE SOLUTION: Check and fix character lengths using an Excel formula
The length formula is one of the simplest and easiest formulas to learn and implement:
Step 1: Open your ads file and insert a column to the right of the column containing the text where you want to check the length. In the example below, I’m going to check my ad title, which resides in column E. To add a column where the length formula will go, I’ll select column F, right click and choose “Insert”:
Step 2: Your newly inserted column is now column F. In the 2nd row down, right next to the ad title, type in “=LEN(E2)”… without the quotation marks:
Step 3: Now tab out of that cell and you’ll see that Excel has calculated the length of your ad title, which is housed in cell F2:
Step 4: Our ad title character length is 41, which means we need to revise it down to 25 in order to meet the editorial guidelines. Revise your ad title, tab out of the cell and the formula will refresh to show your new character length.
Step 5 (optional): If you have more than one ad running (and you should), you don’t need to manually enter the formula for each cell adjacent to your ad title. Simply click on the cell with the formula applied to it to highlight it, in this example, it’s cell F2. You’ll notice there’s a small black box in the lower right hand corner of the bold black outline of the cell:
Hover your mouse over that box and your cursor will become a thin, black plus sign (as opposed to the fat, white plus sign). Once it does, click and drag that black box down the column until you reach the last ad title you want to apply the formula to. Release the click and you’ll find the formula has populated all the way down for all of your ad titles.
These same steps apply for checking any character lengths… all you need to change is the alpha-numeric value for the length formula depending on which column and row the text you’re checking resides in.
NOTE: Be sure to remove these length columns once you’ve made your changes and are ready to re-upload these ads or else the system won’t recognize the upload sheet format.
THE PROBLEM: Landing page not relevant
This disapproval is applied following the review of the relevancy between the ad, keyword and landing page. Take a close look at your ads and keywords and consider where they're leading the searcher and if that destination makes sense. Often, a specific keyword placed with a generic ad and landing page could be deemed irrelevant because the searched term isn't prominent.
THE SOLUTION: Adjust destination URLs to ensure ads and keywords point to the most appropriate page
In most cases you can improve your landing page relevancy by simply adjusting the destination URL to point to a more specific landing page. If you’re sure you’ve got all URLs pointing to the most appropriate page, then it’s time to review your ads and keywords to ensure that they’re as closely related to each other, and to your landing page, as possible.
If you feel that your ads, keywords, and landing pages are cohesive and will lead the searcher to their most probable intent, then these rejections should be appealed. Simply contact our Support Team, available seven days each week from 6 A.M. to 6 P.M. Pacific Time.
THE PROBLEM: Destination URL errors
Have you recently ended a special offer or promotion, discontinued a product, or changed its location on your web site? Don't forget to adjust the destination URLs in your online advertising campaigns! Nothing will bring an editorial disapproval quicker than broken or non-functioning links… ads that lead to “File Not Found” pages are not only a poor experience for searchers, but also a waste of money for you as you’re paying for clicks that don’t lead anywhere.
THE SOLUTION: Make sure all the destination URLs in your search campaigns point to live pages
This one is pretty self-explanatory. If you have dead links, you’re going to find dead ads and keywords if they’re associated with those dead links.
Keep in mind that although disapprovals can be frustrating, the goal of our editorial policies is two-fold: to ensure that searchers have the best experience possible and to alert our advertisers of red flags that can derail their search marketing efforts. If not for the editorial review process, spelling errors, broken links and irrelevant landing pages could cost you hundreds or even thousands of dollars in clicks that don’t help you bring in new business.
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