Google's New Advertising Policy

As some of you are aware, Google changed their advertising algorithm in July – August 2006. This change affected many advertisers and has caused several advertisers to drastically increase their bids or leave Google AdWords.

What happened?
Around July 12th, 2006 many advertisers noticed nearly all of their keywords were inactive for search in their campaigns. While normally (before the policy change) advertisers can raise their max bid $0.03 or so to re-activate their keywords, this was not the case anymore. Instead of seeing a note telling them to raise their bid a couple of cents, Google was telling them in order to activate this keyword they would need to set their keyword's bid to $1.00, $5.00, and sometimes $10.00 per click.

Why the new policy change?
Most people who were negatively affected by the policy change say or think that Google changed AdWords just to make more money. This is not true. Google's new change was intended to remove most of the undesirable paid search results from Google's Search Network.

Changes Keep Coming
In the beginning of October 2008 Google changed their display and a little bit of their policy. What they did is instead of making keywords with “Low Quality” scores inactive for search, they keep the status as Active, but require you to raise the bid to get on the first page of search results. They also changed the way they display your quality score. Instead of displaying it as a required bid, they now show it as a fraction between 1/10 (poor) to 10/10 (perfect). Don't worry if you're not understanding any of this right now, because you will shortly. To make things easier, I'm going to refer to keywords which are of “Poor Quality” as either “Inactive” keywords or “Poor Quality” keywords. Because if your keywords are “Poor Quality” they are usually pretty much inactive within your account.
Things to Remember

Please remember these two things before you start your account. Although there are things that are more important, these things can severely hurt beginner advertisers.

Obey Google's Rules

Google's advertising policies are very strict. They will notify you via email and/or by a message in your account whenever there is something wrong with your account or your advertisements. If you do not fix what they notify you about, then you may become banned by Google. Don't expect this to be a temporary ban either. If Google decides to ban your account they will not accept any of your payments from any credit card you enter. Each time you use a different credit card in a banned account, that credit card will also be declined by Google AdWords. If you ever use that credit card to pay for another AdWords bill, even if it is in an active account, that AdWords account will also become banned. If you ever do become banned, you will not be able to receive traffic to your advertisements, and you will need to call Google to get it fixed.

Don't Ever Completely Change Your Target URL (Destination URL)

If you are a beginner, or even an expert with Google AdWords, you should know that occasionally the website you are advertising for will temporarily go down. The absolute worst thing you can do when this happens is to quickly change your Text Ad's Destination URL to another website which sells a similar product.

Why shouldn't you do this? Even though switching websites will prevent you from having to pause your Account, it will make your Quality Score go to 0.0. Basically, your quality score is what Google uses to decide what you pay for each keyword, it keeps your keyword(s) activated, it ranks your advertisements, and it determines how often your text ad is displayed in Google Searches. Your Quality Score in Google is similar to your Credit Score in real life. You want it to be as good as possible because it saves you money.

By changing your destination URL, this will reset your quality score, causing your traffic to go way way down. If you absolutely have to change the URL, I would recommend pausing the campaign you don't want, and then create a new campaign. Then using Google's AdWords Editor (I'll talk about this later), copy all of your keywords to the new campaign you just created. It may take 5 minutes longer than changing your URL, but your Quality Score will be the exact same for your new Campaign as it would have been if you changed the URL in your old Campaign, PLUS your old text ad's Quality Score will not be affected, so you can later unpause that campaign to receive the same amount as traffic as before. (I'm sorry if some of the terms in this paragraph were confusing to you. I realize that I haven't talked about the Quality Score yet, but it is important that you know what not to do).

The only time(s) when you should change your Destination URL is when you have created a brand new campaign or AdGroup and you are testing new merchants and advertising new products.