If you’re like most advertisers, you don’t give a lot of regard to your AdWords display URL. For those that don’t realise, I mean that green line of text at the end of your ad. Most people speedily type their website domain name and move on. But, pay close attention now because you could be missing out on a valuable advertising opportunity for your business!

Making The Most Of Your AdWords Display URL

Here are our three top tips on how you can make the best use of your display URL to get your ads to stand out more:

1. Use your most popular keywords as sub-domains.

What if you sold dog food and wanted to advertise the organic dog food section of your online store. You could then create a sub-domain for your website called organic, and use a URL in your ad which looks like this: “organic.yourdomain.com”.

Now, when people use search queries like “natural organic dog food”, “organic dog food” and “best organic dog food” to find your business, the word “organic” in your domain name will be highlighted in bold. This is a wonderful way to get extra attention for your ad and gain an advantage over your competition by making your ads stand out more.

Warning: You should ensure when using this technique, that the domain name in your AdWords ad URL is the same as in your destination url.

For example:)

This ad would be accepted:
display url: organic.yourdomain.com
destination url: organic.yourdomain.com/organicdogfood

This in your ad would be disapproved:
display url: organic.yourdomain.com
destination url: yourdomain.com/organicdogfood

2. Using keywords as web pages

An alternative way to include extra keywords in your ads is to add them to the end of your domain name as web pages.

Consider once again our website selling dog food. This time, your ad is going to target the pedigree section and you’re going to tag your main keyword for the ad group onto the end of the domain name so that it reads “yourdomain.com/pedigree”.

Incredibly, Google will not disapprove this ad even though the web page that your display URL points to doesn’t actually exist.

Now, when searchers use keywords like “pedigree dog foods”, “pedigree dry dog food”, and “cheap pedigree dog food” the word pedigree is highlighted in your ad, ensuring it stands out.

3. Promote your exclusive offers

It’s not only keywords that you can place after your domain name. Why not promote special offers, product names (watch out for copyright infringements) and service offerings.

Let’s study this idea more closely. Say your online dog food shop has a free e-book on Healthy Eating for Dogs that it want’s to promote. The display URL in your ad could now read “yourdomain.com/e-book”.

You could also promote your spring sale as yourdomain.com/SpringSale or a discount on all orders using yourdomain.com/50DollarsOff.

Remember To Always Keep to the Rules

I’m sure that you are now starting to appreciate that there are endless ways in which you can use your AdWords display URL as extra ad space. But, to make sure that your ads will always be approved by Google, you must stick to the rules:

• your display URL must use the same top level domain as the destination URL.
• the display URL can be no more than 35 characters long.
• the display URL must point to an actual web site but doesn’t have to point to an actual web page within that site.
• the prefix www. or http:// can be left out of your display URL to give you more space.
• your domain name must end with a valid top level identifier like “.com” or “.co.uk”.

Adrian Key is a professional AdWords consultant and editor of the AdWords Adviser, a blog dedicated to making AdWords more profitable for you. If you found this article on making better use of your AdWords display url helpful, then sign up for Adrian’s newsletter with more valuable tips on how to improve your advertising. http://www.adwords-adviser.co.uk/subscribe-2