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Warning: Use this technique at your own risk. It is most likely against the AdWords TOS and while it will probably only result in a warning if you are caught, repeat offenders could end up being banned.

Have you ever wanted to send AdWords traffic directly to a merchant’s landing page but either couldn’t compete with everyone else using that URL or the merchant didn’t allow you to use their domain name? Have you ever wanted to make Google think you were sending traffic to a content rich website when you were really just sending them to an old-fashioned landing page? If so, you will be happy to know that there is a simple (no advanced cloaking) solution (at least for now).

I read about this technique in a post on the affiliates4u forum. I decided to test it out and it worked like magic. It basically involves using the keyword level destination URL feature in AdWords to bypass some (or all) of the quality checks. Currently, it doesn’t appear that AdWords spiders each custom destination URL, they just spider the URLs that are associated with individual ads. I am also pretty sure that the AdWords Quality Team is understaffed and does not have the time or the resources to manually review each destination URL.

Here is a screen shot of how you can easily apply these destination URLs to your keywords in Excel (or any other spreadsheet software). Just set up three columns: keyword, separator (**), and URL.

Once you have all of the cells filled in, just copy and paste them into AdWords as keywords. The interface will parse them and set the custom destination URLS. Now your keywords will point to a different URL than what was specified in your ad.

This feature is actually meant to be used to append custom tracking or landing page variants onto each keyword, but is susceptible to exploitation as demonstrated here. I used this method for about a month on an account that is not associated with my main one (just to be safe). I never had any problems with it; the ads were approved and remained approved. I got plenty of impressions and plenty of clicks.

One way Google could easily stop this exploit would be to allow a single “destination domain” per ad group, automatically set by the first ad in that group. Anything that doesn’t match would be denied.

I was using this technique to promote Amazon products and was experiencing conversion rates of about 15%-20%. The reason that I stopped using it was because I had domain names such as “Autoparts-Amazon.com” and apparently that is against Amazon’s TOS. They froze my affiliate account until I surrendered the domain. I never got around to registering new domains without the Amazon trademark because I have been working on other things.