Check AdWords Ads For Broken Links.
First, a big thank you to Certified Knowledge for their original article here :-
If you have a lot of accounts to check, please consider paying for their membership / automated tool (and read their article anyway for info about 404 errors).
But if you are skint, don’t have a huge number of accounts, and don’t have Microsoft Excel – here is an alternative method to check all your ads to make sure none are broken…
Download the excellent and free Xenu.
Download (the also excellent and free) OpenOffice.
Open your account in AdWords Editor.
Go to your ads tab.
Highlight all active ads.
Copy.
Paste into a new spreadsheet in Open Office.
Highlight the destination URL column.
Click on Data, Filter, Standard Filter, change Field Name to ‘ – none – ‘, More Options, tick the ‘No Duplication’ box.
Highlight all the URLs in that column.
Copy.
Open a text editor (like notepad).
Paste.
Save as whatever.txt.
Open Xenu.
Click on Options, Preferences, and set Maximum depth to 0, OK, File, Check URL List, and open the file you saved from your text editor.
Wait a while.
Pause any ads that have non working URLs.
NB – I’m sure I’m not the only one who thinks that Google should do this themselves as a matter of course (and inform the advertiser that things need fixing), after all they are always banging on about how important user experience is etc…
PS – While on the subject of avoiding paying for clicks that do not come through to a functioning page, if you have an unreliable web hosting service, and your site is likely to be down for longer than a minute or 2 once in a blue moon, and you spend more than a few pounds a day on PPC then it’s worth checking out https://www.pingdom.com/. Which can alert you and allow you to pause your campaigns until your web site comes back up again. PPC Hero also have an interesting tool which will automate this process for you (though I haven’t tried it). Here is the link – http://pro.ppchero.com/tools/ad-guardian.
