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Building a Google-safe Lander

Deploying a media buying campaign to a network like Google Ads requires compliance with various policies, link checkers, page validators, and more. We define compliance generally into 2 categories:

  • On-page compliance. This involves how you link to your lander, listicle, or article; and how that page behaves once the user lands there.

  • Off-page compliance. This includes what links are on the lander, and what happens when you click or leave the page to another website.

On-Page Compliance

Ad networks generally want to see the following:

  • Links from advertisements to landers can include URL parameters, but must link directly to a page and not a redirection URL.

    • Action item: do not use an affiliate link directly from a creative! Instead, link to your lander directly, without any redirects.

    • If you are creating a “direct campaign”, that is, a campaign that links directly to a Katalys Program, then you must use a Direct Link. Read more →

  • Once the user lands on the page, the user must be presented with a consistent experience. The user cannot be automatically redirected to another page, or have the page meaningfully change after the page loads.

    • Action item: avoid A/B testing on the lander! Instead, have 2 landers linked from 2 different creatives. Split the traffic into A/B variations using Google Ads targeting.

    • Avoid testing tools like Optimizely or VWO that change the lander page itself.

Off-Page Compliance

When linking from your landing page to off-page URLs, follow these guidelines:

  • Prefer links that do not include redirects. If you must use a redirect, such as an affiliate link, you should use 1) an approved redirection domain, and 2) the URL must contain a Transparency Parameter.

    • Action item: ensure all outbound links are Direct Links or use approved redirection domains.

    • The Katalys Tracking Domain track.revoffers.com is an approved/acceptable domain.

Using Affiliate Links on Landers

Google Ads allows landing pages to link to affiliate links, but these links must comply with their guidelines. According to Google’s documentation:

Click tracking URLs should have a visible query parameter that indicates the next immediate hop in the redirection chain. That parameter must be followed instead of using any other redirection target configured on the backend.

Tune has documented their approach to compliance as well, highlighting that their approach uses approved domains. According to Tune’s documentation:

If you use Tracking Templates, Google Ads will require you to use a Transparency Parameter to specify the next immediate redirect in your click flow. For this purpose, we provide a tracking link parameter named redirect_url, which complies with all Google requirements.

Creating a Google Ad

Follow these steps to configure your lander and Google Ads account to correctly capture GCLID values.

  1. Generate and configure your Katalys Tracking script

    1. In the script settings, activate “Google Compliance” toggle, and enter the URL substring to match for the compliant replacement.

    2. Also activate “Parameter Forwarding”, add an entry where “Source” is gclid and “Destination” is a Katalys field, such as sub1.

  2. Create your listicle page.

    1. Add the Katalys Tracking Script to the page

  3. Setup your Google Ads Tracking Template to include ?gclid={GCLID} by activating the setting “Auto-Tagging” (read instructions).