We encountered a situation last week where we wanted to promote a particular news story on one of our sites using Pay Per Click. We saw amazing click through’s and low bids until we got a message from Google saying the status of our ad was “Disapproved”Google has various criteria that they examine in their approval process but the reason this particular ad was disapproved after running for a short time was because of our destination url. This page we were linking to, our “landing page” had a popup on that page. Google does not allow popups on landing pages regardless of the content.

Here’s what Google officially says about this:

“We do not allow links to landing pages that generate pop-ups when users enter or leave your landing page. We consider a pop-up to be any window, regardless of content, that opens in addition to the original window.”

I for one despise popups and see no value in them but there are sites out there beyond our company that get good money out of these ads. If you are running these make sure you have a mechanism in place to block these ads through JavaScript on your site or another means to ensure your PPC ads aren’t disapproved and your site visitor gets what they want.