Today I came across an absolutely strange Adwords ad in my Gmail interface. I am absolutely clueless why would any advertiser put up an ad like that and even if they do how can the Adwords editorial team approve such an ad copy. On top of my Gmail inbox the Adwords ad displayed as
Text ad - www.url.com - Desc1 Desc2
Just to satisfy my curiosity I clicked on the ad to find that it leads to a page that apparently doesn't exist, however, I was even more surprised by the fact that the landing page URL is completely tagged to keep a tab on the performance of the campaign, which indicates that the person who has set up the campaign definitely knows a bit or two about Adwords and PPC
Landing Page:
http://www.test.0000000184.com/path?keywords=keyword&creative=3849139695&adGroup=7711
While the ad copy mostly complies to the Google Editorial policy except for the fact that the landing page URL isn't working ( and that should get the ad disabled ) it is rather strange for any company to put up an ad like that.
There are just two possibilities that clicks my mind on this..
a) The ad is run by Google themselves to test any internal feature or gather any specific user behavior data ( by passing the editorial policy is not an issue for them)
b)Any major agency is running these ads for the purpose of finding out any user behavior data or calculating some other competitive matrix like minimum cpc, ctr or minimum impressions on specific keywords etc. However, in this case I am not sure how they have been able to bypass the Adwords editorial policy.
If you have any other ideas about the possible reasons for such an ad copy please do mention in the comments.
