Ads linking to donation forms not allowed under AdWords Grant?

Alison Hinchman

After years of no problems linking directly to Luminate donation forms, Google has decided those ads are a violation and suspended our AdWords Grant account. They now reject ads using our nonsecure URL--my.preservationnation.org--because those URLs resolve to secure2.convio.net/nthp. They rejected a request to add convio.net to our approved list because we don’t own it/it’s not unique to us. The obvious option is to pay for a vanity secure URL for our donation forms but that’s not in the budget for this fiscal year.


We finally had to remove every ad that resolved to a secure2.convio.net URL to get our AdWords grant account reinstated. This means that we can't have ads that link directly to donation forms, which is a huge bummer. We've had an AdWords grant for years with no problem so this is a new crackdown by Google. Anyone else run into this recently?

Alicia Searfoss

We ran into this a while back, but haven't discovered a good solution. I thought about creating a landing page and then linking to the form from there, but we all know you'll loose quite a few before you convert that way. It will be good to know if someone has found a better alternative.

Jeremy Reynolds

Alison Hinchman:

After years of no problems linking directly to Luminate donation forms, Google has decided those ads are a violation and suspended our AdWords Grant account. They now reject ads using our nonsecure URL--my.preservationnation.org--because those URLs resolve to secure2.convio.net/nthp. They rejected a request to add convio.net to our approved list because we don’t own it/it’s not unique to us. The obvious option is to pay for a vanity secure URL for our donation forms but that’s not in the budget for this fiscal year.


We finally had to remove every ad that resolved to a secure2.convio.net URL to get our AdWords grant account reinstated. This means that we can't have ads that link directly to donation forms, which is a huge bummer. We've had an AdWords grant for years with no problem so this is a new crackdown by Google. Anyone else run into this recently?

It gets worse. Do this google search, swapping out your organization's details...
<span style="background-color:#FFFF00;">site:secureX.convio.net/yourorg</span>

...in our case, almost all of the results say "Pagename | Convio" instead of our organization. In other words, it looks like we don't own our own site!


If that weren't bad enough, Google has started adding security warnings to a bunch of BB customers' pages, and ultimately wants everyone to use secure URLs exclusively (there's another community forum thread with those details). Yesterday, the IT world found out about a major security vulerability in how wi-fi security works, and the only foolproof way to protect user data is to use HTTPS in the browser, so I'd expect Google to get more aggressive about pushing the Internet that way.


This whole thing has been a problem for years., it's just forcing itself on to everyone's radar now. For SEO, Google has been ranking secure pages higher than normal ones since at least 2004. Some folks get freaked out when your donation form has a different URL than the rest of your site. It's harder to remember a random URL too. The list goes on, and the situation has gone from broken to catastrophic.


Only real solution to all of this would be to get a secure URL that has your org name on it. You'll have to talk to your BB rep about that, but I'll warn you in advance that they're asking for a three year contract and thousands of dollars to fix it.

Alison Hinchman

Alicia Searfoss:

We ran into this a while back, but haven't discovered a good solution. I thought about creating a landing page and then linking to the form from there, but we all know you'll loose quite a few before you convert that way. It will be good to know if someone has found a better alternative.

As you suggest, we are planning to create a few landing pages for AdWords. Our web developers have created a method that makes it relatively easy for me to embed a form into any of our pages. Would be nice if it were easier to do without a lot of code.

Alison Hinchman

Only real solution to all of this would be to get a secure URL that has your org name on it. You'll have to talk to your BB rep about that, but I'll warn you in advance that they're asking for a three year contract and thousands of dollars to fix it.

Sadly the secure URL is not an option for us at this time, though I do recognize that it is the most straightforward solution.

Alison Hinchman

Jeremy Reynolds:

It gets worse. Do this google search, swapping out your organization's details...
<span style="background-color:#FFFF00;">site:secureX.convio.net/yourorg</span>

...in our case, almost all of the results say "Pagename | Convio" instead of our organization. In other words, it looks like we don't own our own site!

Jeremy, FWIW our pages show up with our page title and org name in search results. I believe it's this code in the page wrapper.

<title>

[[?null::[[?xx::x[[A7]]x::null::[[A7]]]]::

yourorg::

[[A7]][[?xx::x[[A17]]x::::[[M0:global:html_page_subtitle_divider]][[A17]]]][[M0:global:html_page_title_divider]]yourorg]]

</title>

Laura Rabell

Hi Alison, I see this is an old post, but just thought I would share an idea in case it helps... you could do a basic/blank page on your existing website with just your site header and footer and for the main content of the page embed the donation form at it's Convio URL via an iframe. It's not ideal, but it would probably work in a pinch! Any web developer should be familiar with iframes, they are pretty simple to implement with just one line of HTML code.


Here is a tutorial, hope this helps:

https://www.tutorialrepublic.com/html-tutorial/html-iframes.php


Feel free to email me at laura@rabellcreative.com if I can be of any further assistance.