Did you know that redirects hurt your account’s performance?
Here’s why:
- Page load times are an important factor. Using 301/302 redirects slows things down which can impact your conversion rates and Quality Score and thus overall performance.
- Redirects often drop URL parameters necessary for proper conversion tracking, resulting in incomplete data and under-reporting of conversions. This is especially bad when you are running smart bidding.
- Cross-domain redirects are terrible for analytics.
Luckily for us, there’s a nice Chrome extension that makes it very easy to spot redirects during campaign setups, and/or landing page analyses. It’s called “Redirect Path,” and here’s a link to it:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/redirect-path/aomidfkchockcldhbkggjokdkkebmdll?hl=en
Now, unfortunately, links that do not redirect at the time of setup might do so in the future. Here are some possible reasons:
- Changes in URL structure: Your SEO colleagues or web developers might have decided it was time to change the URL structure of the website, redirecting visitors all over the place.
- CMS updates: The CMS might have been updated, adding or removing trailing slashes to all URLs for some reason.
- Protocol shifts: Your client might have just shifted from HTTP to HTTPS (yes, I know, it’s 2023 already!).
All sorts of things can result in your Final URLs not working properly anymore.
That’s why I created my Redirect Checker script.
It checks for URLs with redirects, reports them in a Google Sheet, and sends an email if there’s at least one redirect. You can access the script here:
https://nilsrooijmans.com/google-ads-script-check-for-redirects/
Happy scripting!
-Nils