Recently, we had a client that was very interested in launching an agressive PPC campaign. Everything started out perfect. During our collaboration to form a strategy, we found out the domain name for this project has 36 characters. This is not including the www. (ExampleOfA36CharacterDomain123.com)
For those of you who don't know, Google's Adwords policy states that the display URL has a character max of 35 characters. Since this site is a newly acquired site, it normally wouldn't have been an issue because we can easily buy a new domain & point the website to the new domain. However, marketing dollars were already spent on print advertising with this 36 character domain.
Bear in mind that if you read blog or forum posts stating that Google will sometimes make exceptions to this, that is no longer the deal. Google runs a tight ship when it comes to their policies.
Obstacles
- We don't want two identical sites
- We have to keep the 36 character domain due to print advertising
- We want to build on the brand
Solution
While we sometimes might of been over-analyzing the situation, we overlooked a very simple, but effective solution to this problem. We purchased a very similar domain that still keeps their brand strong and relevant. Then we took the OLD (36 characters) domain and 301 redirected it to the newly acquired domain (33 characters). This solved the display URL problem, the issue with the URL being on print advertising because the URL is redirected to the new domain, and also allowed us to avoid having two identical sites.