Hoping someone can shed some light on what’s going on. I’m trying to set up an Adwords campaign to run ads in Canada and USA.
Due to heightened security in part to having my website hacked, we’ve limited IPs to only those from Canada and the United States. So… when I set up a Google AdWords campaign, Google is unable to access my website and get the following destination not working message.
I’ve spent a considerable amount of time working with google explaining and illustrating how my destination URL is working fine. They couldn’t care less. They mentioned how, as a result of my IP exclusion their bots weren’t able to visit my destination. Regrettably, their solution was to remove IP exclusion and given my previous experience with getting my site hacked; I’m less than willing to open my website to the world.
HELP!! How do I get my AdWords ads approved while excluding specific IPs from accessing my website? Looking forward to a solution!
There’s only one other post on the subject, and it’s inconclusive. Do you see entries in the Firewall log from Google? It also sounds like if you were to unblock IP addresses (I know you need them blocked), that it will work. So it was working before?
I’ll speak with IT on Monday to do a test. I’ll ask them to temporarily remove the restrictions to see if google approves my remarketing ads. Don’t know how happy they’ll be at the prospects of of opening up our website to potential hacks! (fingers crossed)
Hi Astojkovic,
I feel your pain! I recently posted a thread on here about a similar situation we are having with Google ads suddenly disapproving some of our ads due to ‘Destination not working’, when the destination clearly is working! (thread called: ‘Could we be blocking a Google Ads bot?’).
Same as you, we have so far found Google ads support to be less than helpful, it feels like they have just been guessing at possibilities, rather than letting us know what the actual problem is.
Whilst researching for possible solutions, I came across a thread on Stackexchange that might - possibly - be something worth you looking into - this wasn’t our issue but as you said you are limiting your IP’s to Canada and the US, I wondered if this might help you - if maybe your server or website is set to redirect users based on “locale”. The thread I found is this one: Google AdWords disapproved site as "destination not working", but it is reachable - Webmasters Stack Exchange If you look down to the bottom, their solution is in the “We Found The Problem” - could it be that your server is redirecting people based on locale? It’s only a suggestion, but could be worth checking.
Also, in case you want to try this - we have found that if we re-create the disallowed google ads, using the exact same detail and same destination, and re-submit them, that google is Approving them, which makes no sense, but that’s what we’ve found over the last couple of days.
Good luck! I will keep an eye on this thread as well as mine!
Just in case this helps… we have got to the bottom of our “destination not working” - turns out it was a problem at Google’s end, and not to do with our website at all.
After much correspondence with Google Adwords support they “escalated” the issue to a more senior Adwords technician, who has told me he thinks the problem was at Google’s end and that our ads should not have been disallowed at all. He described it as a “system misunderstanding”!
He tried to get the disallowed ads approved again, but they just keep getting disallowed again - he said those ads are now caught in a “loop” their end and will always be disallowed.
So the only way we can get those ads up and running again, is to re-create them as new ads (copy & paste). When we do that, they are getting Approved without a problem.
So, if like us you can’t find anything wrong with your “destination pages”, try re-entering some of the disallowed ads as new ads, and see if they get Approved. Good luck!
