How to Validate Your AdWords Ad Group?
It has been observed that merchants find it really bothersome to validate their PLA Campaign’s various Ad Groups. And it is quite understandable; one needs to be very careful while inputting the labels because if they fail to match the AdWords labels, the ad group will not validate. Even a small error – an extra space, use of plurals in place of singulars, capitalization where there is none – can lead to validation issues. To avoid mistakes, it is better to copy all the information directly from your AdWords account – like labels, categories, brands etc – and paste it into your feed.
At the time of creating your Ad Group the surest way to do this without any mistakes is to open your Google feed simultaneously (as shown in the example below) so that you can cross check that the information has been copied accurately.
Use the Incorrect Filter to Validate Your Ad Group(s)
Besides the ‘copy-paste’ mistakes that may occur during the Ad Group creation, another mistake that merchants do is that they choose an incorrect AdWords filter while creating the Ad Group for validation.
The following snip shows the window that appears when comes the time to choose the filter arrives. So, be careful while choosing the filter, for instance, if you want to recognize an ad group by a category, make sure that you are selecting a ‘category’ and not an ‘AdWords label’.
Other Issues That Might Arise With Validation
At times, AdWords can be over-particular about things, for instance, at many occasions brand product target has been observed to be highly case sensitive.
Also, for some accounts, it has been seen that despite the proper feeds and correct labels, sometimes the account’s traffic drops. These are observations, something which Google never announced, so make sure that you catch such type of trends by regularly keeping an eye on your account.
But do pay heed to the capitalization when picking your labels.
And not just capitalization, also pay attention to other minute things like spaces, commas, and quotations etc, while selecting your ad group product targets.
Another noteworthy thing about validation that can be of great help to merchants is that in some accounts the labels are to be inputted on separate lines, while in others the labels must be put in the same sentence using commas as separators.
This is how that second type of label is inputted:
So, to get your ad groups validated, make sure that you avoid errors by always copying the exact labels. But this is just not it; you will also have to keep a regular check on your account, traffic, conversions etc, so as to detect any out-of-the-place changes.
