Landing pages

What is this screen?

Where your ads send people, in three parts: What Google says about it, The pages Adintel checks, and Spend by page. It changes nothing: anything that needs you is a finding in the audit, with its fix beside it.

Tiles at the top give the state at a glance. When Pages that open, Need a look or Could not check has pages to show, click it to show only those in The pages Adintel checks. Click the tile again, or Show all, to bring the rest back.

What does Google say?

Any running ad, sitelink or asset group link that Google disapproves or limits for its destination, with Google's reason, such as Destination not working or Destination mismatch. Running means the ad or link, its ad group or asset group and its campaign are all enabled, and the campaign has not ended. A sitelink set on the account counts while any campaign is running. A disapproval in a paused campaign is left out, so an old account's history stays quiet. The first tile reads All clear when Google reports nothing, and otherwise each problem is listed under the tiles. If this has not been read in the last 48 hours, the tile says so and lists nothing.

Which pages does Adintel check?

Once a day, after the morning read, Adintel checks the pages your running ads, sitelinks, asset groups and keywords send people to. Each page is checked once, however many things use it. Each row shows the page's last answer, or the answer a finding rests on, and its spend in the last 7 days. The button under Used by says what sends people there, and lists each one when you click it. Product pages from a feed are not checked: Google's product status covers them. Adintel checks at most 50 pages an account and 25 pages a site each day. Past that, pages whose last answer showed a problem take most of the day's checks, the pages checked longest ago take the others, and the rest follow the next day. Not checked yet marks a page Adintel has no answer for.

What do the answers mean?

• Opens: the page answered normally. A redirect within the same site, such as to https or to the www address, still counts as opening.
• Page not found: the page answered 404 or 410. This is a finding the first morning.
• Server error: the site answered with a server error. This is a finding only when the page also answered a server error or page not found the morning before, because a site can fail for a moment.
• Redirects to another site: the page sends people to a different site. This is a finding, and Google's destination rules do not allow it.
• Redirects to the home page: a deeper page sends people to the site's home page, usually because the page was removed. This is a finding.

Why does a row say Could not check?

Adintel cannot tell whether the page opens. Many sites turn servers away and open normally for people, so this never starts a finding. Google's own review of your ads and links still applies. A page's finding stays through Could not check, for up to 48 hours from the answer it rests on.

• Could not check: the site refuses servers: the site answered with a refusal, such as 403, 429 or a 503 that says when to come back, or showed a check for bots. After a 429, that 503 or a check for bots, Adintel stops asking that site for the day, so its remaining pages show the same.
• Could not check: robots.txt asks Adintel not to: the site's robots.txt rules out the page.
• Could not check: no usable answer: the site did not answer in time, its address or security certificate could not be used, its robots.txt could not be read, its redirects went wrong, or it answered another status, such as 400. A site down for everyone shows this too, so open the page if it matters.
• Could not check: not a public address: the URL, or a redirect from it, is not a public web address, so it was not requested.

How does Adintel request a page?

As AdintelBot, a named crawler with a page of its own. It follows robots.txt and asks a site for one page at a time. It waits at least five seconds between requests to a site. It records whether the page opened and, if it redirected away, where it went, never what the page says.

What is Spend by page?

Figures from Google's landing pages report, for the dates set above the list. Each query string is a separate URL to Google, so one page can have many URLs. By page adds the URLs of one address into a single row, whatever their query string, and treats http and https, www or not, and a trailing slash as the same address. When a page has several URLs, the button on its row lists them. Every URL has one row per URL, so you can read it beside Google's report.

Only URLs that took spend are listed, at most the 1,000 with the most spend in each view.

Chosen by Google marks a URL Google picked rather than one you set, and a page with at least one such URL. Google does not say who chose it marks a URL whose source Google does not state. When every URL carries the same mark, it appears once above the list.

How do I change the dates?

The list opens on the last 30 days up to yesterday, unless you chose dates on another page. Click the period above the list to open the calendar. A preset, such as last 60 days, applies at once. For your own dates, click the first and last day, or type them, then Apply. On this screen, only this list changes. The line above the list shows the exact dates to set in Google's report.

The dates travel with you to Overview, search terms and the accounts page. Those pages do not offer 60 or 90 days, so they show the last 7 instead.

Adintel's first read of this report reaches back 90 days, and each day is kept for up to 400 days. The calendar runs from the first stored day with spend to the last. If your dates start earlier, the list says so.

What do its figures mean?

The figures are Google's. They do not add up to the account's spend, so this screen shows no total. ROAS is conversion value divided by spend. A page's ROAS counts all its URLs' value and spend together, so a URL with more spend weighs more. The bar under a row's spend shows it against the largest row in the view, not as a share of the account. The URLs listed under a page have no bar.

While the account is spending, Adintel reads the last 30 days each morning and 90 days once a week, so a conversion Google credits late still lands on its day. A day older than that stays as it was last read.

How do I sort the list?

The list opens with the most spend first. In Spend by page, click a column's heading, or choose from Sort by, which is also how to sort on a phone. A figure's heading sorts highest first and the page or URL heading sorts A to Z, and clicking the heading in use reverses the order. Find a URL narrows the list by any part of a URL. A view holds at most 1,000 rows, so past that, sorting and Find a URL cover the 1,000 with the most spend.

When does a page become a finding?

How the audit decides gives the rules. A row that meets them shows In the audit, which opens the audit. A page checked after that day's nightly check reaches the audit the next day.