Google Adwords Delays in Landing Page Crawl Time for Instant Previews

In April, Google added “Instant Preview” for ads providing searches with a way to see the landing page without clicking on the ad. This change forced ppc managers to ensure their landing pages were visually appealing and provided the content a user was looking. Theoretically, it was also supposed to reduce the amount of clicks that subsequently lead to a user clicking the “back” button.

While making edits and running tests for a client today, we discovered a frustrating delay in Googles Adbot landing page review time. Our client wished to change their price as part of a test in their business model, moving the price for their service up by $50. We changed the ads to reflect this as well as the pricing on the landing pages. Unfortunately, Google’s Adbot has yet to crawl the page and update its preview in the system. Thus, a searcher (should they choose to preview the page) will see a different price than what is on the ad.

We spoke with Google about the issue and were informed that it can take “up to a week” for the changes to take effect.

How can you avoid this?

If your changing pricing for your products and want to avoid this, we reccomend the following:

1. Create a new ad group in a new campaign a week or so in advance with some of your core keywords.
2. Create your new landing page with updated pricing.
3. During “off hours” (early in the morning), set your ads to run for a short period of time. This should trigger the Adbot to crawl this new page.
4. Once the new page is crawled, then update your existing campaigns and ad groups to the new landing page URL.