Fix disapproval issues with your Dynamic Search Ads

Your Dynamic Ad Target status lets you know whether your targets are eligible to serve or not. If your Dynamic Ad Targets are not serving, you can use the status to figure out the nature of the problem. 

These statuses are listed in the “Dynamic Ad Targets” section of the page menu in Google Ads. This article explains what the different statuses mean and how to resolve them.

Types of Dynamic Search Ad statuses

Below are the different status types:

Status type Examples
Statuses that you control
  • Campaign paused
  • Removed

Statuses related to where Google’s system is
in regards to processing your webpages
  • Pending
Statuses that require you to make a change
  • Below first page bid estimate
  • Domain mismatch
  • Invalid URL
  • No matching pages
  • No matching queries
  • Pages blocked by negative auto targets
  • Page can’t be crawled
  • Redirect or cross domain
  • URL not indexed
Statuses that are impacted by other factors
  • Overlapping target

What they mean and what to do about them

The Dynamic Ad Target status tells you whether your target is eligible to serve ads to customers. In general, your target will be in one of three states:

  • Showing ads
  • Not showing ads because you paused or removed a keyword, ad group, or campaign
  • Not showing ads because there is an issue with your target, website, or setup

Here are the different types of keyword statuses, what they mean, and how to respond to them:

Dynamic Ad Target status What it means Next steps
Below first page bid estimate Your ad isn't performing well because its bid is too low to show ads on the first page of search results. Increase the bid. Learn more about bid strategy statuses here
Disapproved: Domain mismatch The domain specified in the campaign settings does not match the domain of the URL_EQUALS Dynamic Ad Target. Make sure that the domain specified in the Dynamic Search Ad settings is the same one used for the Dynamic Ad Target.
Disapproved: Invalid URL The URL_EQUALS target URL is invalid.  Check the URL to make sure that it’s valid and loads in a browser.
Disapproved: Page can’t be crawled Dynamic Search Ads rely on Google’s webpage crawlers to collect data from the website to generate the website headline and targets. If the webpage you are targeting with URL_EQUALS cannot be crawled, then webpages cannot be used with Dynamic Search Ads. Learn more about common product crawl issues

GoogleBot and AdsBot supply Google Ads with the information that Dynamic Search Ads use. Your webmaster can ensure that your webpages aren’t blocking these crawlers and improve the information available to them by following this Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.

Learn more about how to troubleshoot uncrawlable landing pages in a Dynamic Ad Group.

If you use AJAX on your website, learn how to make your site more accessible to Google. 

Learn how to get your site working on Search Console here
Disapproved: Redirect or cross domain The URL_EQUALS target does not allow redirects. 

Make sure you are targeting the final URL after all redirects with  URL_EQUALS Dynamic Ad Targets. The redirect URL should be displayed if you hover over the status. 

For example, if you want to serve an ad for https://example.com/home.html, enter exactly that in your Dynamic Ad Target and put any tracking information in the tracking parameters part of your creatives or settings.
Eligible: Pending

It takes up to 24 hours after you set up your first Dynamic Ad Group for it to begin serving ads.

This status also shows if the Dynamic Ad Group setup has not been completed. 

 Review the Dynamic Ad Group and confirm that there is a Dynamic Search Ad in the ad group. After you’ve confirmed the ad group is set up correctly, wait 24 hours.
Eligible (Limited): No matching pages This means that Google Ads isn’t finding any eligible pages that match with the Dynamic Ad Target. There are a variety of reasons that this could happen, including issues with how the target is set up, incompatible campaign settings, the Dynamic Ad Group not containing ads, or the pages not being crawlable.  Check your setup and targets. Some things to look for:
  • Make sure that the Dynamic Ad Target is correct and matches your target pages. For example, if the Dynamic Ad Target is a "URL equals" target, confirm that the URL exists and is typed correctly. 
  • Ensure that the Dynamic Ad Group contains ads.
  • Ensure that the domain and campaign language settings are correct and match. For example, a Dynamic Ad Target can’t serve if all of your webpages are in French but the language targeted in your Dynamic Search Ads settings is German. 
  • Does your website block Google crawlers from indexing URLs? For example, if your website uses robots.txt to prevent Googlebot from crawling your pages, then the target may be ineligible to serve. If your website is blocking GoogleBot but isn’t blocking AdsBot, then you can use Page Feed targeting to bypass the indexing process and add pages directly to your campaign. See status solutions for “Disapproved: Page can’t be crawled” below for more information.
Eligible (Limited): No matching queries Dynamic Search Ads work well with webpages that AdsBot can crawl to identify relevant headlines and queries for ads to serve on. This status means that Google Ads is unable to identify searches to serve ads on for your targeted pages.

You can learn more about how to make your website accessible to our crawlers in the Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. 

You should also make sure that your webpages titles are clear and descriptive. Review your webpage headlines and check out these tips to make it easier for Google to use your webpage to generate Dynamic Search Ad headlines. 
Eligible (Limited): Overlapping target

The target may not serve or may have limited traffic due to an overlapping target that is narrower or expected to be more effective.

 Traffic is being directed to your webpages through the target that is expected to perform better. No action is required.
Eligible (Limited): Pages blocked by negative Dynamic Ad Target

A negative Dynamic Ad Target is overlapping with your target. This blocks your target from being served.

For example, if you add a PAGE_CONTENT exclusion for “out of stock,” but “out of stock” is in the text on every webpage, this will prevent your Dynamic Ad Targets from serving.

 Review your negative Dynamic Ad Targets to see if any of them overlap with your targets. You can review the ”Website coverage” column to see the percentage of pages that are covered by a negative Dynamic Ad Target. Learn more about targeting your ads

Dynamic Search Ad Page feed statuses

To view the Page feed statuses:

  1. Click on the Tools icon .
  2. Click on Business data.
  3. Click on the feed you’d like to view the statuses for.
  4. The information will be listed under the “Status” column.

These are the different types of page feed entry statuses, what they mean, and how to respond to them:

Dynamic Ad Target status What it means Next steps
Approved Page Feed URLs are eligible to serve with a Dynamic Ad Target. Follow directions here to setup a Dynamic Ad Group that targets Page Feed URLs.
Approved (Limited) The URL specified directs to a webpage within the same domain. 

URLs that redirect within the same domain are eligible to serve. However, you should make sure that you are targeting the page you intend to serve ads on.

Review the page feed URL and make sure that you are targeting the final URL after all redirects. The redirect URL should be displayed if you hover over the status.

You should also make sure that you’ve put any tracking information in the tracking parameters section of your ads or settings.
Disapproved: Destination mismatch  Dynamic Search Ads don’t allow cross-domain redirects.

Make sure that the final URL has the same domain as the URL specified in the page feed.

For example, if the page feed URL is example.com, but the URL redirects to example1.com, then the URL will not be eligible to serve.
Disapproved: Destination not working The targeted URL is invalid.  Check the URL to make sure that it’s valid and loads in a browser.
Disapproved: Duplicate URL If there are identical URLs in a page feed, only the URL most recently added to the feed is eligible to serve. All other duplicate URLs will be labeled as "Disapproved." 

Review the labels associated with the duplicate URLs and make sure the correct labels are associated with the URL that is approved and serving.

You should also remove disapproved duplicate URLs to make your feed easier to manage. 
Disapproved: Not crawlable Dynamic Search Ads rely on Google’s webpage crawlers to collect data from the website to generate the website headline and targets. If the webpage cannot be crawled, then the webpage won’t work with Dynamic Search Ads.  Learn more about common product crawl issues

GoogleBot and AdsBot supply Google Ads with the information that Dynamic Search Ads use. Your webmaster can ensure that your webpages aren’t blocking these crawlers and improve the information available to them by following this Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.

If you use AJAX on your website, learn how to make your site more accessible to Google. 

Learn how to get your site working on Search Console here
Under Review: Waiting for crawl It can take up to 24 hours to crawl all of the pages in a page feed after you create or modify it.

This status shows if you modify the page feed by adding a URL, edit a URL, or edit a custom labels. Most URLs should be crawled within 24 hours after making a change to the feed. 

If you’re not blocking Google Ads from crawling your content, you might be limiting efficient crawls. This is especially likely if you have uploaded or edited a large number of page feed entries at one time. You can check and adjust the crawl rate in Search Console.

If your website doesn’t have sufficient crawl capacity, it may take significantly longer to finish crawling all of the pages in the page feed.

If you use a click tracker for your ads, check to see if it is affecting the crawl capacity.

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