When Microsoft Advertising serves Shopping Ads, the Landing Page is pulled directly from the merchant’s feed. If you are using URL Builder, this means that URLs for Product Groups often look like {lpurl}?mkwid=[uniq_id]&param… where the parameters are applied based on URL Builder settings.

When ads are served to users, URLs do not receive any special logic from Microsoft Advertising to replace Landing Page URLs. In other words, it is possible that broken URLs could be served in cases where the combined Landing Page URL plus required parameters create a malformed URL.

Note: There is no change in behavior between Microsoft Advertising Product Listing Ads (deprecated in early 2016) and Microsoft Advertising Shopping Campaigns.

Examples

Below are a couple of examples highlighting how these potential broken URLs can arise:

Example A: Valid URL

Landing Page: https://www.powpowsports.com/golf/clubs

Product Group Destination URL: {lpurl}?mkwid=abc123&param

Product Group Destination URL on Serving: https://www.powpowsports.com/golf/clubs?mkwid=abc123&param

Example B: Valid URL

Landing Page: https://www.powpowsports.com/golf/clubs?

Product Group Destination URL: {lpurl}mkwid=abc123&param

Product Group Destination URL on Serving: https://www.powpowsports.com/golf/clubs?mkwid=abc123&param

Example C: Invalid URL

Landing Page: https://www.powpowsports.com/golf/clubs

Product Group Destination URL: {lpurl}mkwid=abc123&param

Product Group Destination URL on Serving: https://www.powpowsports.com/golf/clubsmkwid=abc123&param

Avoiding Broken URLs

For most platform users, no change is required since this logic and behavior existed previously with Microsoft Advertising Product Listing Ads.

That said, it is important to keep this in mind when setting up new platform accounts or making changes to URL structure. You should take an approach to avoid possible broken URLs and ensure the the combined values of URLs from Landing Page (from merchant feed) and URL Builder settings will not result in a conflicting URL.

• One method is to end Landing Page URLs in the feed with a ?
• Alternatively you may prefer to leave your feed unchanged and account for this behavior in URL Builder settings,
• You may prefer to set URLs in bulk to confirm the structure meets your needs, however those that use this will not be able to leverage URL Builder on Sync (aka Autocorrect).