A friend of mine has just discovered he has wasted nearly $2000 on Google Adwords. The only reason he discovered this is that I happened to click on one of his Adwords ads and was taken to an error page.

In other words he has paid $2000 for people to land on an error page. Not a good investment.

He's had a few leads from the error page from people who have managed to navigate to the main page and then find the correct landing page.

The problem is that Google Adwords appends a tracking code to the destination url. I believe this tracking code is required for Google Analytics. The trouble is the tracking code doesn't play well with web site servers and content management systems.

So rather than sending clickers to http://www.yourbusiness.com/23/12/ they get directed to something that looks like http://www.yourbusiness.com/23/12/?sa=l&ai=B6Rzo78ePR5LSGZSopATQn8noCPK.

This can be a problem with some web servers and content management systems (the popular Mambo / Joomla for example).

I suspect it's something to do with MOD REWRITE.

The big issue to me is that when you create the ad in the Google Adwords administration system and test the ads from there, the landing page works just fine.

I wonder how many millions of dollars are being wasted by the combination of Google Adwords and content management systems?

I have read on another blog that Matt Cutts from Google is investigating putting dummy tracking code in the test ads so what you see is what you get. This would be a great development for advertisers who would be able to do legitimate tests at no cost.

I suspect it will also lead to an outcry because Adwords customers will realise their ads have never worked properly, their prospects being directed to the wrong page.

In the meantime I suggest that you do live testing of your Adwords ads rather than relying on the testing from the Google Adwords administration system. Set up a campaign for some cheap keywords and then test the urls that are presented in the real ads.

Has anyone else noticed this problem?