Google Ads Disapprovals during A/B tests

Hi,

We have been experiencing some issues when A/B testing on our website with the Split Testing Feature.

Whenever we push a split test live, we run into an issue in the Google Ads platform, which tells us that our ads have been disapproved. There are two errors that cause this:

  1. 404 errors
  2. 502 errors

Both of the above errors are caused on pages that exist and are live on the site, however during the split test, the Googlebot seems to have issues accessing these pages.

In some cases, this is a temporary issue and the problem resolves itself, however we have had instances where the Googlebot is unable to validate our ads and we have to go into the platform and re-submit ads for approval ourselves.

It would be great to understand what solutions there are to this problem, as I’m sure others have run into this issue as well.

Hi, @Yvie. We can investigate the 404 and 502 response your site but I don’t any any special ability to see what is happening inside the Google Ads platform itself.

To troubleshoot the 404s and 502s, would you please help us identify an example of one of these responses?

Ideally, the x-nf-request-id HTTP response header is the most unambiguous way to identify the response. There more information about this header here:

If that header isn’t available for any reason, please send the information it replaces (or as many of these details as possible). Those details are:

  • the complete URL requested
  • the IP address for the system making the request
  • the IP address for the CDN node that responded
  • the day of the request
  • the time of the request
  • the timezone the time is in

If you don’t have the IP addresses because the Google Ad platform won’t tell you that information, if you share the other details above I should be able to filter for the response based on the user-agent header for the Googlebot.

​Please let us know if there are other questions for us and we look forward to your reply.