Hi there - One of my clients is redeveloping its website. That means, the domain is remaining the same, but the whole site is being rebuilt in wordpress so all the adwords final URLs need to change OR be redirected.

There are 550 live adgroups and 3400 ads.

We haven't set up tracking.

I can't find anywhere what the best thing to do is in this case. The key issues seem to be:

1. 301 redirects - given we have to do these anyway as part of migration, this seems to be the easiest path as Google is ok about redirects as long as they don't go to a different domain. From what I'm hearing, you don't get adversely impacted in terms of quality score etc. This has the huge advantage that you don't have to edit the ad therefore no loss of statistical history or risk of downtime whilst you wait for approval. HOWEVER, there is some concern that if you then redirected again IN THE FUTURE, the redirect might not work (in some browsers) or cause a loop. I'm also concerned that it's messy to leave it like that (ie: with the wrong URLs throughout).

2. Buik updating ads - I don't think this is an option as if you bulk download and then reupload, Google will see this as a new ad, and delete all the statistical history - I'm also concerned that that WOULD impact quality score as you'd be starting from scratch!

3. Changing each ad individually - as far as I understand you'd have to create copies of all the ads (so that you keep the history of the old ones) and effectively create new ones with the correct URL - one by one. You end up with a messy account (a lot of paused ads) but you keep the history? This is obviously the most time consuming and I can't see a way of avoiding ads having to go in for approval again, given the urls are all different, so you'd have to do this a an ad level, not an adgroup/campaign level etc.

People redevelop their websites (without changing domains) all the time. It seems strange that no one is mentioning this problem! Any ideas?!

Many thanks