Recently my client told me they got penalized for running a paid ad to a landing page. By penalised I mean the ad and the landing page were disallowed. And by landing page I mean a page with one place to click. I.e not a regular webpage. I was surprised to hear this because running paid ads to landing pages is just what you do. It might be because this “landing page” was a splash page. So after submitting your email, the user was then taken through to the company website. My client said something like “Google doesn’t like ads to websites with gated content so we can’t use landing pages." Anyone know anything about this? Has Google changed its stance lately?

Hey Robbie, in my experience this might happen if the ad is using keywords that are not contained in the landing page. And google might think its a misleading the users. Even tough users get what they wanted, google crawlers might not get that. Manual review by human or contacting their acc manager representative can clarify lot of questions.

What did they describe as the “penalty”?

the advert was just disallowed

This is a paid search ad? Do you have the copy and LP?