Click & destination
Destination not working
What Google's rule says
Google's stated rule is that the click-through URL does not work properly. The rejected-creatives page lists malformed click-through URLs, invalid click redirect URLs, problems with macro replacement and non-working landing pages under the same heading.
What actually causes it
- A destination that works on desktop and fails on mobile, or in one country and not another.
- A redirect chain with a broken hop in the middle, where the final URL is fine in isolation.
- An unencoded parameter that truncates the URL at the first ampersand.
- A campaign landing page taken down at the end of a flight while the creative is still live.
How to fix it
Click the ad as it is actually served, on a mobile device and from the geography being targeted, rather than pasting the destination into a browser. Most failures under this reason are conditional, and pasting the final URL is precisely the test that cannot see them.
The part that is not obvious
This reason and missing click macro overlap in a way that costs real time: macro replacement problems are listed here, under destination, rather than under the macro reason. So a creative disapproved for a destination that does not work may have a perfectly good landing page and a broken macro instead. Check what the click actually resolves to before anyone goes near the web server — the URL in the tag and the URL the browser receives are different strings, and only the second one is being judged.
Related reasons
Reason name verified against Common ad disapproval reasons — Authorized Buyers Help on 30 July 2026. The causes and fix above are practitioner guidance, not Google policy text.