Customizing text ad destination URLs leaves original keyword URL

Requirement: When an ad with a customized destination URL is displayed in search results, clicking the ad should you to the customized destination URL.

ADS deployments currently set the keyword destination URL to what is passed in at the campaign-level custom URL field. Keyword destination URLs override the ad destination URL. This worked fine when all ads and keywords were using that same URL. Now that ads can custom URLs, we can't have keyword being used anymore. It would make any customizations the user does at the ad level moot, because AdWords uses the keyword destination URL at the time of the click.

https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2404246?hl=en

The fix is to change the code so new deployments set keyword destination URLs to null in Google. To handle existing deployments (from versions prior to 2.3.0/Jamestown), when the difference checking detects a change in the ad destination URL, we can set the keyword destination URLs (in that campaign) to null and send the keyword and ad updates to Google. This avoids writing an additional migration, which simplifies deployment for techops.

There are several cases you'll need to test.

1) deploy accounts with the old build so the gce_keyword table will have values for the destination URL. then deploy the new build and add a BA or location to one of the accounts. you should see the new campaign has no keyword destination URLs (null in the DB and empty in Google) but the previously existing campaigns will still have URLs. This is expected because none of the ads in the other campaigns were touched.

2) deploy accounts with the old build so the gce_keyword table will have values for the destination URL. then deploy the new build and customize an ad in one campaign. check the keyword destination URLs for that campaign in Google and the DB have been set to null, but the other campaigns still have the keyword destination URL because they weren't modified.

3) deploy accounts with the old build so the gce_keyword table will have values for the destination URL. then deploy the new build and customize one or more ads in all of the campaigns and you will see none of the keywords in that account have a destination URL value in the DB or in Google.

4) deploy accounts with the new build and confirm no keywords have a destination URL in google or in the DB.