Final URL expansion and sold out products: a morning check of where your ads land

To check where your ads land, list every live Google and Meta ad with its link each morning, open each link on your phone, and confirm the page loads, the product is in stock, the offer, price and code match the ad, and the tracking doesn’t break the page. If you run AI Max or Performance Max, also read the Landing pages report or the Expanded Final URL assets tab, and add URL exclusions for pages that shouldn’t take paid traffic.

Turn on AI Max in a Google Ads Search campaign and Final URL expansion turns on with it. In Performance Max it is on by default, and Google says it can serve traffic to any page on your final URL’s domain that you haven’t excluded. In both, a click can land on a page you never wrote into the ad.

In Search, Google lists the pages it chose in its Landing pages report. Your list of ads shows the links you wrote. That report shows where the clicks went. The older leak is quieter. A product sells out, and its ad runs on until the data behind it changes, which happens on a schedule set in your feed app.

A page that can’t sell raises no error. It looks like a quiet day, with the same spend behind it. Costs make that day dearer. Meta CPMs first rose clearly in the week of 10 November in 2025, and in mid October in 2024. Plan around the week of Monday 9 November, with Black Friday on Friday 27 November.

The check below takes 10 minutes, needs no tool and costs no clicks. It runs in the order a shopper meets a page.

What Final URL expansion does when AI Max is on

Google describes it as sending traffic to the most relevant URLs on your site when that is likely to perform better, matched to the search and the ad group (Google Ads Help, AI Max guide). A page can be relevant and still sold out.

Google said in April that from September, eligible Search campaigns with legacy settings would upgrade to AI Max automatically (Google). An agency, Common Thread Collective, reported on 2 September that the upgrade began on 1 September, and read it as leaving Final URL expansion to each campaign’s earlier settings, and off in broad match campaigns. Dynamic Search Ads campaigns are in Google’s notice too, and the sources we read disagree on their date, so check your account’s notices. Read the setting in each campaign rather than assume it.

That is Google’s figure, from its own data and for advertisers outside retail. It is the category claim, not your store’s result. Turning the setting off is one decision, and Google documents how: untick it in the campaign’s settings. Leaving it on and narrowing it with exclusions is the other. The morning check shows which suits your store.

Why ads keep running on out of stock products

A text ad’s link is a URL you or Google chose, and nothing in it reads your stock. Catalogue ads on Meta and Shopping ads on Google read product data, which moves on a schedule.

Meta’s developer documentation says a scheduled feed can’t upload more often than once an hour, points to a direct upload for faster stock updates, and advises marking unavailable items out of stock rather than deleting them (Meta). Google says Merchant Center’s automatic updates are not a replacement for regular product data updates, and may not work for products whose availability changes more than once a day. Neither page gives a delay from a sell out to the ad stopping. Find out what your own feed app is set to.

A morning check that takes 10 minutes and costs no clicks

Use your phone, in a private window that isn’t signed in to your store admin. Open each ad’s link itself rather than tapping the ad. A tap on a live ad can be billed, and it adds a click to your ad numbers.

• Every live ad, with its link. Export the live ads from each account and keep the link column. In Google Ads, you can add the Final URL and Tracking Template columns with Modify columns (Google Ads Help).
• Costliest first. Sort by yesterday’s spend, so the ads you run out of time on are the cheapest ones.
• A sheet with 5 columns: the ad, its link, the time you opened it, pass or fail, and a screenshot.
• A note to whoever reports your numbers. A link opened directly shows as a visit in analytics.

Open the link and look at the page

Paste the final URL into the window. A pass: the page loads in seconds on a mobile connection, it is the page the ad promised, and the market, language and currency are right. If it fails, check for a redirect that loops, a login wall, or a link that lost its parameters.

Check the product can be bought

Choose the size and colour the ad shows and add it to the basket. A pass: the button works and the basket holds it. If it fails, pause the ad or point it at a product that can sell. For catalogue ads, open the product links of the lines you expect to be low. A sold out page isn’t always a dead one. If it takes a back in stock sign up or offers similar products, decide on purpose whether this ad should still send people there.

Match the offer, the price and the code to the ad

Read the ad, then the page, then the basket. A pass: the same offer, end date, price and currency at every step. Enter the ad’s code at checkout and take the basket as far as the payment step. A page that loads is not a checkout that works.

Follow the click through your tracking template

Google’s AI Max guide says dynamic URLs combined with an existing tracking template can sometimes lead to broken expanded pages with a 404 error. It names two likely causes: a static tracking URL with no {lpurl} tag, and a tag in a nonstandard format.

Read the template in the campaign. Then build the click through URL by hand: put a page from the Landing pages report where {lpurl} sits, and open the result. A pass: the same page, with its parameters. A 404 is the break.

Read the pages Google chose, and narrow them

In Search, open the Landing pages report. Pages added through Final URL expansion sit beside the ones you wrote, and the “Selected by” column shows whether AI Max selected the URL (Google Ads Help). In Performance Max, open the asset report and its Expanded Final URL assets tab. Sort by cost and open the top pages you didn’t write.

A pass: every page that takes paid clicks is one you would choose to pay for. If it fails, add URL exclusions. In Search they sit under Final URL expansion, as a list of URLs or as rules, and need AI Max, Text customization and Final URL expansion all on. In Performance Max, choose Exclude some URLs under Text customization in Asset optimization. Policy pages, blog posts, sold out products and markets you don’t ship to are the first candidates.

What one day of clicks to a dead page costs you

1. Spent on clicks that couldn’t buy: the ad’s daily spend times the share of its clicks that land on the dead page. For a product that sold out mid day, count the clicks since. For an expanded page, divide its clicks in the Landing pages report by the campaign’s.
2. Purchases that money would have brought: line 1 divided by the ad’s cost per purchase, from its own report.
3. Sales missed: line 2 times your average order.
4. Days: use 1. Even when you can’t say when the page died, 1 keeps the sum low.

On invented numbers: Northmark Run (northmark.example) spends £90 a day on a Meta ad for one trainer. The trainer sells out at 14:00, and 40% of the day’s clicks come after. £90 times 40% is £36 spent. At a £30 cost per purchase that is 1.2 purchases, and at a £55 average order, £66 in sales. Fill the list with yours.

From the week of Monday 9 November the same clicks cost more. On Meta, if you hold the number of clicks steady, multiply line 1 by 1.15, Lebesgue’s reading for that week in 2025. Black Friday week was 1.59. The 1.15 is deliberately low, and a CPM is the price of reach, not of a click, so swap it for your own cost per click for the week, on Google or Meta. On Northmark’s numbers, £36 becomes £41.40.

What Quality Score and a link checker can’t tell you

Google calls Quality Score a diagnostic tool and not an input in the ad auction. Landing page experience is one of its three parts, graded above average, average or below average, and it measures how relevant and useful the page is. A sold out product page can be both. A good grade is not a pass on this check.

A link checker tells you a page loads. Whether the product is in stock and the offer matches the ad is a separate test, and it needs the page opened and read.

Where a morning check by hand stops

• One moment. A pass at 08:00 says nothing about 14:00, when a product can sell out or a sale can start.
• One phone. You see the page in your own market. A shopper elsewhere can see another price, currency or page.
• Your time. Count how many ads fit in your 10 minutes. The rest go unchecked on your busiest days.
• Proof. A screenshot starts an argument. The link, the time and what the page showed settle one.

For the ads that don’t fit in 10 minutes, and the hours between mornings, Obsession’s Ad landing check runs the same routine from the ad accounts you connect. Each morning, or more often in a sale, it opens every live ad’s page from its link on a phone and a desktop, checks the page loads, the offer and price match and the product is in stock, and drafts the fix, a pause or a new link, for your OK.

Run it every morning from Monday 9 November

• Every morning from Monday 9 November to Cyber Monday, Monday 30 November.
• After any change to a feed, theme, app, tracking template or campaign setting.
• When a sale or a launch goes live, and again at the hour you expect a product to sell out.

If your ads don’t change and nothing in your range sells out, one pass a week is enough.

For agencies: run it on every client before their sale

Run it on a client’s accounts with the client’s OK. The sheet is the report: the ad, its link, the time, the result and a screenshot of what the page showed. A client who can open the same link has no need to take your word for it. Send the first sheet to the client whose sale starts first.

Questions