I say this as somebody who shot down the "We'll send ad clicks to a squeeze page!" option several times (including on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=59

I say this as somebody who shot down the "We'll send ad clicks to a squeeze page!" option several times (including on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599162 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599162). This is more in response to the content of the linked comment, but creating a landing page for a not-quite-finished product and/or idea before launch is okay and so long as your CTR is high (which you can achieve by targeting your spending in exact match keywords) your quality score is still good. The Unbounce page I mentioned in the article which had reasonable QS (6 or 7/10 IIRC although there's no historical QS view in AdWords and I've since changed the landing page) AND which, despite initially violating their "Information Harvesting" policy has since been cleared, is this one: http://unbouncepages.com/your-first-3-months-on-adwords/ http://unbouncepages.com/your-first-3-months-on-adwords/ I think that it's a very different landscape that what it was 5 - 7 years ago when you could get THOUSANDS of visitors for pennies per click to a page to test an idea, but you can certainly still get < $2/click traffic for very targeted search terms to test out an idea. Sometimes I'm not only interested in testing the market (ie. testing conversions) but just seeing what traffic there is and how much it costs. The free data you receive via the KeywordPlanner is notoriously inaccurate, so while a "real" website is being developed I'll often put up a simple landing page so I can start running the AdWords campaign and be ready to "hit the ground running" after launch. EDIT: just to reply to this bit, as well: You know what I told my clients who were worried about Google enforcement? It was not "Don't worry, Google enforces policies in a consistent manner and, in the unlikely event you are caught up in a heuristic, you will be able to talk to someone and resolve the issue in a timely fashion." I think this is changing and Google is wising up. In fact, the screenshot of Google's support documentation that I provide in the article isn't the same page I saw when I was suspended. The page I saw just said: "If you have received an Advertising Policy violation we will no longer accept advertising from you". I think that this is a function of 2 things: 1) Clicks are more expensive, and losing individual advertisers affects Google more now than it used to. You can see the strategy clearly: shut down fake SEO link building, drive people onto AdWords, increase CPC, improve support. 2) They're targeting a lot of non-tech-savvy type small businesses now who are far more likely to "bluster their way through" than to sit down and carefully analyse Google's terms of service, so they are being far more lenient. The funny thing is, that since Google is becoming more lenient in reinstating suspended accounts now, a bunch of companies have sprung up saying "WE'LL HELP YOU GET BACK ON GOOGLE!!1" but that's only because it's so much easier to do than it used to be anyway :)