Dive Brief:
- The big news from Google’s "bad ads" report for 2015 is it blocked 780 million fraudulent ads last year. According to Google, if you spent one second viewing each of those ads, it would take almost 25 years to see them all.
- The Internet giant also revealed it used technology to recognize accidental mobile ad clicks so as to not send users to the ad site and not charge advertisers for the accidental click.
- Google’s ad blocking focused on a set of categories including: counterfeiters, pharmaceuticals, weight loss scams, phishing, unwanted software and trick-to-click ads.
Dive Insight:
"Bad ads can ruin your entire online experience, a problem we take very seriously," Sridhar Ramaswamy, Google svp of ads and commerce, wrote in a blog post about the report. "That’s why we have a strict set of policies for the kinds of ads businesses can run with Google — and why we’ve invested in sophisticated technology and a global team of 1,000+ people dedicated to fighting bad ads.”
Last year, Google blocked over 25,000 apps from displaying ads due to policy violations. For 2016, Google reported planning on further restricting weight loss ads as well adding new protections against malware and bots.
According to a report from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and White Ops, advertisers are predicted to lose $7.2 billion to fraudulent ad bot impressions this year. Display media and programmatic were found to be especially vulnerable to bot fraud. With CPMs over $10, display media had 30% more fraud than lower CPM media, and programmatic ads had higher bot fraud at 14% for display ads and 73% for video ads.