From sexual content to misleading ads for financial products and outright fakes, Google stopped 3.4 billion ads that violated the company’s policies last year, according to a report. As a result, Google blocked 5.6 million accounts of suspected advertisers.

No more funding for fake news?

The group is repeatedly criticized because it is said to have financed many sites with fake news and other misleading offers through its advertising networks. That’s why Google expanded its guidelines in recent years and also increased the monitoring of illegal offers. Among other things, Google found harmful information about Covid-19 on more than half a million websites and blocked it to finance advertising. False information about climate change is also not allowed from the end of 2021 if you want to import Google ads.

In total, the group has partially excluded or restricted 63,000 different offers from its ad networks. However, advertisers are often surprised that their advertising is partially based on radical websites Emerge. Google is now addressing this point of criticism by allowing brand owners to use “dynamic exclusion lists” from trusted third parties to avoid such image-damaging ad placements.

First identify, then report

The fight against abuse of Google’s advertising platform also includes a program that requires advertisers to identify themselves with company documents in order to continue serving ads on Google’s ad networks. Previously, scammers could use false information to constantly acquire new advertising accounts, which then replaced accounts that had already been suspended without much interruption.

Google is now seeing early successes from the program, which is now said to be running in 180 countries. Due to this measure, among other things, the number of account lockouts has tripled in a year-on-year comparison. However, advertising scammers are far from giving up the game of cat and mouse. Google, for example, complains about “cloaking,” in which group auditors are only shown unproblematic ad media, which is then swapped when the ad campaign runs.

(mac)