Google shares how it is preventing malicious advertising practices in its latest report.
Google yesterday released its 10th annual Ads Safety ReportOpens a new window that offers insights into how the company is preventing malicious use of its ads platform and safeguarding advertisers’ and consumers’ interests.
The report highlights that the platform blocked nearly 3.1 billion ads to clean up the ad space. Google blocked 867 million ads attempting to evade detection systems, and an additional 101 million ads were blocked for breaking misrepresentation policies.
However, no story for 2020 is complete without examining the impact of COVID-19 on the state of business. On that front, Google said it blocked over 99 million COVID-19 related ads from running on its platforms. These ads included content promoting price-gouging and fake cures, and fake vaccine treatments.
Google also temporarily paused over 5 million election ads and blocked ads on over 3 billion search queries immediately following the election.
Ernesto De La Rocha Gomez, senior product manager, Ads Privacy & Safety, Google, mentions in the blog article that predicting the future of the ads landscape is challenging in an ever-changing landscape. But the pandemic helped inform the company’s future ad safety concerns.
However, the post also mentions that malicious advertisers are also getting smarter. They are deploying cloaking in an attempt to evade detection, promote fake businesses, and run ads for phone-based scams to lure unsuspecting victims off the platform.
Also read: Beating the Fraud Guide: How To Protect Your Ads
How Is Google Improving Ad Safety?
The company is improving its ads ecosystem and prevent malicious ads by:
- Introducing new policies, including advertiser and business operation verification programs.
- Investing in technology to improve detection of harmful and malicious advertiser behavior.
- Improving automated detection and human review processes based upon an ever-increasing list of network signals, prior account activity, behavior patterns, and user feedback.
The number of ad accounts disabled for privacy policies increased by 70% in 2020, to over 1.7 million.
To prevent future malicious behaviors, Google’s team follows this process:
- Human reviewers identify and label policy-violating ads.
- Engineers create machine learning models using policy-violating ads to identify signals of malicious behavior.
- The system uses the machine learning models based upon the network signals they have identified to flag similar ads.
Models are continuously improved over time.
Also read: Beating Ad Fraud With Effective Invalid Traffic (IVT) Detection
Ads Safety: The Future and Beyond
Google’s latest report comes at an interesting time. With the company getting ready to phase out cookies and shifting its focus to privacy-first advertising solutions, user safety is an integral part of preserving trust for advertisers, consumers, and publishers. The company has said that safeguarding its ad platform is a priority, and it will continue focusing on improving the experience for all stakeholders heading into 2021.