Google released its annual Trust and Safety in Ads Report, where the company shares key actions and data around its efforts to keep the digital advertising ecosystem safe.
The full blog post, “Enabling a safe digital advertising ecosystem” by Scott Spencer, Google Director of Sustainable Ads, can be accessed here.
Key takeaways from the report are that Google….
· Introduced 31 new ads policies in 2018
· Took down 2.3 billion bad ads. Overall, that’s more than six million bad ads, every day.
· Took down nearly 207,000 ads for ticket resellers
· Took down over 531,000 ads for bail bonds
· Took down approximately 58.8 million phishing ads (NOTE: many of these ads were blocked before ever serving)
· Used improved machine learning technology to identify and terminate almost one million bad advertiser accounts, nearly double the amount Google terminated in 2017
· Launched 330 detection classifiers to help us better detect “badness” at page level– nearly three times the number of classifiers Google launched in 2017
· Removed nearly 734,000 publishers and app developers from the Google ad network.
· Removed ads completely from nearly 1.5 million apps.
· Removed ads from nearly 28 million pages for violating the publisher policies.
· Verified nearly 143,000 election ads in the U.S.
· Removed ads from almost 74,000 pages for violating Google’s policy on “dangerous or derogatory” content
· Took down approximately 190,000 ads for violating Google’s dangerous or derogatory policy.
Google also continued to tackle the challenge of misinformation and low-quality sites, using several different policies to ensure that Google ads are supporting legitimate, high-quality publishers. In 2018, the company removed ads from 1.2 million pages, more than 22,000 apps, and nearly 15,000 sites across the ad network for violations of policies directed at misrepresentative, hateful, or other low-quality content.