Google blocks 8m ads related to Ukraine war, suspends 5.6m ad accounts

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Google has blocked eight million ads related to the war in Ukraine and removed ads for more than 60 state-funded media sites across its platforms, according to its Ads Safety Report 2021. The tech giant previously instituted a "Sensitive Event" section under its ad policies to ensure ads running through its services do not take advantage of the situation. This is in addition to its longstanding policies prohibiting content that incites violence or denies the occurrence of tragic events to run as ads or monetise using Google's services.

Since 2021, Google has blocked or removed over 3.4 billion ads, restricted over 5.7 billion ads, and suspended over 5.6 million advertiser accounts. It also blocked ads from serving on more than 1.7 billion individual publisher pages, and took broader enforcement action on 63,000 publisher sites with pervasive or egregious violations.

Last year, it added or updated over 30 policies for advertisers and publishers. For example, it introduced a multi-strike policy for repeat policy violations, a policy prohibiting claims that promote climate change denial and a certification for US-based health insurance providers to only allow ads from government exchanges, first-party providers and licensed third-party brokers.

At the same time, it also blocked over 106 million ads related to COVID-19 in 2021 and blocked as from running on more than 500,000 pages that violated its policies against harmful health claims related to COVID-19.

Google witnessed an increase in fraudulent activity during the pandemic in 2020 and continued to see bad actors operate with more sophistication and at greater scale in 2021, these included using techniques such as cloaking and text manipulation. It continues to take a multi-pronged approach to combat this behaviour, which includes verifying advertisers identities and identifying coordinate activity between accounts using signals in its network.

It is also actively verifying advertisers in over 180 countries; and if an advertiser fails to complete its verification programme, the account is automatically suspended. According to Google, the combination of efforts has allowed it to match the scale of its adversaries and more efficiencly remove multiple accounts associated with a single bad actor at once.

As a result, Google tripled the number of account-level suspensions between 2020 and 2021.

Overall, Google said advertiser brand safety reminds its top priority. Last year, for example, it added a new feature to its advertiser controls that allows brands to upload dynamic exclusion lists that can be automatically updated and maintained by trusted third parties. According to Google, this tool helps advertisers get access to the resources and expertise of trusted organisations to better protect their brands and strengthen their campaigns. It has also made targeted improvements to the publisher approval process that helped Google better detect and block bad actors before they could even create accounts.

Photo courtesy: 123RF

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