Google Targets Bad Advertising – 780 Million Ads Removed

Advertising is great in many ways as it keeps you connected to the products and services you’re most interested in and makes it even easier for you to access the things you all know and love. Spoiler: they removed a lot. The company has also been cracking down on ads that cover up what you’re trying to see, or send you to an advertiser’s site even if you didn’t want to go there. In 2015, we disabled or banned the worst offenders. “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”. As some people find advertising through the web a nuisance, Google is working hard at keeping those ads more relevant and from promoting unnecessary products that are placed there to only make money or even worse, scam. We responded by suspending more than 30,000 sites for misleading claims.

Almost 7,000 sites were blocked for phishing for web users’ personal information. “Through a combination of computer algorithms and people at Google reviewing ads, we’re able to block the vast majority of these bad ads before they ever get shown”, Google says. With this, Google also banned 10,000 websites that try to sell counterfeit goods online.

Weight loss scams, like ads for supplements promising impossible-to-achieve weight loss without diet or exercise, were one of the top user complaints in 2015. In 2015 alone we rejected more than 17 million.

Kirshner said mobile impressions and clicks were up “substantially” but offset “modestly by weaker pricing”, according to Blackledge. This will also save advertisers money wasted on accidental clicks.

It also stopped showing ads on more than 25000 mobile apps because developers did not follow its policies. Also on that front, last June, Google made some changes to help minimize the impact of fat-finger clicks on mobile ads. Back in 2011, it settled with the US Department of Justice and had to pay out $500 million on allegations that it knowingly accepted ads from Canadian pharmacies selling drugs illegally in the US. Clicks on its ads grew at a slightly more leisurely pace, rising 23 percent from a year earlier in the third quarter last year, the most recent for which figures are available.

Lastly, the search engine added a feature that lets users block/mute ads, simply by clicking an X at the top of ads that become too annoying.

Predicting that Alphabet-owned Google will drive more ad growth on its YouTube video wing and search operation, investment bank Cowen & Co. Advertising, being one of Google’s main source of income, wants to improve the way we see and interact with them.