Category Archives: DoubleClick Advertiser Blog

News, features, tips, and training – DoubleClick Advertisers

Programmatic native ads now available to all in DoubleClick Bid Manager

We are excited to announce that programmatic native ads are now available to all advertisers in DoubleClick Bid Manager, allowing more brands to build beautiful ads and deliver them at scale to mobile-first audiences.

A “native ad” is a paid advertisement that fits the look, feel and function of a publisher’s content. It’s assimilated into the design so that it feels like it belongs on the page or in the app. Users are responding positively to native ads: across the DoubleClick platform, we've seen that users are more than 2X as likely to click on a native ad as a traditional banner.1

DoubleClick’s component-based native ad solution makes it easy for brands to create compelling native ads that look great across any site or app, and on any device. Exact audience targeting and access to thousands of premium publishers provide both reach and precision — Bid Manager’s 40+ exchange integrations give access to hundreds of billions of global monthly native impressions. And the unified workflow lets you seamlessly integrate native ads with other buys and measure native alongside other campaigns to get a holistic view of performance.

“Native allows us to deliver ads that look good, with appealing text and information, for users to learn about products. We’re able to provide users with an integrated experience.” - Elie Milan, Associate Director of Programmatic at Starcom

Native advertising drives results

Native ads offer many benefits for advertisers. To date, over 500 brands and agencies have used DoubleClick Bid Manager to execute native ad strategies across both brand and direct response campaigns, with success across multiple objectives.

For example, Starcom helped Saudi Telecom reach a younger, tech savvy audience with native ads in DoubleClick, with a 30% increase in unique user reach and 2X improvement in operational efficiencies. Sojern team with SF Travel and used DoubleClick’s native solution to drive 1662% more bookings than their previous campaign with greater media efficiency.

“Thanks to our work with the San Francisco Travel team and Google, programmatic native ads in DoubleClick are now a proven method for driving direct bookings. We’ve since expanded this opportunity and made it available to all of Sojern’s clients.” - Jackie Lamping, VP of Marketing for Sojern

Visualize native ads with our new interactive tool

We've heard from a number of advertisers who want to better understand how their native ads will look before delivering them across a range of different publisher formats and devices.

We’re launching a new tool to help solve this challenge. Our interactive native ad gallery allows you to visualize your native ads before you begin building them. You can use the tool to preview native ads across multiple website templates and multiple devices, using sample creative or uploading custom assets to see your branded ads in action.

Try our interactive tool now to start visualizing your next native campaign.

Getting started with programmatic native ads in DoubleClick Bid Manager

We have also created a guide to help advertisers better understand native and the benefits of buying native ads programmatically. This guide gives you an overview of programmatic native in DoubleClick Bid Manager and offers practical tips to get you started.

DoubleClick’s native solution can help you build beautiful, relevant ads at scale, engaging consumers with better experiences across any screen and context.

Explore native ads in DoubleClick with our new interactive tool and getting started guide.

Posted by Ladika Jackto
Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick
1 DoubleClick Internal Data April 2017

Bridging the gap between TV and digital video

If you’ve watched a movie on your mobile phone or streamed a YouTube video on your TV, you’re not alone. People are watching great content wherever and whenever they want, across the small screens in their pockets to the large screens in their living rooms. We’re in the golden age of video, and while this explosion of great content is great for users, it creates a lot of complexity for advertisers and publishers.

As the lines blur between TV and digital video, it's important that marketers are able to reach their audiences across screens. That’s why we’re making traditional TV inventory available to buy in DoubleClick Bid Manager in the US. We are integrating with WideOrbit, clypd and Google Fiber to provide access to national, local and even addressable TV inventory in DoubleClick Bid Manager.


Manage TV and digital video campaigns in a single platform with DoubleClick Bid Manager

Historically, TV and digital advertising have been bought and measured through different systems and currencies. By adding traditional TV buying into DoubleClick Bid Manager, we are taking the first step towards allowing advertisers and agencies to manage their video campaigns across digital and linear TV, in a more efficient and effective way.

In addition, to help brands and agencies understand the effectiveness of their TV campaigns, we will be providing impact-based metrics in DoubleClick. For example, an advertiser will be able to measure the lift when someone searches for their brand on Google or YouTube after seeing their TV ad.

Programmatic technology has already automated some of the manual processes associated with buying digital video, and with these new integrations we’ll be extending many of the same workflow improvements to traditional TV.

Access to new advertisers for television networks and station owners

With their inventory now available through DoubleClick Bid Manager, television networks and station owners get access to new types of buyers, such as advanced TV buying groups in agencies, digital-first advertisers, and even global advertisers. Many of these buyers already use DoubleClick, but until now, have had limited access to US TV audiences.

As viewership patterns change, advertisers and publishers have new opportunities to provide audiences with great ad experiences across screens and content types. By bringing TV and digital video advertising together, we hope to help advertisers and publishers grow with video in a more impactful way.

Posted by Rany Ng
Director, Product Management, Google

Introducing Marketing Mix Model Partners: Helping brands better understand the impact of their marketing

The following was originally posted on the Google Agency Blog.

CMOs and marketing executives use marketing mix models to understand how their marketing investments are driving sales and how to optimize their spend across multiple brands, channels, and regions. With rising investment in digital and mobile advertising, marketers want to be sure the models they use correctly value the impact of these channels.

Today we’re excited to announce a program to help marketing mix model providers better incorporate Google media data into their services. The Marketing Mix Model Partners program is designed to ensure advertisers can accurately measure the ROI of their digital investments and confidently understand the digital drivers of ROI to improve returns year-over-year.

The Marketing Mix Model Partners program offers:

  • Data Access: Partners get access to accurate, granular campaign data across all relevant Google video, display, and search media in a standardized format. We’re also making the data easier to access by providing data from multiple properties, like Search and YouTube, in one centralized location.
  • Expertise: Partners also get dedicated training, resources, and specialists to better understand Google advertising products and practices and incorporate digital data into their model methodologies.
  • Actionability: We provide Google account and technical teams to help advise on results and strategies designed to understand the drivers of ROI and improve returns over time.

Our partners

We’re excited to be working with the initial participants in the program, Marketing Management Analytics, Neustar MarketShare, and Nielsen. Google customers can talk with their Google representatives about working with one of these partners on using Google data in their marketing mix model engagements.

Here’s what our partners have to say about the program:

“The ability to collect and analyze digital data at extremely granular levels enables both marketers and their advertising partners to more successfully measure, predict and action the most effective and profitable means of optimizing each digital channel to achieve their business objectives. We are excited that Google has taken such a proactive approach in working with MMA and analytic companies within the marketplace in providing such a high level of objectivity and transparency."
‒Patrick Cummings, CEO of Marketing Management Analytics

“Today’s measurement solutions need to be connected, always on and incorporate the myriad of channels, as well as critical econometric externalities in order for marketers to truly get an accurate view of marketing’s impact. We are thrilled to be a Google launch partner as this signals our commitment to helping brands understand how their marketing investments are driving business results. Through this partnership our advanced analytics models will incorporate more accurate, granular data, giving marketers a more complete understanding of the effectiveness of their marketing and how best to optimize their spend to improve future outcomes.”
‒Julie Fleischer, Vice President, Product Marketing, Marketing Solutions, Neustar.

"As the marketing landscape rapidly evolves, it is critical to use the most robust data-streams in our Marketing Mix models to ensure the highest standard of insight quality. Working with Google, we will have better input and better consultative output so that our advertiser clients can best understand what is driving their performance today and make informed decisions for tomorrow.”
‒ Jason Tate, VP of Global Analytics at Nielsen.

As part of our commitment to providing the industry with trusted, transparent, and independent third-party metrics, we’ll be expanding the program over the coming months. If your company provides marketing mix model services and you’re interested in learning more about the partner program, please sign up here.

Posted by Mallory Fetters
Product Manager, Marketing Mix Models

Bringing programmatic buying to reservation deals everywhere

At DoubleClick, we’ve always focused on building solutions that help publishers and advertisers connect in better ways. Today, delivering on that goal means giving advertisers the programmatic tools to find and reach their audiences across their preferred publisher partners. It also means giving publishers the flexibility to negotiate a variety of different types of deals that can be delivered programmatically, including direct deals that were historically transacted via paper insertion orders and tags.

This was the premise for Programmatic Guaranteed. Advertisers gain guaranteed access to premium inventory on brand-safe publisher sites with the ability to optimize their campaigns programmatically. Publishers benefit from locking in revenue from preferred advertisers with greater efficiency.

With these benefits, it’s no surprise that Programmatic Guaranteed impressions served on DoubleClick grew at a monthly rate of 20% in 20161, making it the fastest growing transaction type on our platform. We’ve seen adoption from global advertisers like Turkish Airlines and Mercedes-Benz, and premium publishers like Conde Nast and Vox.

Building on our initial announcement last year, today we’re excited to share that Programmatic Guaranteed is now available to all DoubleClick Bid Manager and DoubleClick for Publishers users globally with two new key features—support for buyer audience lists and sponsorships.

Reach the right user with audience lists

Using Programmatic Guaranteed with audience lists, advertisers can target (or exclude) their own audience lists and secure guaranteed access to preferred publisher inventory while minimizing media waste. Publishers can forecast the inventory available against advertisers’ lists and guarantee they’re only serving ads to the buyer’s target audience. Since we announced this feature, advertisers and agencies such as i360 have used Programmatic Guaranteed with audience lists to meet their reach goals while targeting only their desired consumers on premium publishers. The net result: a 25% uplift in viewability and a 72% completion rate for their video ads.

Greater flexibility to transact fixed fee deals programmatically

Programmatic Guaranteed with sponsorships allows publishers to sell high-value inventory on a flat-fee sponsorship basis—a common practice among publishers transacting via traditional reservations. With this new capability, advertisers and publishers can maintain the control of a sponsorship transaction, while reaping the efficiency benefits of programmatic.

“Being able to sell sponsorships through Programmatic Guaranteed really benefits us. On one hand, we are able to transact high value placements through a new channel generating new business to Universo Online. On the other, we also see a lot of operational benefits for us and for our buyers. With this new feature, it is possible to bring agility to the entire workflow of booking, trafficking, credit checking and invoicing. Consequently, we have a more agile and efficient implementation process to run campaigns.”
-Adriano Marques, Head of Adtech at Universo Online (UOL)

Connect faster with Marketplace and Programmatic Guaranteed

Media buyers who use DoubleClick Bid Manager can discover and request to reserve premium inventory from any publisher participating in DoubleClick’s Marketplace. With the recent release of the new RFP workflow in Bid Manager, advertisers now have a simple solution to create a media plan. And with a single click, they can request quotes from publishers who they already know or from publishers whose inventory matches their campaign goals or their first party audience data.

With the launch of these new features, we’re excited to prove the value of programmatic in connecting advertisers with their audiences on premium inventory. Stay tuned as we expand the capabilities of our programmatic platforms to bring the full power of automation and machine learning to improve advertising performance for our partners.

Check out the latest Programmatic Direct trends in our newly updated report “The State of Programmatic Direct” or g.co/ProgrammaticDirect.

Posted by Kurt Spoerer
Group Product Manager, DoubleClick		 Posted by Roshan Khan
Product Manager, DoubleClick

1 DoubleClick Ad Exchange data, Jan 2016-Dec 2016

Expanded safeguards for advertisers

Cross-posted from The Keyword
The web has opened a door for new communities and platforms that help people find diverse views and have a voice. Today, anyone with a smartphone can be a content creator, app developer or entrepreneur. And Google has enabled millions of content creators and publishers to be heard, find an audience, earn a living, or even build a business. Much of this is made possible through advertising. Thousands of sites are added every day to our ad network, and more than 400 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. We have a responsibility to protect this vibrant, creative world—from emerging creators to established publishers—even when we don’t always agree with the views being expressed.

But we also have a responsibility to our advertisers who help these publishers and creators thrive. We have strict policies that define where Google ads should appear, and in the vast majority of cases, our policies and tools work as intended. But at times we don’t get it right.

Recently, we had a number of cases where brands’ ads appeared on content that was not aligned with their values. For this, we deeply apologize. We know that this is unacceptable to the advertisers and agencies who put their trust in us. That’s why we've been conducting an extensive review of our advertising policies and tools, and why we made a public commitment last week to put in place changes that would give brands more control over where their ads appear.

I wanted to share that we've already begun ramping up changes around three areas: our ad policies, our enforcement of these policies and new controls for advertisers.

Raising the bar for our ad policies

We know advertisers don't want their ads next to content that doesn’t align with their values. So starting today, we’re taking a tougher stance on hateful, offensive and derogatory content. This includes removing ads more effectively from content that is attacking or harassing people based on their race, religion, gender or similar categories. This change will enable us to take action, where appropriate, on a larger set of ads and sites.

We’ll also tighten safeguards to ensure that ads show up only against legitimate creators in our YouTube Partner Program—as opposed to those who impersonate other channels or violate our community guidelines. Finally, we won’t stop at taking down ads. The YouTube team is taking a hard look at our existing community guidelines to determine what content is allowed on the platform—not just what content can be monetized.

Increased brand safety levels and controls for advertisers

Every company has brand guidelines that inform where and when they want their ads to appear. We already offer some controls for advertisers that respond to these needs. In the coming days and months, we’re introducing new tools for advertisers to more easily and consistently manage where their ads appear across YouTube and the web.

  • Safer default for brands. We’re changing the default settings for ads so that they show on content that meets a higher level of brand safety and excludes potentially objectionable content that advertisers may prefer not to advertise against. Brands can opt in to advertise on broader types of content if they choose.
  • Simplified management of exclusions. We’ll introduce new account-level controls to make it easier for advertisers to exclude specific sites and channels from all of their AdWords for Video and Google Display Network campaigns, and manage brand safety settings across all their campaigns with a push of a button.
  • More fine-tuned controls. In addition, we’ll introduce new controls to make it easier for brands to exclude higher risk content and fine-tune where they want their ads to appear.

Increasing resources, accelerating reviews and improving transparency

We’ll offer advertisers and agencies more transparency and visibility on where their ads are running, and in the coming months we’ll expand availability of video-level reporting to all advertisers.

We'll be hiring significant numbers of people and developing new tools powered by our latest advancements in AI and machine learning to increase our capacity to review questionable content for advertising. In cases where advertisers find their ads were served where they shouldn’t have been, we plan to offer a new escalation path to make it easier for them to raise issues. In addition, we’ll soon be able to resolve these cases in less than a few hours.

We believe the combination of these new policies and controls will significantly strengthen our ability to help advertisers reach audiences at scale, while respecting their values. We will continue to act swiftly to put these new policies and processes in place across our ad network and YouTube. But we also intend to act carefully, preserving the value we currently provide to advertisers, publishers and creators of all sizes. In the end, there’s nothing more important to Google than the trust we’ve built amongst our users, advertisers, creators and publishers. Brand safety is an ongoing commitment for us, and we’ll continue to listen to your feedback.

Posted by Philipp Schindler
Chief Business Officer, Google

Join us live on May 23, 2017 as we announce the latest Ads, Analytics and DoubleClick innovations

What: Google Marketing Next keynote live stream
When: Tuesday, May 23, 9:00 a.m. PT/12:00 p.m. ET.
Duration: 1 hour
Where: On the DoubleClick Blog

Be the first to hear about Google’s latest marketing innovations, the moment they’re announced. Watch live as my team and I share new Ads, Analytics and DoubleClick innovations designed to improve your ability to reach consumers, simplify campaign measurement and increase your productivity. We’ll also give you a sneak peek at how brands are starting to use the Google Assistant to delight customers.

Register for the live stream here.

Until then, follow us on Twitter, Google+, Facebook and LinkedIn for previews of what’s to come.

Posted by Sridhar Ramaswamy
Senior Vice President, Ads & Commerce

Enhanced YouTube buying and reporting in DoubleClick

With consumers watching video across screens and devices, you need to be able to reach these audiences wherever they are — on YouTube, on the web and on apps — and analyze your campaign results in tandem. This requires access to engaging formats and to reporting and measurement capabilities that work across your buys. Today, we’re excited to announce several improvements to YouTube buying and reporting in DoubleClick that make it easier to align your YouTube and cross-exchange buys under one roof, and understand how your viewers are engaging with your brand across all of your media strategies.

New YouTube formats to drive awareness and consideration

Bumper ads, now available in DoubleClick Bid Manager, are YouTube’s 6-second non-skippable video format. Bumpers are great for driving upper-funnel brand impact at an efficient CPM and in a mobile-friendly way. TrueView Shopping ads, currently in beta in DoubleClick Bid Manager, allow you to add product details from your Google Merchant Center account to your video ads on YouTube, making it easier for viewers to engage and learn more about your products.

Enhanced reporting for YouTube TrueView campaigns in DoubleClick

Starting soon, we'll automatically track YouTube TrueView campaigns bought through DoubleClick Bid Manager with pixels from DoubleClick Campaign Manager. No more waiting for support to manually set them up.

Automated tracking enables us to offer substantial enhancements to TrueView reporting across the DoubleClick suite:

  1. Enhanced conversion tracking in DoubleClick Bid Manager. Now you can measure de-duplicated conversions across YouTube TrueView and cross-exchange inventory.
  2. A wide variety of brand metrics: Easily track additional brand metrics in DoubleClick Campaign Manager for TrueView and cross-exchange buys. Metrics now include: standard VAST, viewability, audibility and visibility metrics.
  3. Automated TrueView attribution: See how TrueView impressions factor into your viewers’ conversion paths without having to manually set anything up. We’ll expose TrueView in DoubleClick Campaign Manager’s attribution reports automatically, helping you compare different models of assigning credit to your TrueView campaigns (e.g. last interaction, first interaction, linear and time decay).
  4. Data extraction for custom analyses: TrueView data is now available in DoubleClick Campaign Manager data transfer files, so you can extract the raw data and complete custom analyses, or export your data into Data Studio to build advanced dashboards and visualizations. This allows you to determine campaign effectiveness across media and can inform your strategy for future campaigns.

Track standard VAST metrics, core viewability metrics and new audibility and visibility metrics in DoubleClick Campaign Manager for your TrueView campaigns bought in DoubleClick Bid Manager.

It’s difficult to analyze and understand what’s working best — and what isn’t working — when your media exists in silos. Combining your video strategy under one roof, in one reporting interface and with a single set of brand metrics can help you understand which strategies are performing well across all of your inventory. Consolidation with DoubleClick can lead to greater efficiency, reliability and insight for your video advertising.

Posted by Rany Ng, Director, Product Management, Google Video Ads

Keep a pulse on your bid strategy performance

Having successful bid strategies is paramount to successful campaigns. To help you monitor the performance of your bid strategies, and identify and fix potential issues, we’re introducing a helpful health panel with details and recommendations for fixes, a timeline to show when issues start and end, and icons representing issue severity in the new bid strategies Overview page.

Quickly uncover issues affecting your bid strategy

It can sometimes be challenging to identify the issues that are holding back your bid strategies. That's why the bid strategies Overviews page will now automatically surface those issues and help you monitor any fixes you decide to apply.

Under the performance summary graph, you’ll now see a timeline highlighting days when an issue was detected and when a fix was applied. For example, if you’ve applied a fix to increase the max bid limit for your bid strategy, you can now see when that fix was made and monitor its impact on performance.

Easily see the issues affecting your bid strategy

Diagnose your bid strategy, at a glance

New icons throughout the bid strategies page will help you identify the severity of detected issues, status of automated fixes, and when your bid strategy is learning. For example, if a small number of keywords are hitting the max bid limit, you’ll see the minor issues icon:

 

However, if a large number of keywords are hitting the max bid limit, the critical issues icon will show:

 

These icons let you quickly see the severity of all your issues and make it easy to prioritize the ones you should fix first. You can also see a brief summary of all the issues detected on a particular day by hovering over the icon in the performance summary graph.

Take action to improve performance

When bid strategy issues are detected, you’ll want to address them quickly to minimize potential negative impact. The new health panel provides more information about the issues affecting your bid strategy and what you can do to fix them. For each message that’s displayed, you’ll see an overview of the issue, and where possible, the estimated impact on conversions, revenue and spend, as well as links to learn more or apply an automatic fix.

For example, if your campaign budgets are capped, you may see a message with details about the issue and a recommendation to increase daily budgets to drive additional sales. With one click, you can automatically apply the recommendation and move on to the next one.

The health panel provides details about issues and, where applicable, automatic fixes

Periscopix, a London-based performance marketing agency, has been using these new features to successfully monitor their bid strategies:

"I found the DoubleClick bid strategy health feature a definite time-saver, and can envision it becoming the first step for the effective management of bid strategies. It allows for the quick and effective diagnosis of both critical and minor strategy issues, and provides meaningful recommendations and insights that are immediately actionable within a few clicks” - Ruaridh Stewart, Senior PPC Account Manager, Periscopix
 

You can learn more about monitoring the health and performance of your bid strategies in the DoubleClick Help Center.

Posted by Tris Southey  Product Manager, DoubleClick Search

Building trust and increasing transparency with MRC-accredited measurement

Cross-posted from the Google Agency Blog

Measurement has been top of mind in our recent conversations with advertisers, and for good reason. As we’ve said many times, “If you can’t measure it, how do you know it worked?” Committing to measurement is critical, but just the first step. We believe that that the industry needs metrics that are trusted, transparent and easily verified. Today, we’re pleased to share several updates on the work we’re doing with third party verification and audit partners to ensure that the metrics available from Google are objective and accurate.

Transparency and trust are the core principles of our measurement strategy. We strongly believe in the need for third-party accreditation through the Media Rating Council (MRC). We gained our first accreditations back in 2006, and for over ten years we’ve partnered with the MRC, advocating for standards across the industry and contributing to ongoing discussions that set guidelines for measuring the effectiveness of ads. We currently maintain over 30 MRC accreditations across display and video, desktop and mobile web, mobile apps, and clicks, plays, impressions and viewability.

MRC accreditation for 3rd party viewability reporting on YouTube

Since 2015, we've completed integrations with Moat, Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify to enable third-party viewability reporting on YouTube. These integrations offer advertisers additional choice for measuring viewability on YouTube, alongside Active View.

Today, we’re announcing that each of these integrations will undergo a stringent, independent audit for MRC accreditation. The audit will validate that data collection, aggregation and reporting for served video impressions, viewable impressions, related viewability statistics and General Invalid Traffic (GIVT) across desktop and mobile for each integration adheres to MRC and IAB standards. In short, advertisers will have even greater confidence in the metrics returned by these third party partners about their campaigns on YouTube.

“Google’s announcement that they are undertaking an independent audit of their 3rd party viewability reporting integrations is a positive step forward for marketers. At the ANA, our goal is to create transparency for the advertising supply chain. This action from Google today demonstrates their commitment to partnering with us to deliver this goal."
—Bob Liodice, President and CEO, Association for National Advertisers

New MRC accreditations for DoubleClick and AdWords

Our commitment to MRC accreditation goes beyond our media to include our platform solutions as well. We maintain several accreditations for DoubleClick already, and today we’re announcing that we are now fully accredited for video impressions and viewability statistics for desktop web, mobile web and mobile app in DoubleClick Campaign Manager.

We are also seeking MRC accreditation for video impressions and viewability statistics and GIVT detection for display and video in both AdWords and DoubleClick Bid Manager. These MRC audits will span across all video available through these buying platforms — including YouTube and partner inventory.

"Google's commitment to MRC's initiatives has been unwavering over time, and their participation in industry standards projects has been helpful. We look forward to working on these new audits and expanding the industry's trust as it relates to YouTube's third party integrations and DoubleClick Bid Manager."
—George Ivie, CEO and Executive Director, Media Rating Council

“Google’s announcement to bring more media transparency is important progress that will help move the industry forward. At P&G, we are encouraged by Google’s actions, which should make a positive impact on creating a clean and productive media supply chain.”
—Marc Pritchard, Chief Brand Officer, Procter & Gamble

With so much activity underway, we know that it can be difficult to stay current. For an up to date list of all MRC accreditations, click here.

Transparency and trust are fundamental to measurement, and they’re fundamental to our strategy for giving marketers and publishers the metrics and insights they need to make better decisions. A solid foundation has been created, but there is much more work to do. In 2017, we’ll continue to seek ways to raise the bar on transparent and trustworthy measurement, and we welcome your partnership along the way.

Posted by Babak Pahlavan
Senior Director of Product Management, Analytics Solutions and Measurement, Google

How we fought bad ads, sites and scammers in 2016

Cross-posted from The Keyword
A free and open web is a vital resource for people and businesses around the world. And ads play a key role in ensuring you have access to accurate, quality information online. But bad ads can ruin the online experience for everyone. They promote illegal products and unrealistic offers. They can trick people into sharing personal information and infect devices with harmful software. Ultimately, bad ads pose a threat to users, Google’s partners, and the sustainability of the open web itself.

We have a strict set of policies that govern the types of ads we do and don’t allow on Google in order to protect people from misleading, inappropriate, or harmful ads. And we have a team of engineers, policy experts, product managers and others who are waging a daily fight against bad actors. Over the years, this commitment has made the web a better place for you—and a worse place for those who seek to abuse advertising systems for their own gain.

In 2016, we took down 1.7 billion ads that violated our advertising policies, more than double the amount of bad ads we took down in 2015. If you spent one second taking down each of those bad ads, it’d take you more than 50 years to finish. But our technology is built to work much faster.

Last year, we did two key things to take down more bad ads. First, we expanded our policies to better protect users from misleading and predatory offers. For example, in July we introduced a policy to ban ads for payday loans, which often result in unaffordable payments and high default rates for users. In the six months since launching this policy, we disabled more than 5 million payday loan ads. Second, we beefed up our technology so we can spot and disable bad ads even faster. For example, “trick to click" ads often appear as system warnings to deceive users into clicking on them, not realizing they are often downloading harmful software or malware. In 2016, our systems detected and disabled a total of 112 million ads for “trick to click,” 6X more than in 2015.

Here are a few more examples of bad ads we took action against in 2016:

Ads for illegal products

Some of the most common bad ads we find online are ads promoting illegal activities or products. Although we've long had a policy against bad ads for pharmaceuticals, last year our systems detected an increase online. We disabled more than 68 million bad ads for healthcare violations, up from 12.5 million in 2015.

Similarly, we saw more attempts to advertise gambling-related promotions without proper authorization from regulators in the countries they operate. We took down more than 17 million bad ads for illegal gambling violations in 2016.

17M ads removed for illegal gambling violations

Misleading ads

We don't want you to feel misled by ads that we deliver, so we require our advertisers to provide upfront information for people make informed decisions. Some ads try to drive clicks and views by intentionally misleading people with false information like asking, “Are you at risk for this rare, skin-eating disease?” or offering miracle cures like a pill that will help you lose 50 pounds in three days without lifting a finger. In 2016, we took down nearly 80 million bad ads for deceiving, misleading and shocking users.
1,300+ accounts suspended for tabloid cloaking

Bad ads on mobile

If you’ve ever been on your phone and suddenly, without warning, ended up in the app store downloading an app you’ve never heard of, a “self-clicking ad” could be to blame. In 2015, we disabled only a few thousand of these bad ads, but in 2016, our systems detected and disabled more than 23,000 self-clicking ads on our platforms, a huge increase year over year.

Ads trying to game the system

Bad actors know that ads for certain products—like weight-loss supplements or payday loans—aren’t allowed by Google's policies, so they try to trick our systems into letting them through. Last year, we took down almost 7 million bad ads for intentionally attempting to trick our detection systems.

In 2016, we saw the rise of tabloid cloakers, a new type of scammer that tries to game our system by pretending to be news. Cloakers often take advantage of timely topics—a government election, a trending news story or a popular celebrity—and their ads can look like headlines on a news website. But when people click on that story about Ellen DeGeneres and aliens, they go to a site selling weight-loss products, not a news story.

To fight cloakers, we take down the scammers themselves, and prevent them from advertising with us again. In 2016, we suspended more than 1,300 accounts for tabloid cloaking. Unfortunately, this type of bad ad is gaining in popularity because people are clicking on them. And a handful of scammers can pump out a lot of bad ads: During a single sweep for tabloid cloaking in December 2016, we took down 22 cloakers that were responsible for ads seen more than 20 million times by people online in a single week.

Promoting and profiting from bad sites

When we find ads that violate our policies, we block the ad or the advertiser, depending on the violation. But sometimes we also need to suspend the website promoted in the ad (the site people see after they click on it). So, for example, while we disabled more than 5 million payday loan ads last year, we also took action on 8,000 sites promoting payday loans.

Here are some examples of common policy violations we saw among bad sites in 2016:
  • We took action on 47,000 sites for promoting content and products related to weight-loss scams.
  • We took action on more than 15,000 sites for unwanted software and disabled 900,000 ads for containing malware.
  • And we suspended around 6,000 sites and 6,000 accounts for attempting to advertise counterfeit goods, like imitation designer watches.
6,000 sites and 6,000 accounts removed for attempting to sell counterfeit goods

Publishers and website owners use our AdSense platform to make money by running ads on their sites and content, so we have strict policies in place to keep Google's content and search networks safe and clean for our advertisers, users and publishers. When a publisher violates our policies, we may stop showing ads on their site, or even terminate their account.

We've had long-standing policies prohibiting AdSense publishers from running ads on sites that help people deceive others, like a site where you buy fake diplomas or plagiarized term papers. In November, we expanded on these policies, introducing a new AdSense misrepresentative content policy, that helps us to take action against website owners misrepresenting who they are and that deceive people with their content. From November to December 2016, we reviewed 550 sites that were suspected of misrepresenting content to users, including impersonating news organizations. We took action against 340 of them for violating our policies, both misrepresentation and other offenses, and nearly 200 publishers were kicked out of our network permanently.

In addition to all the above, we support industry efforts like the Coalition for Better Ads to protect people from bad experiences across the web. While we took down more bad ads in 2016 than ever before, the battle doesn’t end here. As we invest in better detection, the scammers invest in more elaborate attempts to trick our systems. Continuing to find and fight them is essential to protecting people online and ensuring you get the very best from the open web.

Posted by Scott Spencer
Director of Product Management, Sustainable Ads