Tag Archives: Ads

An update on our political ads policy

We’re proud that people around the world use Google to find relevant information about elections and that candidates use Google and search ads to raise small-dollar donations that help fund their campaigns. We’re also committed to a wide range of efforts to help protect campaigns, surface authoritative election news, and protect elections from foreign interference.

But given recent concerns and debates about political advertising, and the importance of shared trust in the democratic process, we want to improve voters' confidence in the political ads they may see on our ad platforms. So we’re making a few changes to how we handle political ads on our platforms globally. Regardless of the cost or impact to spending on our platforms, we believe these changes will help promote confidence in digital political advertising and trust in electoral processes worldwide. 

Our ads platforms today

Google’s ad platforms are distinctive in a number of important ways: 

  • The main formats we offer political advertisers are search ads (which appear on Google in response to a search for a particular topic or candidate), YouTube ads (which appear on YouTube videos and generate revenue for those creators), and display ads (which appear on websites and generate revenue for our publishing partners). 

  • We provide a publicly accessible, searchable, and downloadable transparency report of election ad content and spending on our platforms, going beyond what’s offered by most other advertising media.  

  • We’ve never allowed granular microtargeting of political ads on our platforms. In many countries, the targeting of political advertising is regulated and we comply with those laws. In the U.S., we have offered basic political targeting capabilities to verified advertisers, such as serving ads based on public voter records and general political affiliations (left-leaning, right-leaning, and independent). 

Taking a new approach to targeting election ads

While we've never offered granular microtargeting of election ads, we believe there’s more we can do to further promote increased visibility of election ads. That’s why we’re limiting election ads audience targeting to the following general categories: age, gender, and general location (postal code level). Political advertisers can, of course, continue to do contextual targeting, such as serving ads to people reading or watching a story about, say, the economy. This will align our approach to election ads with long-established practices in media such as TV, radio, and print, and result in election ads being more widely seen and available for public discussion. (Of course, some media, like direct mail, continues to be targeted more granularly.) It will take some time to implement these changes, and we will begin enforcing the new approach in the U.K. within a week (ahead of the General Election), in the EU by the end of the year, and in the rest of the world starting on January 6, 2020.

Clarifying our ads policies

Whether you’re running for office or selling office furniture, we apply the same ads policies to everyone; there are no carve-outs. It’s against our policies for any advertiser to make a false claim—whether it's a claim about the price of a chair or a claim that you can vote by text message, that election day is postponed, or that a candidate has died. To make this more explicit, we’re clarifying our ads policies and adding examples to show how our policies prohibit things like “deep fakes” (doctored and manipulated media), misleading claims about the census process, and ads or destinations making demonstrably false claims that could significantly undermine participation or trust in an electoral or democratic process. Of course, we recognize that robust political dialogue is an important part of democracy, and no one can sensibly adjudicate every political claim, counterclaim, and insinuation. So we expect that the number of political ads on which we take action will be very limited—but we will continue to do so for clear violations.

Providing increased transparency

We want the ads we serve to be transparent and widely available so that many voices can debate issues openly. We already offer election advertising transparency in India, in the EU, and for federal U.S. election ads. We provide both in-ad disclosures and a transparency report that shows the actual content of the ads themselves, who paid for them, how much they spent, how many people saw them, and how they were targeted. Starting on December 3, 2019, we’re expanding the coverage of our election advertising transparency to include U.S. state-level candidates and officeholders, ballot measures, and ads that mention federal or state political parties, so that all of those ads will now be searchable and viewable as well. 

We’re also looking at ways to bring additional transparency to the ads we serve and we’ll have additional details to share in the coming months. We look forward to continuing our work in this important area.

Google Ad Grants help a U.K. nonprofit save lives

Editor’s note: Today is World Mental Health Day, a day run by the World Health Organization with the aim of breaking down the stigma of mental health and draw attention to resources and organizations available to help people cope. One of those organizations is Samaritans, which is a recipient of Google Ad Grants. 

Every six seconds, someone contacts Samaritans in need of support. And for the more than half a million people we reach each year, our more than 20,000 volunteers are here.

Founded in 1953, Samaritans is a U.K.-based organization dedicated to making sure fewer people die by suicide. We provide more than 20,000 volunteers over the phone, by email and face to face. My team manages the digital side, including search, social media, video and email outreach to raise awareness and connect with people who need our services. 

For over 13 years, my team has been a recipient of Google Ad Grants, which provides eligible nonprofits with free Search ads to connect people to causes. We use Ad Grants uniquely to help two types of people: Those struggling to cope with mental health issues, and those trying to help loved ones who are struggling.

People struggling to cope often turn to Google for several reasons: to better understand their symptoms, to find resources or—at worst—with the intent of harming themselves. For some searches with intent to self-harm, Google has a feature that surfaces our help line at the top of results to provide people with resources in their time of need. 

But beyond that, there’s more we can do with ads. Our Ad Grants ads ensure that the many different ways we provide help is front and center for people in need of support. For example, when someone comes to Google struggling to cope themselves, our ads proactively offer resources to get them help and shift the focus toward ways to get better.

The Google Ad Grants program helps us save lives.

Uniquely, Search ads from the Ad Grant also allow us to provide resources to people who want to help others. We run ads targeting people who are looking for information on how to start difficult conversations or how to support friends and family who might need it.

Overall, Google Ad Grants has been a critical tool in supporting our organization’s mission and connecting people to life-saving mental health resources in real time. Our free Search ads have incredible reach and help us drive measurable results in the real world, such as raising awareness of our helpline, driving donations and increasing volunteer signups. All of these results from Ad Grants enable us to serve more people in need.

Last year, our Ad Grants ads were seen 2.6 million times. More than 320,000 people, seeking either support services or expressing interest in volunteering, clicked on our ads. A key part of our success is using free Google tracking tools (such as Analytics and Conversion Tracking) to measure the impact of our ads, learn what support offerings are most desired and see firsthand in our reports how many lives we are touching. Samaritans relies on Google to help us reach hundreds of people a day who are in need and might not otherwise know our services exist. The Google Ad Grants program helps us save lives.

The ad tech industry is crowded and competitive

“Ad tech”—the technology that powers digital advertising on publishers’ sites—is an important part of a healthy web. Google's investments in this space help publishers make money to fund their work, make it easy for businesses large and small to reach consumers, and support the creative and diverse content we all enjoy.

Some critics have claimed to Reuters that the ad tech sector suffers from a lack of competition and that Google’s efforts in this space have come at the expense of publishers. These are not new claims, but various parties are working to spur renewed interest in the topic. 

To suggest that the ad tech sector is lacking competition is simply not true. To the contrary, the industry is famously crowded. There are thousands of companies, large and small, working together and in competition with each other to power digital advertising across the web, each with different specialties and technologies. We compete with lots of other companies in this space, including household names such as Adobe, Amazon, AT&T, Comcast, Facebook, Oracle, and Verizon. In just the last few years, many of these companies have bought or introduced new ad tech platforms, each bringing its own unique advantage. Successful companies like Telaria, Rubicon Project and The Trade Desk are less familiar to consumers but are publicly traded leaders. Other private but sizable platforms in the industry include Index Exchange, MediaMath and OpenX.

Competition is flourishing, and publishers and marketers have enormous choice. In a study this year of 155 major digital publishers, Advertiser Perceptions found that the average publisher uses six supply-side platforms (SSPs), an ad tech product that helps them sell ads on its website, and will likely use eight next year. 

Advertisers likewise have lots of options. The average advertiser uses 3.7 demand-side platforms (DSPs) simultaneously; in fact, Amazon’s DSP now enjoys wider adoption than Google’s, a position they achieved in less than two years, according to third-party estimates. 

In the past decade, we’ve built products that foster competition. Our tools and platforms make it easy for advertisers and publishers of all sizes to choose whom they want to work with in this open, interconnected ad system. Publishers use our technology to access demand from hundreds of partners, of which Google is just one source. Advertisers use our technology to buy ad space on more than 80 exchanges.

By anyone’s reasonable definition, this represents a healthy marketplace.

Publishers face numerous challenges, including the explosion in the number of news sources and the transition of advertising to digital delivery. To look at all the challenges the industry faces, plus the extreme level of competition, and say the problem is a lack of choice in advertising technology is to misunderstand the roots of the issue.

We understand people have questions about our business. It’s been widely reviewed by many regulators in the past, and we're happy to answer any questions about these issues.

Most importantly, we'll continue our work to contribute to the open web and the access to information that advertising supports. We know that publishers and marketers are using hundreds of other technology partners, and we'll continue to compete for business fairly alongside them.

Growing in-app viewability coverage with Open Measurement

People are spending more time on their mobile phones, especially in apps, and move across screens frequently. As people’s usage of mobile apps has grown, so has the importance of standardizing the way viewability is measured on mobile devices.

Today we’re sharing how we’ve made in-app inventory more measurable through the IAB Tech Lab’s Open Measurement standard. Integrating the Open Measurement Software Development Kit (SDK) into both our Google Mobile Ads (GMA) and Interactive Mobile Ads (IMA) SDKs has allowed us to enable Open Measurement on 85+ percent of in-app display and video impressions on Google AdMob and Google Ad Manager publishers. This means that buyers of this inventory can now take viewability measurements using solutions like Integral Ad Science, DoubleVerify, Comscore, and Moat in addition to measurement that was previously available with Active View.  

“IAB Tech Lab’s Open Measurement (OM) initiative makes it easier for ad buyers and sellers to work together for viewability measurement and other verification needs,” said Dennis Buchheim, Executive Vice President and General Manager, IAB Tech Lab. “The sell-side has been adopting OM quickly, and we ask brands, agencies, and Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) to get more active and take advantage of what OM offers.” 

Advertisers can get started today by appending Open Measurement enabled tags from their viewability vendor of choice to their creatives.

Measurement vendors are lauding this development as progress for a more measurable future. Joseph Ranzenbach, Director of Product Management, IAS says, "Google's adoption of the Open Measurement SDK is a huge step in moving the industry forward and creating more transparency for advertisers." Sumit Shukla, SVP, Strategic Partnerships, Comscore says, "It’s important for Brands to consistently measure viewability across the entirety of their media buys. With Comscore’s cross-platform campaign measurement as a trusted market currency, this close partnership with Google further helps Brands measure what matters."  

Viewability measurement unlocks high-performing In-app inventory for advertisers

Viewability continues to be an integral part of measuring ad effectiveness—it helps advertisers understand if their ad had the opportunity to be seen and it helps publishers offer more high-quality inventory.

In-app viewability means that advertisers can confidently take advantage of this high-value inventory. In 2018 we worked with Ipsos MORI to understand the impact of in-app advertising and found it was successful in driving action. People were 50 percent more likely to interact with a brand, buy a product or service, follow a call-to-action or recommend a brand to their family or friends after seeing its ad in an app, compared with those who saw it via a browser. Display & Video 360 customers can now confidently extend their brand campaigns to apps knowing they are able to measure ad viewability at the impression level as they would in other environments.

Publishers like Pandora recognize the importance of holistic viewability measurement. Maria Breza, VP, Ad Quality Measurement and Audience Data Operations at Pandora said, “Advertisers should be able to seamlessly use one viewability provider to measure their buys across all publishers and platforms. Open Measurement has allowed Pandora to make this a reality for our clients with less latency, less maintenance and more stability.”

What’s next for Open Measurement

We’re continuing to work with the IAB’s Tech Lab Open Measurement Working Group to expand Open Measurement to use cases beyond viewability, as well as to other environments such as web video. We believe Open Measurement has the potential to create a more transparent and accountable digital media ecosystem across all screens. Reach out to your measurement partners and Google representative to find out how you can take advantage of this new measurement technology.



Source: Google Ads


Enabling a Safe Digital Advertising Ecosystem

Google has a crucial stake in a healthy and sustainable digital advertising ecosystem—something we've worked to enable for nearly 20 years. Every day, we invest significant team hours and technological resources in protecting the users, advertisers and publishers that make the internet so useful. And every year, we share key actions and data about our efforts to keep the ecosystem safe by enforcing our policies across platforms.

Bad ads taken down

Dozens of new ads policies to take down billions of bad ads

In 2018, we faced new challenges in areas where online advertising could be used to scam or defraud users offline. For example, we created a new policy banning ads from for-profit bail bond providers because we saw evidence that this sector was taking advantage of vulnerable communities. Similarly, when we saw a rise in ads promoting deceptive experiences to users seeking addiction treatment services, we consulted with experts and restricted advertising to certified organizations. In all, we introduced 31 new ads policies in 2018 to address abuses in areas including third-party tech support, ticket resellers, cryptocurrency and local services such as garage door repairmen, bail bonds and addiction treatment facilities.

We took down 2.3 billion bad ads in 2018 for violations of both new and existing policies, including nearly 207,000 ads for ticket resellers, over 531,000 ads for bail bonds and approximately 58.8 million phishing ads. Overall, that’s more than six million bad ads, every day.

Ticket Resellers

As we continue to protect users from bad ads, we’re also working to make it easier for advertisers to ensure their creatives are policy compliant. Similar to our AdSense Policy Center, next month we’ll launch a new Policy manager in Google Ads that will give tips on common policy mistakes to help well-meaning advertisers and make it easier to create and launch compliant ads.

Taking on bad actors with improved technology

Last year, we also made a concerted effort to go after the bad actors behind numerous bad ads, not just the ads themselves. Using improved machine learning technology, we were able to identify and terminate almost one million bad advertiser accounts, nearly double the amount we terminated in 2017. When we take action at the account level, it helps to address the root cause of bad ads and better protect our users.

In 2017, we launched new technology that allows for more granular removal of ads from websites when only a small number of pages on a site are violating our policies. In 2018, we launched 330 detection classifiers to help us better detect "badness" at the page level—that's nearly three times the number of classifiers we launched in 2017. So while we terminated nearly 734,000 publishers and app developers from our ad network, and removed ads completely from nearly 1.5 million apps, we were also able to take more granular action by taking ads off of nearly 28 million pages that violated our publisher policies. We use a combination of manual reviews and machine learning to catch these kinds of violations.

Addressing key challenges within the digital ads ecosystem

From reports of “fake news” sites, to questions about who is purchasing political ads, to massive ad fraud operations, there are fundamental concerns about the role of online advertising in society. Last year, we launched a new policy for election ads in the U.S. ahead of the 2018 midterm elections. We verified nearly 143,000 election ads in the U.S. and launched a new political ads transparency report that gives more information about who bought election ads. And in 2019, we’re launching similar tools ahead of elections in the EU and India.

We also continued to tackle the challenge of misinformation and low-quality sites, using several different policies to ensure our ads are supporting legitimate, high-quality publishers. In 2018, we removed ads from approximately 1.2 million pages, more than 22,000 apps, and nearly 15,000 sites across our ad network for violations of policies directed at misrepresentative, hateful or other low-quality content. More specifically, we removed ads from almost 74,000 pages for violating our “dangerous or derogatory” content policy, and took down approximately 190,000 ads for violating this policy. This policy includes a prohibition on hate speech and protects our users, advertisers and publishers from hateful content across platforms.  

How we took down one of the biggest ad fraud operations ever in 2018

In 2018, we worked closely with cybersecurity firm White Ops, the FBI, and others in the industry to take down one of the largest and most complex international ad fraud operations we’ve ever seen. Codenamed "3ve", the operation used sophisticated tactics aimed at exploiting data centers, computers infected with malware, spoofed fraudulent domains and fake websites. In aggregate, 3ve produced more than 10,000 counterfeit domains, and generated over 3 billion daily bid requests at its peak.

3ve tried to evade our enforcements, but we conducted a coordinated takedown of their infrastructure. We referred the case to the FBI, and late last year charges were announced against eight individuals for crimes including aggravated identity theft and money laundering. Learn more about 3ve and our work to take it down on our Security Blog, as well as through this white paper that we co-authored with White Ops.

We will continue to tackle these issues because as new trends and online experiences emerge, so do new scams and bad actors. In 2019, our work to protect users and enable a safe advertising ecosystem that works well for legitimate advertisers and publishers continues to be a top priority.

Source: Google Ads


Change to the Google Ads API and the AdWords API Showcase Ads Clicks Reporting

Update (Feb 21, 2019): clarified wording of the Clicks impact.
On February 27, 2019, the data returned in the Clicks metric for Showcase ads will change in order to more accurately show you the interactions with products via Showcase ads in reporting.

In the AdWords API and the Google Ads API, the Clicks metric (clicks for Google Ads API) will change for the Shopping Performance Report and the Product Partition Report (product_group_view for Google Ads API) as follows:
  • Current reporting: Clicks only include charged clicks.
  • New reporting: Clicks will report all clicks, including free clicks. As a result, you may see a change in the number of reported clicks.
If you have questions, please reach out to us on the forum.
Nadine Sundquist, Google Ads API Team

Upgrade Dynamic Search Ads in AdWords API and Google Ads API by March 6, 2019

Upgrade your AdWords API and Google Ads API ads to use ExpandedDynamicSearchAd (EXPANDED_DYNAMIC_SEARCH_AD) instead of DynamicSearchAd (DYNAMIC_SEARCH_AD) by March 6, 2019. After March 6th, creating these ads through the APIs will fail with an AdGroupAdError.CANNOT_CREATE_DEPRECATED_ADS error, while updating them will result in an AdError.CANNOT_MODIFY_AD error. Existing DynamicSearchAds will continue to serve.

An ExpandedDynamicSearchAd goes beyond automating just headlines and adds the advantage of automating display URLs, so that the subdomain of your ad matches the subdomain of your landing page. In addition, Google Ads will add a path when it expects the path to outperform a plain URL. In order to increase the performance for all our advertisers, Google Ads is moving everyone to the newer format.

If you have any questions while upgrading, please reach out to us on our forum.
Nadine Sundquist, Google Ads API Team

Protecting what we love about the internet: our efforts to stop online piracy

The internet has enabled people worldwide to connect, create and distribute new works of art like never before. A key part of preserving this creative economy is ensuring creators and artists have a way to share and make money from their content—and preventing the flow of money to those who seek to pirate that content. Today, we're releasing our latest update on those efforts..

Our 2018 "How Google Fights Piracy" report explains the programs, policies, and technology we put in place to combat piracy online and ensure continued opportunities for creators around the world.

We invest significantly in the technology, tools and resources that prevent copyright infringement on our platforms. We also work with others across the industry on efforts to combat piracy. These efforts appear to be having an effect: around the world, online piracy has been decreasing, while spending on legitimate content is rising across content categories.

Here are a few of our findings from this year's Piracy report:

  • $3 billion+:The amount YouTube has paid to rights holders who have monetized use of their content in other videos through Content ID, our industry-leading rights management tool.
  • $100 million+: The amount we’ve invested in building Content ID, including staffing and computing resources.
  • $1.8 billion+:The amount YouTube paid to the music industry from October 2017 to September 2018 in advertising revenue alone
  • 3 billion+:The number of URLs that were removed from Search for infringing copyright since launching a submission tool for copyright owners and their agents.
  • 10 million+:The number of ads that were disapproved by Google in 2017 that were suspected of copyright infringement or that linked to infringing sites.

As we continue our work in the years ahead, five principles guide our substantial investments in fighting piracy:

Create more and better legitimate alternatives: Piracy often arises when it's difficult for consumers to access legitimate content. By developing products that make it easy for users to access legitimate content, like Google Play Music and YouTube, Google helps drive revenue for creative industries and give consumers choice.

Follow the money: As the vast majority of sites dedicated to online piracy are doing so to make money, one way to combat them is to cut off their supply. We prevent actors that engage in copyright infringement from using our ads and monetization systems and we enforce these policies rigorously.

Be efficient, effective, and scalable: We strive to implement anti-piracy solutions that work at scale. For example, as early as 2010, we began making substantial investments in streamlining the copyright removal process for search results. As a result, these improved procedures allow us to process copyright removal requests for search results at the rate of millions per week.

Guard against abuse: Some actors will make false copyright infringement claims in order to have content they don't want online taken down. We’re committed to detecting and rejecting bogus infringement allegations, such as removals for political or competitive reasons.

Provide transparency: We’re committed to providing transparency. In our Transparency Report, we disclose the number of requests we receive from copyright owners and governments to remove information from our services.

Today, our services are generating more revenue for creators and rights holders, connecting more people with the content they love, and doing more to fight back against online piracy than ever before. We’re proud of the progress this report represents. Through continued innovation and partnership, we’re committed to curtailing infringement by bad actors while empowering the creative communities who make many of the things we love about the internet today.

Source: Search