Tag Archives: DoubleClick

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


What: Google Marketing Next keynote live stream
When: Tuesday, May 23rd at 9:00 a.m. PT/12:00 p.m. ET.
Duration: 1 hour
Where: On the Inside AdWords 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 AdWords on Twitter, Google+, Facebook and LinkedIn for previews of what's to come.

Posted by Sridhar Ramaswamy Senior Vice President, Ads and Commerce

Source: Inside AdMob


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

Discover why leading publishers and marketers are using Programmatic Direct

In the next article in our #SuccessStack series, we look at a tool used by leading publishers and marketers that offers your publishing business an opportunity to grow.1

Programmatic Direct allows advertisers to programmatically execute deals that were once reserved and transacted directly. Advertisers can now use real-time data to reach the right people in the right moments in brand-safe publisher environments. A shift is happening, and more and more advertisers are adopting Programmatic Direct deals to optimize their direct and guaranteed transactions.

What is Programmatic Direct?

Programmatic Direct unites traditional media reservations with the power of real-time bidding. It offers early access to premium inventory, data-driven targeting, a direct relationship between the advertiser and publisher, and automated workflows. Programmatic Direct offers four different deal types and lots of flexibility to meet the needs of advertisers and publishers.

Why are 90+ Ad Age’s top 100 global marketers1 and 50% of ComScore top 50 US media owners2 using it?

  • Advertisers are empowered: Programmatic Direct offers real-time data, flexible deal structures, efficient workflows and brand safe premium inventory. These benefits can improve user engagement and may translate into greater ad spends with your business.
  • Publishers grow new relationships: Programmatic Direct creates more opportunities to deepen relationships with existing advertisers and generate new business in a brand-safe environment. Darby Sieben, President at Mediative says, “We see Programmatic Guaranteed as another important step to connect advertisers with premium publishers’ inventory. Google’s technology helps automate the buying and selling of premium inventory, which is important to ensure that we can deliver the best experience for our advertising and publisher partners.”

Is Programmatic Direct right for your business?

Programmatic Direct isn’t for everyone. Publishers who don’t currently use DoubleClick for Publishers or negotiate deals directly with advertisers may not see advantages to adopting programmatic.

Others, though, will find it a great fit for their businesses. Here are a few signs that Programmatic Direct might be the right direction for your publishing business:

  • You’re looking for operational efficiencies on the traditional direct model: Programmatic Direct reduces the administrative burden of creating and managing direct ad deals with features like automated billing and collections. This usually offers substantial cost savings to the publisher.
  • You need control: Advertisers and publishers alike benefit from the controls offered by Programmatic Direct. For publishers this means greater control over the ads you show on your sites. 
  • You have the resources to support it: You don’t need hundreds of full time employees, but you will need someone with the time and energy to dedicate to creating and managing your Programmatic Direct deals for optimal earnings.

Next steps

If you’re wondering whether Programmatic Direct might be a good move for your sites, then you’ll benefit from a chat with one of our experts. They can offer a personalized consultation to help you make the right choice for your business. Book a slot.

1 - DoubleClick Ad Exchange data, Oct 2014-Dec 2015. Minimum $1K spend.
2 - DoubleClick Ad Exchange data, Oct 2014 - Dec 2015. Cross references with ComScore 50 US list December 2015.

Source: Inside AdSense


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

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

How to choose the right ad tools for your site

Welcome to the #SuccessStack, a new series of articles designed to help you:
  • Access Google’s large network of advertisers 
  • Grow your publishing business 
  • Earn more from the ads on your site
This first article can help you choose the right tools to sell and manage the ads on your site.




AdSense: Get started with easy access to Google’s network of advertisers
Who it’s for: Publishers looking for a smart and easy-to-use tool to optimize their ad space and revenue.

What it does: AdSense makes it easy for you to place, manage and earn revenue from ads on your site. With AdSense, Google is your advertising sales team, bringing you ads from millions of advertisers using AdWords and other Google advertising programs.

AdSense includes simple and easy controls to help you get started with earning money from ads, but it also does a lot of work behind the scenes to help you make more money. It’s a bit like an automatic car -- it removes some of the manual adjustment, allowing you to cruise along with less effort. You still need regular “tune ups” to get optimal performance, but you won’t need to shift gears all the time.

DoubleClick Ad Exchange: Control who gets programmatic access to the ads on your site with advanced features
Who it’s for: Publishers who require a more granular control over their inventory and who have the resources and expertise to manage ongoing optimizations. This product is suited to publishers with yield management expertise and those who have need for advanced features like Programmatic Direct.

What it does: DoubleClick Ad Exchange gives you real-time access to the largest pool of advertisers. This means that in addition to AdWords advertisers, you can also access major ad networks and agencies.

A major difference between DoubleClick Ad Exchange and AdSense is that AdSense does a lot of the technical settings and optimization work for you, such as automating the sale of all your ad space to the highest bidder. With DoubleClick Ad Exchange, you can control these adjustments yourself and control exactly how your inventory is sold. As an example, DoubleClick Ad Exchange allows you to choose which ad space is for public sale and which is reserved for private auctions. This increased amount of user input is necessary for you to get the best results from DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Another important distinction is that the AdSense demand is majority AdWords advertisers, whereas DoubleClick Ad Exchange pulls demand from multiple sources. You can see the full list of differences at our help center.

DoubleClick For Publishers: Scale your advertising business
Who it’s for: Publishers who are looking for a tool that has AdSense or Ad Exchange built in, along with lots of useful features to help them, schedule, deliver and measure their ad inventory regardless of how they sell it, to networks, programmatically or through their own direct sales teams.

What it does: DoubleClick for Publishers is a single platform that allows you to manage and deliver all of your web, mobile, and video advertising across all your sales channels. It doesn’t come with it’s own ads, but rather helps you scale your ads business by managing your ad sales across a variety of ad networks such as AdSense, ad exchanges like DoubleClick and direct advertising partners. You can get started with the small business version right away for free, or talk to us about integrating with the premium, paid version that is built for large organizations with sophisticated ad sales teams.

Both versions have a simple interface, lots of great tools, built-in revenue optimization, and Google powered ad delivery to provide a simple, worry-free way to potentially increase the value of your ad impressions.

Ready to get started?
You can arrange a consultation with one of our experts who can help you to choose the right solution for your business, and setup AdSense, DoubleClick Ad Exchange or DoubleClick for Publishers.



Posted by Jay Castro, from the AdSense team.

Source: Inside AdSense