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Bad advertising comes at a big cost to the marketing industry but the battle against it is being won according to Google. It claims that in 2014 it disabled more than 524 million bad ads and banned more than 214,000 advertisers from its platform.
Of these 7,000 advertisers were banned for promoting counterfeit goods. That was half the number of 2013 and a massive drop on the 82,000 banned in 2012. It says that its advanced enforcement systems are increasingly difficult for counterfeiters to get around.
Another problem for users can be ads pointing to sites hosting malware – whether spyware, adware or other malicious software. Google says that 2014 saw it remove 250,000 sites from its network for hiding malware in their sites.
Weight-loss problem
The company is also working hard to overcome the weighty problem of weight loss scams online – particularly for those advertisers using extreme, inaccurate claims to sell their dietary supplements. Google is working alongside peers such as AOL and Yahoo in a group called TrustInAds.org which claims to have removed or rejected 2.5 million such ads in the last 18 months.
Google’s director of ads engineering Vikarum Gupta, said that Google remains committed to reducing bad advertising incidents on the web, whether they are deemed bad because of advertising counterfeit goods, harmful malware and spyware or worse. It employs a team of analysts who work around the clock to detect such incidents, supported by continued investment and development of detection technology to highlight bad advertising.
“This is a constantly evolving fight,” said Gupta. “Bad actors continually create more sophisticated systems and scams, so we too are continually evolving our practices, technology, and methodology in fighting these bad ads. The security of our users is the foundation of our ecosystem, and we’ll continue to work tirelessly to keep people safe online.”
