It said that though the report only covers 2021, the search giant acted to prohibit ads from profiting from or exploiting the situation in Ukraine. “This is in addition to our longstanding policies prohibiting content that incites violence or denies the occurrence of tragic events to run as ads or monetize using our services,” Scott Spencer, VP of Product Management, Ads Privacy and Safety said in a blog post.
He said the company has taken several other steps to pause the majority of its commercial activities in Russia across products — including pausing ads from showing in Russia and ads from Russian-based advertisers, and pausing monetization of Russian state-funded media across its platforms.
“So far, we’ve blocked over eight million ads related to the war in Ukraine under our sensitive event policy and separately removed ads from more than 60 state-funded media sites across our platforms,” Spencer said.
He said the company saw bad actors operate with more sophistication and at a greater scale, using a variety of tactics to evade detection. This included creating thousands of accounts simultaneously and using techniques like cloaking and text manipulation to show reviewers and systems different ad content than they’d show a user — making that content more difficult to detect and enforce against.
“We’re continuing to take a multi-pronged approach to combat this behavior, like verifying advertisers’ identities and identifying coordinated activity between accounts using signals in our network. We are actively verifying advertisers in over 180 countries. And if an advertiser fails to complete our verification program when prompted, the account is automatically suspended,” Spencer said.
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Between 2020 and 2021, Google said it has tripled the number of account-level suspensions for advertisers. Abusing The Ad Network, Adult Content and Trademarks were the top three most enforced policies in 2021, as per the report.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, Google said it has blocked over 106 million ads related to Covid-19 and that it supported local NGOs and governments with $250 million in ad grants to help connect people to accurate vaccine information.
“This year, we’ll continue to address areas of abuse across our platforms and network to protect users and help credible advertisers and publishers. Providing more transparency and control over the ads people see is a big part of that goal,” he said.
Spencer added that the new “About this ad” feature is rolling out globally to help people understand why an ad was shown and which advertiser ran it. They can also report an ad if they believe it violates a policy or block an ad they aren’t interested in.
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