The numbers were revealed as part of its Ad Safety Report for 2022 where the tech giant said it blocked or restricted ads from serving over 1.5 billion publisher pages across over 143,000 publisher sites compared with 63,000 in 2021.
The company said the ads removed were due to policy violations such as abusing the ad network, trademark violations, legal requirements, misrepresentation, gambling and games, adult content, inappropriate content, dangerous products or services, sensitive events (like the war in Ukraine), enabling dishonest behaviour, alcohol, counterfeit goods and so on.
In 2022, Google said it added or updated 29 policies for advertisers and publishers, including expanding its financial services verification program to 10 new countries, protections for teens and strengthening elections ads policies.
The company said fraudulent activity continues to rise and as a response in 2022 it expanded its financial services certification program which requires advertisers to demonstrate they are authorised by their local regulator to promote their products and services.
“This measure adds a new layer of security against fraudsters and further safeguards people from financial scams. To date, we’ve launched this program in 11 countries including the United Kingdom, Australia, and Singapore. Going forward, we intend to further expand this program,” Google said in a blog post.
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The company blocked or removed 142 million advertisements for violating its misrepresentation policy and 198 million advertisements for violating its financial services policy.On the misinformation front, Google said it has developed extensive measures to tackle misinformation and unreliable claims in its advertising ecosystem. This includes its policies against harmful health claims and ‘demonstrably false claims that could undermine trust and participation in elections.’
“We’ve also developed an industry-leading policy against climate change denial. In 2022, we blocked ads from running on over 300,000 publisher pages that violated these policies and blocked over 24 million policy-violating ads from serving. In addition, we blocked and removed over 51.2 million ads for inappropriate content including hate speech, violence and harmful health claims and 20.6 million ads for dangerous products or services such as weapons and explosives,” the company added.
Further, it said that ahead of major elections around the world, it has expanded its verification and transparency program for election ads, verifying over 5,900 new advertising accounts in the US and over 2,300 in Brazil.
“Election ads from these advertisers included disclosures that showed who paid for the ads and also appeared in our Political Advertising on Google Transparency Report. We’ve also blocked over 2.6 million election ads that came from advertisers who had not completed our required verification process,” Google said.
On Wednesday, it also announced the launch of a new transparency tool, the Ads Transparency Center, a searchable repository of verified advertisers across all of our platforms, including Search, Display, and YouTube, that lets people search for a particular advertiser and view the advertiser page.
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