In a Google blog post detailing the whole ordeal, the company reveals that it disabled over 780 million ads for violating the policies it put in place to determine what kinds of ads businesses can run through them.
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Its crackdown extended to smartphones, an area that had Google stopping ads on upwards of 25,000 mobile apps because their developers didn’t follow the company’s policies.
Elsewhere in 2015, Google said it suspended 10,000 websites and 18,000 accounts for selling fake goods; blocked more than 12.5 million ads that tried to sell unapproved drugs and pharmaceuticals; while 30,000 sites selling weight-loss products were blacklisted too.
“Through a combination of computer algorithms and people at Google reviewing ads, we’re able to block the vast majority of these bad ads before they ever get shown”, Ramaswamy said.
As far as phishing and unwanted software goes, Google blocked almost 7,000 phishing websites and disabled more than 10,000 sites with unwanted software past year.
If you spent one second looking at every single bad ad that Google saved you from viewing last year, it’d take around 25 years to get through them all. In 2015 alone, we rejected more than 1.4 million applications.
The findings released in its annual “bad ads”, now known as Google’s “Better Ads” report, highlight how it combated all the annoying and the malicious ads, along with their tricks and scams.
This time a year ago, Google boasted that an all-time low in the number of sites and advertisers banned for attempting to sell counterfeit goods was a sign that counterfeiters were increasingly unable to circumvent its advanced enforcement systems. In most cases, these are ads for pharmaceutical products which haven’t been approved for use, or ads that made misleading claims to be as effective as prescription medication.
Bad ads are a continuous threat to brands, their reputation, and the agencies supporting them.
Google also removed mobile advertisements that violate policies, by placing themselves just around the buttons, and frequently result into accidental clicks by users.
Ads whose content was fine, but whose practices were not, also found themselves targeted by Google. “Mute This Ad” lets you click an “X” at the top on numerous ads we show and you won’t see a Google ad from that site again.
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We’re always updating our technology and our policies based on your feedback-and working to stay one step ahead of the fraudsters. This, it says, reduced the total unwanted downloads through Google ads by 99 percent.
