In a recent development, Google has released its Annual Ads Safety Report 2022 today, which elaborates on how Google created a safer experience for users in the ad ecosystem the previous year.
Google has been making ongoing investments in its policies and enforcement for people to have a safe experience online. In 2022, Google updated 29 policies for advertisers and publishers. This included expanding its financial services verification program to 10 new countries, expanding protections for teens and elections ads policies.
Moreover, In 2022, the tech giant removed over 5.2 billion ads, restricted over 4.3 billion ads and suspended over 6.7 million advertiser accounts. This represents an increase of 2 billion more ads removed in 2022 from the previous year. It went on to block/ restrict ads from serving on over 1.5 billion publisher pages and took broader site-level enforcement action on over 143,000 publisher sites.
The Google Ads Safety Report 2022 highlighted the following key points:
Protecting Users from Fraud and Scams
As per the report, fraudulent activities continue to rise. As per the report, to combat the issue, Google in 2022 expanded its financial services certification program which requires advertisers to demonstrate that they are authorized by their local regulator to promote their products and services. Hence, this measure adds a new layer of security against fraudsters and further safeguards people from financial scams. To date, the company has launched this program in 11 countries including the United Kingdom, Australia, and Singapore.
Adding further, the report stated that in 2022, Google blocked or removed 142 million advertisements for violating its misrepresentation policy and 198 million advertisements for violating its financial services policy.
Blocking and removing harmful content and combating misinformation
In recent years, Google has developed measures to tackle misinformation and unreliable claims in the advertising ecosystem. This includes policies against harmful health claims and demonstrably false claims that could undermine trust and participation in elections.
According to the report, Google 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 2022. In addition, it also 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.
Ahead of major elections around the world, Google continues its efforts to provide voters with reliable information about the election ads they see on the platforms. As part of that work, Google expanded its verification and transparency program for election ads, verifying over 5,900 new advertising accounts in the U.S. and over 2,300 in Brazil, the report stated. 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. The report highlighted that the company also blocked over 2.6 million election ads that came from advertisers who had not completed our required verification process.