Google has published its annual "Ads Safety Report" and disclosed that it has blocked or removed over 3.1 billion ads for violating its Google Ads policies, it restricted over 6.4 billion ads, suspended over 1.7 million advertiser accounts, and removed ads from over 1.3 billion pages in 2020. Google also said it added or updated over 40 policies for both advertisers and publishers.
Just for some perspective, a decade prior, in 2011, Google removed 130 million bad ads compared to 3.1 billion bad ads in 2020.
On the COVID front Google said it blocked over 99 million covid-related ads from running on its platforms. Including, those engaging in price-gouging and promoting products such as N-95 masks, fake cures and even fake vaccine treatments. And on the election front Google said in the U.S under it's "sensitive events policy", Google temporarily paused more than 5 million election ads and blocked ads on over 3 billion Search queries immediately following the election.
Here is a distribution of across which policies Google blocked or removed those 3.1 billion ads:
Of the 6.4 billion ads restricted by Google Ads, here is how that falls out:
And of the publishers that saw ads removed from their 1.3 billion web pages, here is how that looked:
So yes, Google is pretty active taking down ads - but is it enough?
Forum discussion at Twitter.
