Google killed 2.3 billion ‘bad ads’ in 2018. That’s more than 6 million ads every day.

Apart from being the preferred search engine for the billions of internet users, Google has also emerged as the home for online advertising, over the years. Anyone with good content or an idea can reach out to a potential buyer or customer on the platform, and earn a living. Unfortunately, the platform has also been utilised for nefarious activities by scammers and fraudulent actors.

So in a bid to fight ad fraud, malware, phishing ads, and fake sites, Google has not only tightened its policies and rules, but has also killed millions of “bad ads” every day. In 2018 alone, the tech giant took down over 2.3 billion bad ads for “violations of both new and existing policies”, which makes it nearly six million bad ads every day.

This includes nearly “207,000 ads for ticket resellers, over 531,000 ads for bail bonds and approximately 58.8 million phishing ads.”

On one hand, Google is blocking malicious sites and misleading ads, and on the other hand the company is putting measures in place to make it easier for advertisers to come up with creatives that are policy-compliant. In April, the company is all set to launch a new policy manager to give tips to advertisers to avoid common mistakes.

While identifying and blocking bad ads in one part of the action, the main idea is to identify the nefarious source itself.

“Using improved machine learning technology, we were able to identify and terminate almost one million bad advertiser accounts, nearly double the amount we terminated in 2017,” Google shared on its blog post. Furthermore, it launched 330 detection classifiers to detect “badness” at the page level, and terminated nearly 734,000 publishers and app developers from the ad network.

In 2017 Google blocked around 3.2 billion bad ads. As compared to that, the number is at least 900 million less in 2018. While Google might have targeted fewer ads last year, the company almost doubled the crackdown on advertisers and developers.

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