Google suspended three times as many advertiser accounts in 2021 as the year before

Google suspended more than 5.6 million advertiser accounts last year. A year earlier, the company suspended 1.7 million accounts. According to Google, that tripling is due to the company now verifying accounts better and recognizing coordination between accounts more quickly.

These are advertiser accounts that violate the rules of Google’s advertising platforms, writes Google in an annual report. People who want to place such banned ads are more likely to create thousands of accounts at the same time, according to the company. In addition, they use techniques such as cloaking and text manipulations to serve Google’s systems and employees different ads than the ads that end users see.

Google says to counter these accounts more by verifying the identity of advertiser accounts. For example, if an account ignores Google’s verification system, the account will be automatically suspended. In addition, the company says it better recognizes ‘coordinated actions between accounts’. “This combination of measures allows us to monitor the scale of our adversaries and more efficiently remove multiple accounts from one administrator.”

In total, Google removed 3.7 billion banned ads last year. Many of those ads, 625.1 million, were removed by Google for abusing Google’s advertising network. Nearly 287 million ads were removed for containing “adult content,” nearly 137 million were removed by Google for infringing a company’s trademark.

a year earlier, in 2020, 3.1 billion ads were removed. What is striking is that Google then removed more than three times as many ads with ‘health and medicines’ as the reason. In 2020, the company removed 204 million ads for this reason, a year later, Google removed 60 million such ads.

Every year, Google releases an Ads Safety Report, explaining which ads it has removed from its ad networks and why. Google wants to provide more transparency about its advertising policy and what it is doing to combat banned ads. Last year, Google further restricted 5.7 billion ads that may be offensive or inappropriate to some users, for example, and blocked or restricted ads on 1.7 billion web pages from 63,000 sites.

Although the report focuses on 2021, Google also discusses the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Since that invasion, Google says it has blocked more than 8 million ads related to the war. The company has also removed advertisements from more than 60 media outlets. Google seems to be targeting state media with this, since the company has ‘paused’ advertising in Russia since the war, as well as showing advertisements from Russian parties.