Google denies allegations of breaching its own policies and deceiving advertisers

Google has refuted allegations of breaching its own regulations and deceiving advertisers regarding ad viewership on external websites, dismissing them as “highly inaccurate.”

Through the Google Video Partners network and TrueView (an advertising product also used on YouTube), the company manages the placement of video ads on external websites and applications. According to The Wall Street Journal, Google tells brands that their ads will appear on “high-quality” sites, appear before the main video content and appear with audio. It also says that advertisers don’t pay if users skip ads. However, a third-party analytics firm suggested in a report that Google fails to meet these standards about 80 percent of the time.

Adalytics said the ads often appear on lower-quality websites, such as those with misinformation or pirated content, and can be placed in small video players at the edge or bottom of the screen, away from the main content. . Some of the ads are shown without sound, according to the report, while in other cases there was “little or no video content” between consecutive TrueView ads. Adalytics says other ads play automatically without the viewer engaging with them.

In some cases, the company notes, the skip button that normally appears after five seconds was obscured, forcing viewers to watch the entire ad. This is “a direct violation of Google’s TrueView ad quality standards,” Adalytics says, and may have contributed to artificially inflated ad metrics, resulting in advertisers paying more.

Adalytics reviewed the advertising campaigns of more than 1,100 brands from 2020 to this year. It says customers who may have purchased “mute, auto-play, mis-reported TrueView skippable in-stream inventory” include the US government, the European Parliament, Disney+, HP, Samsung, Sephora, TikTok, Microsoft and General Motors. Some other Google departments (Google Career Certificates and Google Workspace Domains) are listed by the way.

Media buyers Adalytics shared a report accusing Google of “ad fraud” and suggesting brands were not getting what they paid for. Others have demanded compensation. The “mistargeting” could have cost brands billions of advertising dollars, Adalytics said. One “major consumer goods brand” found that 20 percent of its more than $75,000 campaign budget was directed to YouTube channels, with the rest spent on ads that ran on third-party sites like investing.com and Candy Crush Saga.

Google has strongly rejected the report’s findings. The company’s global head of video solutions, Marvin Renaud, claimed in a blog post that Adalytics “used unreliable sampling and routing methods.” Renaud argued that the majority of video ad campaigns run on YouTube, and brands have the option at any time to opt out of showing their ads on apps and websites affiliated with the Google Video Partners program.

Still, more than 90 percent of Google’s video partners “see people online,” Renaud claimed. “We use real-time ad quality signals to determine whether people are present and attentive, which helps us decide whether to show a video ad on a Google Video Partner site or app.”

In addition, Renaud wrote that Google strictly enforces policies that prohibit third-party sites from using deceptive or disruptive techniques to generate advertising revenue, such as placing ads in hidden browser windows. Renaud added that last year Google stopped serving ads on more than 143,000 websites it deemed violating its rules.

Adalytics’ claims come as Alphabet faces scrutiny over its advertising practices. The Justice Department sued the company earlier this year in an attempt to break up its advertising business. This month, the European Union said in a preliminary finding that the only way it could see Google solving its anti-competitive behavior would be to sell part of the advertising empire.