Refunds are being issued by Google for ads that ran on websites that had fake traffic. Over the past few weeks, Alphabet Inc. has informed marketers and ad agency partners that there has been an issue with ad fraud. These ads were bought through the Company’s DoubleClick Bid Manager through the course of a few months.
Google has stated that they plan on refunding these companies, however they only plan to refund a fraction of what the ads cost. They said that they offered to reimburse their “platform fee” which is around 7% to 10% of a buyer’s total purchase. This has left a lot of executives unpleased with the situation.
Google has said that they find this to be an appropriate amount because they don’t control the rest of the money spent. Advertisers usually use DoubleClick Bid Manager to target audiences across a large number of websites in seconds by connecting to online ad exchanges, marketplaces that connect buyers and publishers through real-time auctions.
The amount spent goes through to the exchanges. The problems start when the ads are run on sites that have fake traffic. This includes the ones where clicks are generated by programs known as “bots”. This has become an issue for marketers, and makes it very difficult to recoup any of the money paid to those sites. Especially when the issue is discovered too late.
Advertisers are usually given small credits from Google or any other ad-tech vendors when issues with ad fraud are an issue. However, this discovery of ad fraud was a lot larger than usual.
This case shows how complex the digital advertising world can be. It is an industry where marketers and ad sellers are separated by automation. This can cause friction between the people in Madison Avenue and places like Google.
This is not the first issue that Google has had. Just a few months ago, some marketers suspended their campaigns from YouTube after seeing their ads associated with offensive videos. YouTube has since come forward and fixed this problem and many brands have now returned. Ad agencies have fought with Google to let them see more of their data to help them improve how ads are targeted and make sure that they are effective.
Google is working on a way to fix these issues, along with creating technology that allows advertisers to automatically get a full credit back from Google.
Another point of concern is that brands aren’t being given the details about which sites their ads are appearing on. This doesn’t allow the brand advertisers and agencies to apply their own safeguards in the future.
Google has a team dedicated to finding and filtering out fraud before an advertiser is able to make a bid on an ad. These teams can also stop exchanges from being paid if invalid traffic is quickly detected. They are also required to discover historical instances of fraud.
What’s more, Google has joined a number of industry initiatives that will list all valid ad tech vendors so ad buyers can confirm which platforms are selling legitimate ads.
