This post is the third in a series exploring several of Ad Manager’s key features and how they help our publisher partners maximize their ad revenue. To learn more, see posts one and two which were published in March.

Protecting users from bad ads and malicious actors is key to a healthy revenue stream. Things like inappropriate creative, counterfeit inventory, and malware not only divert revenue from you, but also alienate your users, and degrade the online experience in general.

Some people respond by installing ad blockers, which prevent ads—all ads, good and bad—from appearing. When this happens, every publisher pays the price, as it means they earn less money from the free content we all enjoy. For advertisers who create good ads, these obstacles make it tougher to connect with customers. And for consumers, it means they’ll see less useful ads.

Google Ad Manager helps power our partners’ digital advertising businesses, including helping to combat ad fraud and bad ads. Here are three ways we're working to protect your business and the broader ecosystem from bad ads and invalid activity:

We continuously invest in our defenses against ad fraud

By using a combination of people, policies, and technology, our global team of subject matter experts, PhDs, and engineers have fine-tuned our ad systems policies to provide clear guidance on what is and is not acceptable. To date the team has launched over 200 automated filters that help defend our ad systems from invalid activity in a lasting way. 

One of the ways we did this in 2019 was by investing in new technology to better identify policy-violating behavior at the account level, as opposed to the ad level. Our efforts resulted in 2.7 billion bad ads being taken down in 2019—more than 5,000 bad ads per minute—and the termination of 1.5 million advertiser accounts for violations, 3x more than in 2018.

We develop tools to help you manage which ads are shown on your properties 

We provide and develop new tools to help you manage and control which ads are shown across your sites and apps. Pricing rules and blocking options provide granular control over your inventory before the auction process. Features like the Ad review center help you review individual ads after they've been shown to decide whether you continue to show them, block them, or report them in real-time.

We also understand that sometimes people make honest mistakes when setting up their ads businesses, so we’ve developed solutions like the App Policy Center to help you easily review and monitor policy violations or appeals you may have. The App Policy Center was designed to provide greater insight into our policy enforcement process and help reduce the risk of potential revenue loss.

We support industry initiatives

We invest in industry initiatives to help tackle bad ads for everyone in the ads ecosystem. Here are three key initiatives that we invested in and continue to support to help prevent bad ads.

• Ads.txt and app-ads.txt: These projects are aimed at preventing counterfeit inventory, which diverts revenue from publishers. They allow Ad tech companies to identify unauthorized and domain-spoofed inventory being sold across the industry by letting website owners publicly declare who is allowed to sell their ad space. We scan more than 30 million domains a day and are proud to say that nearly 90 percent of our publisher partners have adopted ads.txt.
• The Better Ads Standards: These standards are based on extensive user research conducted by the Coalition for Better Ads about which ad formats and ad experiences consumers think are the most annoying and disruptive. They’ve identified 4 desktop and 8 mobile web display ad experiences that companies should avoid in order to maintain a good user experience, and help create a better online environment for everyone.
• Open Measurement: This software development kit (SDK) is an industry-wide solution to the challenge of measuring viewability of ads in apps. We offer our partners access to the Open Measurement Initiative by integrating the SDK into our mobile ads products. This preserves your revenue stream by ensuring your inventory is considered for purchase.

The Ad Manager team is constantly working to develop and improve ad policies and protective solutions like those mentioned above. When we protect our publishers, we help ensure the entire advertising ecosystem is as healthy as possible, and everyone benefits.

To learn more about how Ad Manager can help you manage, protect, and grow your advertising business, visit our new feature brief archive in the resources section of our website. And keep an eye out for our next post, "Deliver the best ad experience every time".