Allegedly, Google has been misselling video ads to marketers for the past three years.
According to a study by Adalytics, advertisers working for small businesses, Fortune 500 companies and even the US federal government have been affected, with Google violating its own standards about 80% of the time.
As a result, dozens of marketers expressed regret for purchasing Google’s True View ad product.
Why we care Advertisers have been paying premium prices for a service that Google has allegedly failed to deliver, costing them billions of digital advertising dollars. After reading the reactions of advertisers affected by the poor service they received from Google, other marketers may think twice before deciding to place ads with the Google Video Partners program.
How does True View work? True View is Google’s primary video advertising product, appearing on YouTube as well as third-party websites and apps. Users can skip True View ads after five seconds, but marketers only have to pay for the product when a video is watched for at least 30 seconds (or the length of the ad if it’s less than 30 seconds). Marketers can only be charged if their ad also plays with audio and isn’t accidentally triggered by a user scrolling down a page.
Google charges high prices when ads tick all of these boxes, and the deal is negotiated through a program called Google Video Partners.
In exchange for paying these expensive fees, advertisers are promised:
Ads will be played on high quality sites. Ads will play before a page’s main video content begins. Ads will only play with audio enabled. Ads only play after the viewer launches. They will only have to pay for the ads that are not skipped.
Has Google broken its promise to advertisers? According to the Adalytics report, Google has been accused of violating its own standards most of the time while still charging sellers a premium rate.
Google was accused of misleading advertisers by:
Premium ad playback without the promised audio. Place small video ads in low-value places, such as the side of a page’s main content. Placement of ads in autoplay videos. Placing ads on websites that do not meet Google’s monetization standards.
Several dozen advertisers stated that they would never have purchased advertising space through the Google Video Partners program if they had been informed of these issues in advance. Advertisers also said they were shocked and did not want their ads to play without audio, and that doing so contradicted their understanding of the ad space they had purchased.
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What Google says. Marvin Renaud, director of Global Video Solutions at Google, issued a statement denying the claims to Google. Ads and trade block shortly after the Adalytics report was published. He said:
“Brands care a lot about where their ads are placed and so do we. A recent third-party report used unreliable sampling and proxy methodologies and made wildly inaccurate claims about the Google Video Partner (GVP) network )”. “The report wrongly implies that the majority of campaign spend is on GVP rather than YouTube. This is incorrect. The vast majority of video ad campaigns run on YouTube.” “Video advertisers can also run ads on GVP, a separate network of third-party sites, to reach additional audiences if it helps them achieve their business goals. Although only a small percentage of video ads appear on GVP, It’s Effective: We’ve seen adding GVP to YouTube campaigns increase reach more than 20% for the same budget.” “Ad inventory on the Google Video Partner Network is more than 90% visible. This is well above industry norms. The claims in the third party report are simply not correct. Simply put, more than 90% of GVP ads are visible to people on the web, and advertisers only pay for ads when they’re seen.”
“In addition to the high bar we set on YouTubewe have strict policies that all third-party publishers, including Google video partners, must follow. We actively enforce these policies. Our policies prohibit content made for advertising (MFA). To give you an idea of how serious we are about this, a 2022 We stopped serving ads on over 143,000 sites for violating our policies.”We provide third-party validation for ads served on Google Video Partners content. We partner with external organizations to help us ensure that publishers comply with our policies. Supports Google Video Partners independent third party verification from DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science and Moat for viewability and invalid traffic. These partnerships, combined with the work we already do internally to enforce our policies, give advertisers confidence in the placement of their ads.”
Who is Adalytics? Adalytics is a crowdsourced advertising performance optimization platform that was built to overhaul and improve the digital advertising landscape. The company conducted this research by investigating campaigns from more than 1,100 brands that achieved billions of ad impressions between 2020 and 2023.
deep dive You can learn more about Adalytics’ research by reading their report, Google has misled advertisers about TrueView’s skippable in-stream ads for the past three years? You can also read Google’sTransparency and brand safety at Google Video Partners‘ statement that was made in response to the report.
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