Earlier this year, we began working with the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids to help people find helpful information about substance abuse online. This is a guest post from their President and CEO, Steve Pasierb, describing our efforts together and the organization’s ongoing work to keep teens safe. -Ed
The Partnership for Drug-Free Kids is dedicated to reducing teen substance abuse and helping families impacted by addiction. We are the only family-focused nonprofit that provides resources and direct support to help families prevent and cope with teen drug and alcohol abuse.
The modern path to substance abuse looks very different than it did when today's parents were teens themselves. As we all know, people are spending more of their time online, across a variety of connected devices. As a result, it’s increasingly important for our information to be accessible anytime, on the web and in mobile apps.
Thanks to a recent donation from Google, we’ve created innovative new content and tools that will help countless families find answers in the midst of a crisis, or before one ever happens.
Since beginning our work together in April, Google has funded search advertising campaigns, helped develop a mobile app with substance abuse-related information, improved our website, and plans to revamp our YouTube channel. All of this is complemented by their ongoing efforts to fight rogue online pharmacies — Google has removed more than 7 million ads for these outfits this year alone. This work makes it harder for people to buy controlled substances online without a valid prescription, thereby reducing illicit access to these medications and reducing abuse.
Search advertising campaigns funded by Google
Users will be able to find information about substance-abuse including: images, common slang terms, short- and long-term effects of each drug, and how to get help in our upcoming mobile app
Our national action campaign, the Medicine Abuse Project, is rallying parents, educators, health care providers, communities, and law enforcement to collectively help prevent half a million teens from abusing prescription drugs and over-the-counter cough medicine. Thanks to invaluable partners like Google, we are able to expand our reach, sharpen our tools and help parents navigate the teen years with help at their fingertips.
Posted by Steve Pasierb, President and CEO, Partnership for Drug-Free Kids
Posted by Eric Davis, Global Public Policy Manager
Today StopBadware is announcing the formation of an industry partnership to combat bad ads. We’re pleased to be a founding member of the Ads Integrity Alliance, along with AOL, Facebook, Twitter and the IAB.
Since its beginnings in 2006, StopBadware has enabled many websites, service providers and software providers to share real-time information in order to warn users and significantly eliminate malware (such as viruses, phishing sites and malicious downloads) on the web. We believe that the Ads Integrity Alliance can make a similarly important contribution to the goal of identifying and removing bad ads from all corners of the web.
In 2011, Google alone disabled more than 130 million ads and 800,000 advertisers that violated our policies on our own and partners’ sites, such as ads that promote counterfeit goods and malware. You can read more about our efforts to review ads and also see the numbers over time. Other players in the industry also have significant initiatives in this area. But when Google or another website shuts down a bad actor, that scammer often simply tries to advertise elsewhere.
No individual business or law enforcement agency can single-handedly eliminate these bad actors from the entire web. As StopBadware has shown, the best way to tackle common problems across a highly interconnected web, and to move the whole web forward, is for the industry to work together, build best practices and systems, and make information sharing simple.
The alliance led by StopBadware will help the industry fight back together against scammers and bad actors. In particular, it will:
Develop and share definitions, industry policy recommendations and best practices
Serve as a platform for sharing information about bad actors
Share relevant trends with policymakers and law enforcement agencies
Bad ads reduce trust in the web and in online advertising. The web puts the world’s information at your fingertips and has given everyone a platform to speak, listen, engage and unite. The growth that businesses generate from online advertising has enabled an enormous part of this platform. We think the web is worth fighting for, which is why we strongly support the Ads Integrity Alliance’s efforts to tackle bad actors who seek to damage it.
We believe that ads are useful and relevant information that can help you find what you’re looking for online—whether you’re comparing digital cameras or researching new cars. We also want you to be able to use Google and click on any ads that interest you with confidence. Just as we work hard to make Gmail free of spam and the Google Play Store free of malware, we’re committed to enforcing rigorous standards for the ads that appear on Google and on our partner sites.
Like all other Internet companies, we’re fighting a war against a huge number of bad actors—from websites selling counterfeit goods and fraudulent tickets to underground international operations trying to spread malware and spyware. We must remain vigilant because scammers will always try to find new ways to abuse our systems. Given the number of searches on Google and the number of legitimate businesses who rely on this system to reach users, our work to remove bad ads must be precise and at scale.
We recently made some improvements to help ensure the ads you see comply with our strict policies, so we wanted to give you an overview of both our principles and these new technologies.
Ads that harm users are not allowed on Google
We’ve always approached our ads system with trust and safety in mind. Our policies cover a wide range of issues across the globe in every country in which we do business. For example, our ads policies don’t allow ads for illegal products such as counterfeit goods or harmful products such as handguns or cigarettes. We also don’t allow ads with misleading claims (“lose weight guaranteed!”), fraudulent work-at-home scams (“get rich quick working from home!”) or unclear billing practices.
How it all works
With billions of ads submitted to Google every year, we use a combination of sophisticated technology and manual review to detect and remove these sorts of ads. We spend millions of dollars building technical architecture and advanced machine learning models to fight this battle. These systems are designed to detect and remove ads for malicious download sites that contain malware or a virus before these ads could appear on Google. Our automated systems also scan and review landing pages—the websites that people are taken to once they click—as well as advertiser accounts. When potentially objectionable ads are flagged by our automated systems, our policy specialists review the ads, sites and accounts in detail and take action.
Improvements to detection systems
Here are some important improvements that we’ve recently made to our systems:
Improved “query watch” for counterfeit ads: While anyone can report counterfeit ads, we’ve widened our proactive monitoring of sensitive keywords and queries related to counterfeit goods which allows us to catch more counterfeit ads before they ever appear on Google
New “risk model” to detect violations: Our computer scanning depends on detailed risk models to determine whether a particular ad may violate our policies, and we recently upgraded our engineering system with a new “risk model” that is even more precise in detecting advertisers who violate our policies
Faster manual review process: Some ads need to be reviewed manually. To increase our response time in preventing ads from policy-violating advertisers, we sped up our internal processes and systems for manual reviews, enabling our specialists to be more precise and fast
Twenty-four hour response time: We aim to respond within 24 hours upon receiving a reliable complaint about an ad to ensure that we’re reviewing ads in a timely fashion
We also routinely review and update the areas which our policies cover. For example, we recently updated our policy for ads related to short-term loans in order to protect people from misleading claims. For short-term loans, we require advertisers to disclose fine-print details such as overall fees and annual percentage rate, as well as implications for late and non-payment.
Bad ads are declining
The numbers show we’re having success. In 2011, advertisers submitted billions of ads to Google, and of those, we disabled more than 130 million ads. And our systems continue to improve—in fact, in 2011 we reduced the percentage of bad ads by more than 50% compared with 2010. That means that our methods are working. We’re also catching the vast majority of these scam ads before they ever appear on Google or on any of our partner networks. For example, in 2011, we shut down approximately 150,000 accounts for attempting to advertise counterfeit goods, and more than 95% of these accounts were discovered through our own detection efforts and risk models.
Here’s David Baker, Engineering Director, who can explain more about how we detect and remove scam ads:
What you can do to help
If you’re an advertiser, we encourage you to review our policies that aim to protect users, so you can help keep the web safe. For everyone else, our Good to Know site has lots of advice, including tips for avoiding scams anywhere on the Internet. You can also report ads you believe to be fraudulent or in violation of our policies and, if needed, file a complaint with the appropriate agency as listed in our Web Search Help Center.
Online advertising is the commercial lifeblood of the web, so it’s vital that people can trust the ads on Google and the Internet overall. We’ll keep posting more information here about our efforts, and developments, in this area.
There’s been a lot of debate over the last few years about personalization on the web. We believe that tailoring your web experience -- for example by showing you more relevant, interest-based ads, or making it easy to recommend stuff you like to friends -- is a good thing. We also believe that the best way to protect your privacy is to enable you to exercise choice through meaningful product controls. That said, given the number of different browsers and products available online today -- many of which have different privacy controls -- we recognize that it can get confusing.
So we’re pleased to sign up to today’s industry-wide agreement (you can read the details here) -- put together by the White House, the Federal Trade Commission and the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA), which represents over 90 percent of all online advertising in the U.S -- to create a simpler, more unified approach to privacy on the web. Under this agreement, users will be able to exercise choice under the DAA Principles by setting what has been called a “Do Not Track” header straight from their browser. The DAA Principles, and therefore the header, cover some aspects of tailored advertising. But, for example, if users have requested personalization (such as by signing up for particular services) or visit websites that use “first party” cookies to personalize the overall experience (for example a news website recommending articles to its readers, or a video site remembering your volume preferences), then browsers will not break that experience. In addition, today’s agreement supports continued innovation and competition on the web, as well as important, basic web functionality -- such as malware, spam and fraud detection.
We look forward to working with our industry partners, the White House, the FTC, the DAA and all the major browsers including Google Chrome, to adopt a broadly consistent approach to these controls -- rather than the situation today where every browser sets its own defaults, policies, and exceptions. In particular, we are pleased that today’s agreement will ensure that users are given an explicit choice, and be fully informed of the available options.
This agreement will not solve all the privacy issues users face on the web today. However, it represents a meaningful step forward in privacy controls for users. We look forward to making this happen.
Thanks to the Internet, it’s never been easier to start a business and reach a huge audience, at an incredible scale. Unfortunately, some people misuse legitimate online services to try to market counterfeit goods. Of course, this isn’t a problem unique to the online world, but as the Web has grown, so have attempts to sell counterfeits online.
With over one million advertisers using AdWords in over 190 countries, how do we weed out the bad actors who violate our clear policies against advertising counterfeits? In the last six months of 2010 alone, we shut down approximately 50,000 AdWords accounts for attempting to advertise counterfeit goods. But there’s no silver bullet here. Instead, it’s a cat-and-mouse game, where we are constantly working to improve our practices and tune our systems to keep out the bad guys.
That’s why today we’re announcing three improvements designed to further improve our collaboration with brand owners to address the problem and prevent counterfeiters from abusing our services:
We’ll act on reliable AdWords counterfeit complaints within 24 hours. In 2009, we announced a new complaint form to make it fast and easy for brand owners to notify us of misuse. For brand owners who use this form responsibly, we’ll reduce our average response time to 24 hours or less.
We will improve our AdSense anti-counterfeit reviews. We have always prohibited our AdSense partners from placing Google ads on sites that include or link to sales of counterfeit goods. We will work more closely with brand owners to identify infringers and, when appropriate, expel them from the AdSense programme.
We’ve introduced a new help center page for reporting counterfeits. That way, we aim to make it easier for users and brand owners to find forms to report abuse.
These steps are our ways of facilitating co-operation with brand owners, which is absolutely essential in tackling the sale of counterfeits online. AdWords is just a conduit between advertisers and consumers and we can’t know whether any particular item out of the millions advertised is counterfeit or not.
Of course, we do more than simply respond to brand owners’ removal requests. We use their feedback to help us tune a set of sophisticated automated tools, which analyze thousands of signals along every step of the advertising process and help prevent bad ads from ever seeing the light of day. We devote significant engineering and machine resources in order to prevent violations of ads policies, including counterfeiting.
In fact, we invested over $60 million last year alone, and, in the last 6 months of 2010, more than 95% of accounts removed for counterfeits came down based on our own detection efforts. No system is perfect, but brand owner feedback has helped us improve over time – as our system gets more data about ads it has misclassified before, it gets better at counteracting new ways that bad guys try to cloak their behavior.
While our systems get better over time, counterfeiting remains a complex challenge, and we keep investing in anti-counterfeiting measures. After all, a Google user duped by a fake is far less likely to click on another Google ad in the future. Ads for counterfeits aren't just bad for the real brand holder – they're bad for users who can end up unknowingly buying sub-standard products, and they're bad for Google too.
We’ve been talking with the Federal Trade Commission for the past six months about our planned acquisition of mobile advertising start-up AdMob, which we believe will bring new innovation and competition to mobile advertising. We’ve told the FTC about how new and highly competitive the mobile advertising space is, and the FTC has been talking to others in the industry about their views as well.
Some of those folks are sharing what they told the FTC. The developers of a mobile app called Wertago said they told the FTC that:
The internet and mobile technology sectors right now are perhaps the most (or among the most) competitive and fast-moving industries EVER TO EXIST. The web and mobile spaces have remarkably low barriers to entry. [...] And we think Google’s AdMob acquisition will have little if any effect on the competitiveness of the mobile advertising market space.
Wertago also talked about both the low entry barriers and non-existing switching costs in mobile advertising:
The crucial point here is 1) the marginal advertiser and the marginal developer, not the average or typical advertiser and developer, are who drive the competition, and there will always be a fight for them, especially because of the “long-tail” where lots of niche opportunities exist, and 2) the cost of switching ad networks in a mobile app is close to zero, and the cost of developing an ad network is not terribly high and easily bankrolled.
Industry analyst Greg Sterling also met with the FTC, and said that he told them:
I didn’t believe competition would be affected adversely and that advertising prices were not likely to go up. Indeed, mobile CPM prices have been falling in mobile. In short I said, yes Google becomes more powerful and effective but the deal doesn’t stifle competition. The market is dynamic and highly competitive, I told the FTC.
And:
I’m no laissez-faire capitalist but I think the mobile ad market is both very young and highly dynamic. It’s evolving quickly and definitely very competitive. If the objective of anti-trust law is to protect competition in the market then it is simply unnecessary for the FTC to intervene at this stage by blocking the AdMob deal.
Other analysts and observers have been weighing in too:
With Google and AdMob facing strong competition every day from businesses like Apple, JumpTap, Millennial Media, Microsoft, inMobi, Greystripe, Mobclix and many more, we agree that there’s vibrant competition in this space.
Update (5/5): Dow Jones asked a few players in the mobile industry yesterday what they thought about the deal:
Two of these people said the FTC staff didn't appear to be taking into account other companies like Millennial Media Inc., Greystripe Inc. and Jumptap Inc., all of which operate in-application advertising networks. By a broader definition, the mobile advertising market also includes corporate behemoths such as Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), which serve ads displayed on mobile websites.[...]
Industry insiders and analysts said an FTC antitrust challenge would be problematic for a number of reasons. One industry source argued that it was a "flawed theory" to distinguish between ads that appear within mobile-phone applications and those displayed on mobile websites. This person said the mobile-advertising market is at such an early stage that it is impossible to predict which companies will emerge on top.
Michael Chang, chief executive at Greystripe, acknowledged that the combination of Google and AdMob would create a stronger rival, but he agreed that the market is too new and too dynamic to predict how it will evolve.
"It definitely creates a stronger competitor, but we're in the second inning and it's going to be a long game," said Chang.
We've long labeled most of the ads we serve on the Google Content Network (our AdSense partner websites) with an "Ads by Google" attribution. We do this because we want consumers to have an awareness and understanding of the ads they see online.
Now we're extending this notice to even more ads. Today we are starting to roll out the "Ads by Google" message on rich media ads in a way that is unobtrusive to the advertisement itself, but still gives users clear notice if they want to learn more about online advertising at the moment they're looking at the ad. As more and more advertisers use rich media ad formats, and publishers increasingly support them on their sites, we want to provide the same benefit of clear notice to users -- regardless of the ad format. This new notice shows up as a small "i" (for "information") icon overlay in the bottom right-hand corner of the ad, and expands if the user hovers over it. Just like before, users who click on the "Ads by Google" label will be taken to a page where they can learn more about our advertising practices.
With one click on the label, users can get more information about how we serve ads and the information we use to show ads. As the Federal Trade Commission recommended when it released its principles for online advertising in February, consumers deserve greater notice about advertising practices beyond traditional privacy policies. We couldn't agree more. We're following the approach described in the guidelines recently published by a group of trade associations including the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the American Association of Advertising Agencies, and the Association of National Advertisers. Google is continuing to work with the broader industry towards consistent transparency, choice, and education, and we hope that our new label will help this work.
Posted by Brian "Fitz" Fitzpatrick, Data Liberation engineering manager
As we've previously discussed on this blog, our goal is to "liberate" data so that consumers and businesses using Google products always have a choice when it comes to the technology they use.
Our data liberation efforts also apply to our hundreds of thousands of advertisers. We're committed to enabling our advertisers to easily export data from Google in a machine readable, standardized format. Recently, some have claimed that we somehow stop advertisers from getting their AdWords campaign data out of Google.
That's incorrect.
Advertisers can export data from AdWords into CSV files and reformat and utilize that data as they see fit in a matter of minutes, which includes importing it into other search engines. Indeed, many advertisers recommend the use of Google's AdWords Editor to manage campaigns for other systems -- here's a video to show how it's done:
If you encounter any issues with import or export from Google products, please don't hesitate to let us know. You can reach the Data Liberation team on Twitter at @dataliberation.
Posted by Adam Kovacevich, Senior Manager, Policy Communications
As part of our continuing effort to give advertisers more transparency about Google's advertising system and how our ad auction works, we're launching a cool new feature in our AdWords system called the bid simulator.
The bid simulator gives advertisers more information about the potential impact of their bid on their advertising results, allowing them to make more informed bidding decisions. For each potential cost per click that an advertiser could bid, the bid simulator estimates the likely number of ad impressions, how many clicks an ad could have gotten for those impressions, and how much those clicks could have cost the advertiser.
As we testified a few weeks ago, we are proud that our launch of interest-based advertising incorporated consumer-friendly features that provide real transparency and choice for our users — such as ads labeled 'Ads by Google,' the Ads Preferences Manager, and the choice to opt out of interest-based ads altogether.
We put together the slides below to help Members of Congress and their staffers understand the ways in which we incorporated privacy protections into our products. Though we've distributed these widely on Capitol Hill, we wanted to share them with our blog readers too:
Posted by Adam Kovacevich, Senior Manager, Global Communications and Public Affairs
Most policymakers are pretty familiar with how TV stations, magazines and newspapers sell advertising. Typically those organizations have a "rate card" with standard ad prices for a 30 second ad or a full-page print ad, and the advertiser pays the standard rate or negotiates a lower rate if they commit to buy ad space in bulk.
That's not how ad space on Google is sold. Instead, all advertisers -- big and small -- bid for their ads to appear when users search on Google for certain terms.
Admittedly Google's ad auction can be a bit difficult to understand because it differs so much from traditional ad models. That's why we have posted videos and tutorials on the AdWords Learning Center explaining how it works.
Now Wired Magazine's Steven Levy has a new article out in the June issue taking an even closer look ad the Google ad auction, and it's a must-read for policymakers who want to understand online advertising. Levy looks at how Google's auction model evolved, the role of algorithmic "quality scores" that ensure users see relevant ads, and how the "second price" auction means that advertisers don't overbid.
Check it out when you get a chance. Graphic: Wired.com
