Google took down 2.3 billion misleading ads in 2018

Search engine giant Google has banned 2.3 billion bad ads in 2018 for violations of both new and existing policies.

"We, at Google, have been working towards protecting the users, advertisers, and publishers by investing significant technological resources," Scott Spencer, Director of Sustainable Ads, Google, said in a statement.

Under this initiative, Google will launch a new Policy manager in Google Ads that will give tips on common policy mistakes to help well-meaning advertisers and make it easier to create and launch compliant ads.

In fact, in 2017 Google launched new technology that allows for more granular removal of ads from websites when only a small number of pages on a site are violating our policies. And in 2018, Google launched 330 detection classifiers to help us better detect "badness" at the page level that's nearly three times the number of classifiers we launched in 2017.

Spencer said, "We also continued to tackle the challenge of misinformation and low-quality sites, using several different policies to ensure our ads are supporting legitimate, high-quality publishers. In 2018, we removed ads from approximately 1.2 million pages, more than 22,000 apps, and nearly 15,000 sites across our ad network for violations of policies directed at misrepresentative, hateful or other low-quality content."

Nearly 734,000 publishers and app developers were terminated from the Google ad network and ads were removed completely from nearly 1.5 million apps. Google also took more granular action by taking ads off nearly 28 million pages that violated the publisher policies.

"More specifically, we removed ads from almost 74,000 pages for violating our "dangerous or derogatory" content policy and took down approximately 190,000 ads for violating this policy. This policy includes a prohibition on hate speech and protects our users, advertisers, and publishers from hateful content across platforms," he further said.