Google's video ads haven't been meeting its own standards and have left paid advertisers shortchanged. That's the outcome of a new report based on research by one company that analyzes ad performance.
According to the report, Google's ads fail its own standards around 80% of the time when running ads on other websites before the page's main video content. Those standards claim that the audio will remain on and that only ads that aren't skipped are paid for.
However, not all of that appears to be happening for ads that are sold in bundles for display both on YouTube and the wider internet.
Failing standards
The Wall Street Journal cites a report by Adalytics that looked into 1,100 brands that had billions of ad impressions between 2020 and 2023. The findings suggest that Google isn't living up to expectations — both of those paying for ads and its own guidelines.
Adalytics claims that ads often play muted or in incorrect places on the web page.
"The firm accused the company of placing ads in small, muted, automatically-played videos off to the side of a page’s main content, on sites that don’t meet Google’s standards for monetization, among other violations," the WSJ reports.
"The Journal independently observed invalid ad placements such as those the research identified, but couldn’t confirm the extent of the phenomenon. Digital ad-buyers and engineers vouched for the research findings," the WSJ adds.
Advertisers are obviously unhappy at the publication of these findings, but Google isn't phased. It told the WSJ that the report “makes many claims that are inaccurate and doesn’t reflect how we keep advertisers safe.”
Predictably, some advertisers believe that they should be compensated for the ads that didn't behave the way they should have.
“I feel cheated,” said Giovanni Sollazzo, founder, chairman, and chief executive of digital-ad agency AIDEM told the report. “What I requested to buy was not what I got. This should entitle me to a refund for invalid traffic.”
