Google has announced a number of steps it is taking to help its partners “build trust in the advertising supply chain” – including a new infrastructure that will automate the refund process for invalid traffic.
In the coming months, advertisers will be able to claim money back from supply partners including AppNexus, Index Exchange, OpenX, Pubmatic, SpotX, Teads, Telaria and DoubleClick Ad Exchange, for invalid traffic detected up to 30 days after the monthly billing.
In a blog post, Google’s director of product management, Payam Shodjai, said this will cover over 90% of the available inventory in Google’s demand side platform, DoubleClick Bid Manager – and that it will eventually be able to identify which supply partners provide refunds for invalid traffic and offer advertisers the option to buy only from those sources.
Invalid traffic, sometimes referred to as non-human traffic, is essentially fraudulent, and means advertisers are paying for ads that are not viewed by a human.
Google said it is also investing in reporting features to give advertisers and supply partners greater visibility on what traffic is being filtered.
Advertisers will be able to see the invalid traffic appearing in their campaigns both pre-bid and post-serve, breakdowns by categories, automated browsers and falsely represented inventory, while supply partners will receive reporting on the sources and amounts of invalid traffic that Google’s systems are post-serve filtering from their platforms.
Finally, by the end of October – following the IAB Tech Lab’s release of the ads.txt standard to increase supply chain transparency and make it more difficult to sell counterfeit inventory – Google’s DoubleClick Bid Manager will only buy a publisher’s inventory from sources identified as authorised sellers in its ads.txt file when a file is available.
“Advertising fraud is a complex challenge, but one that we are working to simplify for our partners,” Shodjai said.
“That’s why we’ve developed sophisticated systems, including over 180 automated filters and detection algorithms, to prevent invalid traffic from impacting our clients. For years, we’ve used these technologies to protect Google-owned media properties from invalid traffic and now we’re working to expand them to help the rest of the ecosystem.”
