Google has allegedly been mis-selling video ads to marketers for the last three years.
Advertisers working for small businesses, Fortune 500 companies and even the U.S. Federal Government have all been impacted, with the Google violating its own standards approximately 80% of the time, according to an Adalytics study.
Dozens of marketers expressed their regret over purchasing Google’s True View ad product as a result.
Why we care. Advertisers have been paying premium prices for a service that Google has allegedly failed to deliver, costing them up to billions of digital ad dollars. After reading the reactions from advertisers impacted by the substandard service they received from Google, it may make other marketers 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 ad product, which is featured 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 watches 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 activated accidentally by a user scrolling a page.
Google charges high prices when ads tick all of these boxes and the deal is brokered through a program called Google Video Partners.
In exchange for coughing up these expensive fees, advertisers are promised:
Has Google broken its promise to advertisers? Google has been accused of violating its own standards the majority of the time while still charging marketers a premium fee, according to the Adalytics report.
Google was accused of misleading advertisers by:
Several dozen advertisers claimed they would never have purchased ad space through the Google Video Partners program had they been made aware of these issues in advance. Advertisers also said they were shocked and didn’t want their ads to play without audio, and that doing so contradicted their understanding of the ad space they had purchased.
What Google is saying. Marvin Renaud, Google’s Director of Global Video Solutions, issued a statement to deny the claims on the Google Ads & Commerce Blog shortly after the Adalytics report was published. He said:
Who is Adalytics? Adalytics is a crowd-sourced advertising performance optimization platform that was set up to review and improve the digital advertising landscape. The company conducted this research by investigating campaigns for more than 1,100 brands that achieved billions of ad impressions between 2020 and 2023.
Deep dive. You can learn more about Adalytics’ investigation by reading its report, Did Google mislead advertisers about TrueView skippable in-stream ads for the past three years? You can also read Google’s ‘Transparency and brand safety on Google Video Partners‘ statement which was made in response to the report.
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