Google releases 2021 Ads Safety Report

Earlier this week, Google released the 2021 edition of their annual Ads Safety Report.

With user safety a top priority, the report showcases the work Google is doing to improve user privacy in digital advertising across Google’s advertising ecosystem - to protect users and curb bad practices by malicious actors. In 2021 alone, Google increased the number of advertising account suspensions by three times the regular amount.

The 2021 edition of the annual Ads Safety report provides an overview of the scale of enforcement actions taken by Google on key areas such as fraudulent ads and advertising accounts, misinformation and brand safety for advertisers.

Key insights from the 2021 Ads Safety Report:

• Ad takedown and account suspensions - In 2021, Google took down 3.4 billion bad ads and suspended nearly 5.6 million advertiser accounts
• COVID- 19 - Since the beginning of the pandemic, Google blocked over 106 million ads from running that violated our policies against harmful health claims related to COVID-19.
• Responding to the war in Ukraine - Google blocked over 8 million ads following their Sensitive Events policy and removed ads from more than 60 state-funded media sites across our platforms.

You can read entire 2021 Ads Safety Report for enforcement data and further information.

In addition to the 2021 Ads Safety Report, Google wanted to address the ongoing war in Ukraine.

Though the report only covers 2021, Google wanted to share an update — given its top of mind for so many around the world. Google acted quickly to institute a sensitive event, prohibiting ads from profiting from or exploiting the situation. This is in addition to the company's longstanding policies prohibiting content that incites violence or denies the occurrence of tragic events to run as ads or monetize using our services.

Google has also taken several other steps to pause the majority of our commercial activities in Russia across our products — including pausing ads from showing in Russia and ads from Russian-based advertisers and pausing monetization of Russian state-funded media across our platforms.

As a result, Google has blocked over eight million ads related to the war in Ukraine under our sensitive event policy and separately removed ads from more than 60 state-funded media sites across our platforms.

Provided by Google Canada as part of the 2021 Ads Safety Report and blog post