Following the recent findings of an Adalytics report, Google is offering advertisers more options to control where their ads appear in campaigns like AI powered Performance Max. This move comes after large brands’ ads ended up on pornographic, sanctioned, or pirated websites due to the automatic inclusion of ads in the Search Partner Network (SPN).
Adalytics states there are 36,000 websites in SPN eligible to show advertising, including 390 pornographic sites, four sites for entities sanctioned and more than 2000 websites that may be violating copyright laws.
Google has countered Adalytics’ claims, calling them highly exaggerated. Although advertisers could previously opt out of SPN on Search and Shopping ad campaigns, they couldn’t for other campaign types such as Performance Max (Pmax) or Universal App Campaigns.
For now, Google is temporarily enabling brands opt out of SPN for campaigns of all types, including Pmax and App Campaigns. The opt-out option is available until March 1.
This confirms our belief that Search Engines and Feed Engines (e.g. Facebook) prioritise filling their ad inventories, amounting to cheap clicks, impressions and subpar results in terms of sales and leads. In doing so, they are making it more difficult to opt out of irrelevant and sometimes damaging advertising spots (inventories) by either covering the opt-out in layers of settings or by not offering opt-out at all.
The challenge and part of the ad value of a digital marketer is knowing how to opt-out of these inventories.
