Google To Start Cracking Down On Fraudulent Advertisers: Identity Verification Is Must Now!

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The tech giant Google is now all set to crack down on fraudulent advertisers who are leveraging their advertising platform to trick people into scams and spreading misinformation!

On Thursday, in a blog post, Google said that they will soon start requiring the identity verification of all advertisers who use their platform. This preventive measure is mainly being taken because lately Google has been finding many advertisers to be falsely misrepresenting themselves.

According to Google, consumers who use their platform have every right to know which advertisers are running targeted ads on them along with which country these advertisers are located in.

Lately, in recent months, as the whole coronavirus situation started ramping up its pace throughout the world, consumers reported seeing an increasing number of ads for products such as fake vaccines from dubious advertisers on Google.

A company spokeswoman, in a statement, said as this new feature is being rolled out in phases, existing advertisers will have 30 days once notified to complete the verification process.

She also mentioned that if within this notified time, advertisers fail to comply with Google’s request, then their ad account will be immediately suspended.

The search tech giant explained how when their users click on “Why this ad?” while an ad is being displayed to them, they will start seeing disclosures that list this information on the advertiser.

Source: Verge

As of right now, Google has said that they will start to verify advertisers in the U.S only and then slowly expand globally. They also said that this process will take a few years to complete.

Also, in light of this news surfacing, many are saying that Google is only continuing what they earlier initiated in the year 2018. Back then, Google started a verification process for only political advertisers before they could run ads for the election season.

John Canfield who is Google’s Director of Product Management for ads integrity said in the post that this step by the company will enable people to understand which advertisers are targetting ads they see on Google.

He also mentioned that this step by Google will help their user make more informed choices and decisions.

Once advertisers comply with Google’s request for verification by submitting all the required documents, they will have to commit to an “in-account identity check” to confirm they’re legitimate. Companies which run these ads will have to submit personal legal information such as W9 or IRS document showing the organization’s name, address and employer identification number.

Also, in addition to this, an individual belonging to the organisation which runs ads on Google will need to provide their legal identification on the organization’s behalf. Individuals will have to show a government-issued photo ID like a passport or ID card. Google said it previously had collected basic information about the advertiser but didn’t require documentation to verify.

After all these criteria are met, Google will be providing either their approval or feedback to these organisations within three to five business days. They said that in order to issue this approval, they will be using a combination of human and tech reviews.

Now, while this sounds like a very lengthy, cumbersome and detail-oriented process on the advertisers’ side, it is very much needed and important. This issue is not only being tackled by the Google platform alone, but Facebook is also observing a lot of fraudulent ads popping up recently.

Another very important thing that needs to be noted here is the fact that in fiscal Q4 2019 alone, Google made a whopping $37,934 million in revenue from advertising. Now with this verification process coming into play, it will be interesting to see what their future revenue figures from advertising look like. We will keep you posted on all future developments. Stay tuned.

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