As marketers know all too well, there are trade-offs in everything. And in the age of set-it-and-forget-it tools, that tradeoff is one of efficiency spending on ads that sometimes appear in questionable environments.
Despite the grumbling, many marketers have accepted this compromise. But with AI powered made for advertising sites the phenomenon risks getting worse.
Looking specifically Google Performance Max campaigns, which offer broad reach and valuable placements across multiple channels, three major challenges persist: the uncontrolled increase in low-quality content. AI-generated sites, the difficulty of unsubscribing, and the tedious process of sifting through vast ad placement data.
“MFA is a complex and difficult subject, it is also one that lacks consensus and definition at the moment,” said a Google spokesperson. “We continue to review these issues and work with our industry partners on possible policy adjustments.” Google has taken action against more than 2.1 billion publisher pages and 395,000 sites in 2023, an increase from 1.5 billion pages and 143,000 sites in 2022. It is taking action against sites that violated its policies but were not captured by its enforcement systems, the tech giant said.
Here is your introduction to these questions:
A surge of AI-powered sites
Previously, advertisers could prevent ads from appearing on MFA sites by using blocklists.
Now, advertisers are faced with AI-created template sites, often falling into the MFA category. These low-quality domains prioritize ad revenue over content and can emerge overnight without human intervention, quickly eating into advertising budgets.
These sites can be spotted by their cookie-cutter appearance: repetitive designs, AI images, and suspicious domain names like privatecaregiverfortheelderlyfinder.today or gametacticzone.top, and extensions like .click or .today.
“We call them model sites,” said Rachmiel Moss, co-founder and CEO of DeepSee.io. “They are carbon copies of each other, with slight variations.”
DeepSee.io has seen a sharp increase in these sites, with their number increasing from 20,000 to almost 50,000 since the start of the year, ADWEEK previously reported. reported.
“They can be launched very quickly,” Moss said, “They don’t have any human touch. I don’t know how Google monetizes that.
Gaming sites, often featuring ad.txt files but little legitimate content, are also becoming more common.
“One glance reveals that this is just absurd,” Moss added, noting that thousands of these sites are created every week and continue to benefit from ad spend, “especially thanks to Google’s Pmax campaigns.” .
Traffic to low-quality domains will never be zero, according to an agency official, speaking anonymously to preserve industry relations.
“With Generation AI, it’s just easier to build an MFA site,” the executive said.
No easy way to unsubscribe
Google’s advertising ecosystem does not have a dedicated exclusion tool for MFA sites, which means advertisers must manually block individual sites as they appear, according to the first director of the agency.
“There isn’t necessarily a general framework to keep you away from this inventory,” the executive noted.
Although advertisers can block partial domains before launching a campaign, the constant emergence of new sites makes it difficult to maintain control, according to a second industry executive.
In 2021, Google rolled out dynamic exclusion lists, allowing advertisers to block placements based on topics like politics or devices like tablets.
Navigating Data Overload
Although advertisers have long had access to ad tracking data through the Google API, they needed some technical expertise to extract it, such as writing custom scripts, the CEO said.
Since March, Google has made this data directly available in its advertising ecosystem, thus simplifying access. However, extracting meaningful information remains a challenge
“They have thousands of rows in an Excel spreadsheet, so it’s more difficult to make them actionable and navigate the volume,” the manager said.
