Microsoft has published its version of the ad quality year in review 2020. Microsoft said it suspended about 300,000 advertising accounts in 2020, which was up 30% from 2019. It removed 1.6 billion "bad ads" and rejected about 21 million ads in accordance with its sensitive advertising policy. It also removed 270,000 sites from its system.
How does this compare to Google Ads report? Google said it blocked or removed over 3.1 billion ads for violating its Google Ads policies, it restricted over 6.4 billion ads, suspended over 1.7 million advertiser accounts, and removed ads from over 1.3 billion pages in 2020.
Microsoft said it had a key focus on these five areas:
- Coping with the pandemic
- Political advertising
- Third-party government services
- Tech support scams and phishing attacks
- Advertiser safety
People are complaining, Microsoft said, which helps them fight this. Microsoft said in 2020, it received a total of ~50,000 complaints related to ads not being compliant per Microsoft's advertising policies. They investigated each complaint and found ~65% of the reported ads to be in violation of Microsoft Advertising policies. Most of the complaints were related to trademark infringements, the company said.
It is interesting watching, from year-to-year, from platform-to-platform, how they deal with bad advertisers.
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