The Wall St. Journal reports that Google is now issuing refunds to advertisers who ran promotions on websites with fake traffic, typically generated by ‘bots,’ and is rolling out a new ‘transparency’ tool for marketers to better monitor ads they buy through its platform. 
Over the past few weeks Google informed hundreds of marketing partners and ad agencies about the issue with ‘invalid traffic’ also known as ‘ad fraud,’ in which ads bought using the company’s DoubleClick Bid Manager were served to sites which pay for traffic.
That said, the refunds are for just a fraction of the invalid traffic. Via WSJ:
Google’s refunds amount to only a fraction of the cost of the ads served to invalid traffic, which has left some advertising executives unsatisfied, the people familiar with the situation said. Google has offered to reimburse its “platform fee,” which ad buyers said typically ranges from about 7% to 10% of their total purchase.
The ad spending flows through to the exchanges. The problems arise when ads run on publisher sites with fraudulent traffic, including those where clicks are generated by software programs known as “bots” instead of humans. This is an issue of growing concern to marketers. It is difficult to recoup the money paid to those sites when the issue is discovered too late.
Google declined to state the dollar figure of the refunds, though some ad buyers told the Wall St. Journal that refunds range from “less money than you would spend on a sandwich” to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Advertisers aren’t too happy about the refunds, as they haven’t been given specifics about which ‘fake traffic’ sites their ads ended up on, or the specific exploits used. “We need to be very careful about commenting on or discussing specifics about bots or our detection,” Said Scott Spencer, director of product management for Google. “Often fraudsters will change their approaches and strategies based on our public comments.”
Scams within scams.
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Now that’s a sweet deal for Goolag. Similar to sweet deals in banking. Defraud customers/savers of tens of billions and then pay $1-2 million fine to the usual suspects who are supposed to regulate them.
Goolag: Fake news and fake traffic. But Facebook and Twitter are no better. Lots of fake traffic to go ’round.