Google Ads Blocked 3.4 Billion Ads, Restricted 5.7 Billion Ads & Suspended 5.6 Million Advertisers

Google has published its annual “Ads Safety Report” and disclosed that it has blocked or removed over 3.4 billion ads for violating its Google Ads policies, it restricted over 5.7 billion ads, suspended over 5.6 million advertiser accounts, and removed ads from over 1.7 billion pages in 2021.

How does this compare to last year?

2021: 3.4 billion ads removed/blocked

2020: 3.1 billion ads removed/blocked

2021: 5.7 billion ads restricted

2020: 6.4 billion ads restricted

2021: 5.6 million advertiser accounts suspended

2020: 1.7 million advertiser accounts suspended

2021: 1.7 billion ads removed from pages

2020: 1.3 billion ads removed from pages

So all the numbers increased with the exception of the number of ads restricted. While the number of accounts suspended sky rocketed this year. Google did write “as we shared in our 2020 report, we’ve seen an increase in fraudulent activity during the pandemic. In 2021, we continued to see bad actors operate with more sophistication and at a greater scale, using a variety of tactics to evade our detection. This included creating thousands of accounts simultaneously and using techniques like cloaking and text manipulation to show our reviewers and systems different ad content than they’d show a user — making that content more difficult to detect and enforce against.”

Here are some of the revised charts: