Google refunds advertisers for traffic generated by bots

Search giant Google has issued refunds to hundreds of advertisers for running ads on websites with fraudulent traffic generated by automated bots, according to a Wall Street Journal report on Sunday.

However the refunds amount to only a fraction of the cost of the ads served to invalid traffic – 7 per cent to 10 per cent – since the rest of the money has already been passed on to site owners and middlemen, the report said.

According to Mumbrella, one disgruntled ad buyer said the refund amounted to ''less money than you would spend on a sandwich''.

Alphabet, Google's parent company, informed marketers and ad agency partners that their ads shown through the search engine had garnered fraudulent traffic generated by bots, which certainly would never click on their ads they had paid for to be shown.

''Today, we can't disclose the information about third parties. So when we aren't able to catch invalid traffic before it impacts our advertisers and we're unable to refund their media spent, it hurts us, even if we're not responsible,'' Scott Spencer, director of project management at Google, was quoted as saying.

Spencer added that the meagre refunds had been paid back to advertisers. According to the report, the refunds primarily involved video advertising and highlight a persistent issue that threatens the health of commercial content online.

Google has geared up to resolve the issue. It is believed that the search engine will provide more clarity over which tech providers in the ad-buying chain are responsible for making the refunds.

But according to Mumbrella's Bob Hoffman, Google is hardly unique - every automated buying platform is similarly affected as the web is drowning in fraudulent traffic.

For example, according to a recently published report, Facebook says it reaches 1.5 million Swedes between the age of 15 and 24. But Sweden only has 1.2 million such persons. If Facebook reached 100 per cent of them, they'd still be 300,000 short!