Google is charging marketers even when its own reports show that adverts were viewed by ‘bots’, says a new report. Making the case for more transparent analytics, the research reveals that YouTube did not count many of the fake views it directed at its own videos but still charged marketers for them.
Google is charging marketers even when its own reports show that adverts were viewed by ‘bots’, says a new report. Making the case for more transparent analytics, the research reveals that YouTube did not count many of the fake views it directed at its own videos but still charged marketers for them.
The experts who put together the report tested the systems employed by five video platforms.
On YouTube, the experts uploaded videos and bought ads targeted at them using Google’s AdWords service and set up a series of bots to target fake views at the videos.
The researchers found that the public view counter was different to the monetised one. Google publicly counted only 25 of the 150 fake views as real on one video, but its monetised view counter was 91.
They also found that they were charged for fake views on another two videos, but YouTube then identified the activity as suspicious in a secondary check and suspended the associated account.
They said that the issue “exposed advertisers to the risk of building their advertisement campaigns on unreliable statistics” when the public view counter was “much more discriminative”, demonstrating that YouTube was capable of more accurately identifying fake views.
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