Who needs enemies when you’ve got unvetted partners?
On Tuesday afternoon, ad tech research firm Adalytics published a new transparency report digging into the Google Search Partners (GSP) program, a largely unknown and completely nontransparent search ad network.
Adalytics estimates GSP generates roughly $10.5 billion annually, but alleges the program is chockablock with brand unsafe ad inventory, including on pornography sites, right-wing fringe publishers and White House-sanctioned Iranian and Russian sites.
These revelations come six months after Adalytics published a report about Google Video Partners, a YouTube campaign extension product that sold subpar placements as premium inventory and gave advertisers almost no visibility into where their ad dollars were going.
How does GSP work?
GSP is a Google program that allows publishers to run custom Google searches within their sites, which extend Google Search campaigns.
If you’ve ever comes across a site with a subtle “Enhanced by Google” logo in its search bar, that’s GSP.
Best Buy, for example, one prominent publisher in the GSP network, might license the Google search engine so as to generate relevant search ads if, for some reason, a shopper queries “home mortgages” or “groceries” on BestBuy.com.
Sounds innocuous in theory. But, in practice, GSP offers almost no transparency or advertiser controls, according to Adalytics Founder and CEO Krzysztof Franaszek.
Although advertisers can see how much of their media served on non-Google sites versus Google’s owned-and-operated search, they get no site-level disclosure or registry of sites enrolled in the program. GSP is also just one part of Google Search’s off-site media.
That makes it hard to identify how much is actually spent on GSP. It also means advertisers can only identify the ads served to the GSP network by finding them in the wild.
Microsoft Bing has a similar product and also has no open registry, but Bing discloses every URL where a placement runs. That’s a key distinction.
Also, search advertisers are opted into GSP by default, and the program is automatically part of all Performance Max (PMax) campaigns. Even if an advertiser opts out of GSP, there is no way to opt out of those placements and spend through PMax, Franaszek told AdExchanger.
In other words, if advertisers use PMax, there is no way for them to avoid GSP inventory –and there’s a heck of a lot of inventory.
Although Google’s documentation mentions in passing that there are only “hundreds of non-Google websites” in the program, Adalytics found more than 80,000 sites that carry the search engine embed code for GSP.
Combined with the term “partner,” Franaszek said ad buyers are being presented with a misleading sense of quality.
Advertisers that consent to GSP or use PMax are buying across a far larger pool of search inventory than they likely expect, he said, and have no way to see where their ads go.
And their ads can go to some pretty bad places.
About those bad places …
Ads in the GSP network appear in response to search queries rather than based on the context of the website on which they run.
This means advertisers can’t target specific sites. A cosmetics brand, for example, can’t extend search ads to makeup tutorial blogs.
But it also means GSP causes advertisers to serve ads tied to searches on websites where they would never want to be, like an American advertiser on a website hosted in a country and by a business sanctioned by the US government.
The Adalytics report found ads for the FBI, Secret Service and US Mint on sanctioned Iranian and Russian sites – which is way worse than just a brand safety snafu. There is no world in which a federal agency wants to appear on a website hosted by a company that the US government believes is violating international law.
Yet it’s easy – surprisingly easy – to find problematic placements in the GSP network. Despite the sophistication of Google’s machine learning system, it falls for the easiest prompts imaginable.
Here are just some examples that AdExchanger generated:
- Want to put a DoubleVerify brand safety ad on a bestiality porn site? GSP.
- Would a prominent Democratic candidate place a fundraising ad on Breitbart? With GSP, yes.
- Want to see Disney or Amazon sponsoring placements on sites that pirate their content?
- How about a Procter & Gamble product you can click-to-cart with Target but via an ad on a Russian state-sponsored site sanctioned by the US Treasury?
You get the point.
What about that $10.5 billion estimate?
Although the GSP program is huge, it’s not the only source for Google’s off-site search extensions, which include search extensions on YouTube and programmatic display extensions, which are text-only banner units that look like search engine responses and generate search ad clicks.
So how did Adalytics come up with $10.5 billion?
Franaszek said he looked at Google search revenue, which Statista pegged at $162.5 billion last year, as well as the portions of campaigns Adalytics tracks that go to Google’s off-site partners. Google Search and PMax both disclose the percent of a campaign that went to Google and the percent that went to non-Google media.
According to his estimate, the portion of GSP sites that consists of brand-unsafe inventory is somewhere between 6% and 8% of the overall supply in the program.
But with Google Search revenues approaching hundreds of billions per year, even a single-digit slice of that pie is significant, he said. For the sake of comparison, The Trade Desk’s entire annual revenue last year was less than $2 billion.
Still, it strains credulity to imagine $10.5 billion in organic search engagement on the GSP network alone. How many people are actually searching for “DoubleVerify” on a porn site? And more than 20,000 GSP sites identified by Adalytics are parked domains – meaning they’re inactive pages loaded with nothing but a few click boxes that redirect people to a search page. ChallengeCandy.com, for instance, is a parked domain with links that generate a Google search for “candy,” “candies” or “bulk candy.”
“Adalytics has established a track record of publishing inaccurate reports that misrepresent our products and make wildly exaggerated claims,” said Dan Taylor, VP of Google Ads, in a statement. “We’ll of course review the report, but our analysis of the sites and limited information already shared with us did not identify ad revenue being shared with a single sanctioned entity.”
And some of the dark pool of unexplained spend may be fraud. Bots could generate traffic and clicks to extract revenue, or a publisher could surreptitiously run searches and pop up out-of-sight placements in the background while a real person browses the site.
“No one is alleging all that money went to porn or Iran,” Franaszek said. “[But] brands shouldn’t need to play a guessing game to find out how much.”
What can advertisers do?
The short answer is: Not much.
The first step is to opt out of GSP, which is opt-in by default. But advertisers are still exposed if they use PMax, which has no controls for GSP.
“I want to know how much is driven by PMax,” Arielle Garcia, UM’s former chief privacy and responsibility officer, told AdExchanger. “I could see as an outcome of this report that brands direct agencies to opt out of search partners without realizing at the same time their agency is aggressively pushing dollars into PMax.”
Adalytics clients that removed GSP from their search campaigns did see a small drop in overall reach, Franaszek said, but it’s well worth the savings on ROI grounds alone. Off-site Google search ads cost about as much as a true Google search query, he said, but Google O&O ads are 13 times more efficient at driving conversions.
According to Franaszek, two Fortune 500 brands that asked not to be named have halted PMax campaigns until Google provides an option to opt out of GSP or to blacklist sites in the network.
But what if Google’s changes, such as removing publishers from the program or no longer placing sponsored links in the results, do away with the evidence before the Adalytics report makes an impact on advertisers?
Franaszek said Google did boot some GSP sites in the days before the report was released, indicating that word got back to Google and it’s begun to remove the worst offenders. But he also said he’s not worried about Google taking swift and decisive action that nullifies the investigation.
In June, an Adalytics report caused a stir by detailing specific sites that sold instream, sound-on video placements, but served mute, out-of-sight outstream video ads. “To this day,” he said, “brands are still running outstream ads represented as instream on the same sites named in the report.”
Google said it has removed adult content from the GSP program. But check back on GSP in six months, and it will likely still be a black-box cesspit for search inventory.
Allison Schiff contributed to this report.
