Bing rejected 130M ads in 2016, including 17M tech support scam ads

Advertisers attempting Phishing attacks and pushing counterfeit goods continued to try to evade detection.

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Bing Ads released its report on actions it took to keep malicious and misleading ads and advertisers off the search results in 2016. Its systems rejected 130 million ads (fewer than the 250 million were rejected in 2015) and banned 175,000 advertisers (more than the 150,000 banned the prior year).

Phishing ads, ads promoting tech support scams and counterfiet goods continued to be areas in which Bing continued to battle bad actors. More than 7,000 sites were blocked for potential phishing attacks, and a million ads were blocked for hocking counterfeit items. Bing Ads banned third-party tech support advertisers altogether last year after finding it difficult to weed out the good from the bad. Its systems blocked more than 17 million tech support scam ads in 2016.

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Bing added a software download policy for ads and says it “ramped up systems that detect browser hijacking ads, phishing attempts, scareware ads, ads targeting the most common sites on the internet, and ads with multimedia content” in 2016. Bing relies primarily on machine learning to find bad actors, but does perform “occasional” manual checks as well.


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About the author

Ginny Marvin
Contributor
Ginny Marvin was Third Door Media’s former Editor-in-Chief (October 2018 to December 2020), running the day-to-day editorial operations across all publications and overseeing paid media coverage. Ginny Marvin wrote about paid digital advertising and analytics news and trends for Search Engine Land, MarTech and MarTech Today. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.

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