When buying ads, all brands and marketers know that at least some of the views on their advertisement are going to be by bots rather than people. While it is known, it is certainly not something that should be accepted. Unfortunately, it is not always easy to tell which views come from real people and which ones from computers.
Google had recently found out about a large amount of ad fraud impacting their ads, especially video ads. Rather than just taking steps to prevent it in the future and moving on, they are actually issuing refunds to the brands that purchased the ads.
The refund has been issued automatically, so if you haven’t received one, your traffic wasn’t part of the fraud that they found. And even for those who are getting refunds, don’t expect it to be a huge amount. Reports show that only about 7-10% of the money people spent is going to be refunded since a lot of it has already been paid out to site owners and other middlemen.
That being said, it is nice to hear that Google is taking steps to compensate brands for money that they spent without getting what they paid for. Whether we will see more of this in the future is unknown.
The refund was originally reported by the Wall Street Journal, and can be seen HERE.
