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As marketers know only too well, there are trade-offs with everything. And in the era of set-it-and-forget-it tools, that trade-off is one of spend efficiency for ads sometimes showing up in questionable environments.
Despite grumbles, a lot of marketers have accepted that trade-off. But with AI fuelled made for advertising sites springing up, the phenomenon will likely exacerbate.
Looking specifically at Google’s Performance Max campaigns, which offer broad reach and valuable placements across multiple channels, three key challenges persist: the unchecked rise of low-quality AI-generated sites, the difficulty of opting out, and the labor-intensive process of sifting through vast ad placement data.
“MFA is a complex and challenging topic—it’s also a topic that lacks consensus and definition at the moment,” said a Google spokesperson. “We continue to review these issues and work with our industry partners on potential policy adjustments.” Google took action against over 2.1 billion publisher pages and 395,000 sites in 2023—an increase from 1.5 billion pages and 143,000 sites in 2022. It takes action on sites that violate its policies but were missed by its enforcement systems, the tech giant said.
Here’s your primer on these issues:
A surge in AI-spun sites
Previously, advertisers could avoid ads being served on MFA sites by using block lists.
Now, advertisers are faced with AI-spun template sites, often falling under the MFA category. These low-quality domains prioritize ad revenue over content and can emerge overnight with no human involvement, rapidly eating into ad budgets.
These sites can be spotted by their cookie-cutter appearance: repetitive designs, AI imagery, and suspicious domain names like privatecaregiverfortheelderlyfinder.today or gametacticzone.top, and extensions like .click or .today.
“We call them template sites,” said Rachmiel Moss, co-founder and CEO, DeepSee.io. “They’re carbon copies of each other, with slight variations.”
DeepSee.io has tracked a sharp rise in these sites, with their numbers jumping from 20,000 to nearly 50,000 since the start of the year, ADWEEK previously reported.
“They can be spun up very quickly,” said Moss, “There’s no human touch to them. I don’t know how Google monetizes this.”