SAN FRANCISCO: The cost of advertising on Google is expected to rise after the internet giant reported that its adoption of the IAB’s Ads.txt filter has helped it to reduce counterfeit inventory on its ad systems.

Google has been preventing advertisers from buying unauthorised impressions identified by Ads.txt since November 8 and the average cost of an ad on its systems has grown over the past three weeks, the Wall Street Journal reported.

“We would expect prices to increase once we started to cut out unauthorised inventory,” said Pooja Kapoor, Google’s Head of Global Strategy and Programmatic.

“Advertisers and agencies may need to pay a little more. But if they don’t vote with their dollars then unauthorised selling will continue,” she added.

According to Google, more than half of ad space available to buy through its DoubleClick Bid Manager system now comes from publishers using Ads.txt to help verify authenticity.

What has also helped is that a number of ad tech companies have come out in support of the Ads.txt initiative, including The Trade Desk, which in turn encourages publishers to publicly declare the select companies who are authorised to sell their digital inventory.

However, Google’s Kapoor noted that some publishers are still holding back from supporting Ads.txt amid concerns it could negatively impact their revenue or interfere with their existing arrangements regarding ad sales.

“There’s still some education needed and there’s still some confusion out there,” she said. “At the end of the day, you have to approach this in a principled way. It’s incumbent on the market to enforce this across the board.”

For the Wall Street Journal, Google’s disclosure is “good news for publishers” because it means they can maintain the value of their inventory, while for marketers “it should also give them greater confidence they’re receiving the product they’re paying for”.

Sourced from Wall Street Journal; additional content by WARC staff