C. Scott Brown / Android Authority
TL;DR
- My Ad Center lets you see the companies behind advertising in Google Search.
- Google is now adding a separate “funded by” section, to more clearly communicate where ad dollars come from.
Living in our modern world means dealing with advertisements. While we sometimes have the option to pay to make ads go away, in the vast majority of cases we’re stuck with ads whether we want them or not. That just makes it all the more important for us to be ad-savvy, recognizing when claims are too good to be true, and thinking critically about why we’re seeing the messages we are.
One big problem with that, though, is that it’s not always easy for us to have the full picture on the advertisements we’re being served, and too often much of that process is opaque to the end viewer. Google, to its credit, has been offering a level of transparency through its My Ad Center, and that’s now getting a nice little upgrade that can help us better understand the ads we see.
Stephen Schenck / Android Authority
When you see an ad up top in your Google Search results, you’ve been able to click through to pull up My Ad Center, where Google offers a little background on why you’re being served that ad in particular, and who’s the company behind it. That was a solid start, but we live in a complicated world full of messy corporate structures, and it’s very possible to get into situations where the company that’s paying for an ad is not necessarily the same one whose products or services are being promoted.
Money talks, and if we really want to understand what’s going on with an ad campaign that’s targeting us, it’s probably a good idea to know who’s bankrolling it.
To that end, Search Engine Land reports that Google is currently rolling out an expansion of My Ad Center that displays the source of ad funding. While the company only initially disclosed that it would share the funding source when it differed from the actual advertiser, as you can see in the example we experienced above earlier today, that does not appear to be the case in practice. A little redundancy is far from an actual problem, though, and we sort of prefer the reassurance we get from clearly seeing this funding line, even when it’s not independently necessary.
Do you ever wonder who’s paying to promote the ads you see? Will you be clicking through to My Ad Center more often now that this information is easily available? Or are you content to just let ads keep doing their thing, without you needing to waste any of your own time thinking about it?
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