What Google Ads Transparency Means for Digital Advertisers

In case you missed it, on March 29, 2023, Google launched its Ads Transparency Center “to help [consumers] quickly and easily learn more about the ads [they] see on Search, YouTube and Display.” As Alejandro Borgia, Google’s director of ad safety, explains in a press release on the Google blog, the Ads Transparency Center is a natural followup to My Ad Center, launched fall 2022 as a user dashboard for managing Google ad preferences and “learn[ing] more about the information used to personalize [the] ad experience.” Jerry Dischler, Google VP of ads, said last October that “online advertising doesn’t need to be confusing” and consumers “should have a say in the ads [they] see online.” He was right, and with the Google Ads Transparency Center supplementing My Ad Center, consumers should have more control than ever over what paid media they’re seeing online. This is a good thing, as consumer uncertainty has steadily risen alongside the unfettered use of third-party tracking cookies and all the corporate data breaches. Here’s the good news: Unless you sell offensive, dangerous or politically misleading products, more ad transparency should help you too.

Introducing the Ads Transparency Center

The Google Ads Transparency Center is a searchable hub of all ads served from pre-approved (“verified”) online advertisers. By visiting the Ads Transparency Center directly — or by clicking the three-dot menu next to any ad to access My Ad Center — users can identify all the ads the advertiser has run through Google, the geographical regions in which those ads were run, the last date the ads ran, and the format of each ad. They can also:

• Confirm the advertiser is a verified business
• Determine the types of online activity used by Google to personalize their user experience
• Choose the categories (e.g., education, relationship status, or work industry) that will influence the ads and other services offered by Google
• Customize the ads they see (and the ones they don’t)
• Limit ads by topics (e.g., blocking ads about alcohol, or weight loss)
• Like, block or report individual ads and advertisers
• Turn off ads personalization completely, on and off Google, on all your devices

Not only will this improve the UX of the billions of people who use Google every day, it will improve the trust forfeited recently among brands and consumers.

But that’s not all. 

How the Google Ads Transparency Center Can Improve Your Digital Advertising

There are actual corporate use cases for the Google Ads Transparency Center. Use cases that improve: 

• The quality and effectiveness of your ads
• Your ability to serve the right ads to the right audiences, at the right time, on the right platform and device

By leveraging this consumer platform as a digital advertising research tool, comparing your output to that of your key competitors. Like the Facebook Ads Library, the Google Ads Transparency Center can provide your digital marketing team with details including the design and copy used in all ad variations, as well as platform, geography, date and more.

Five Ways to Use Google’s Ads Transparency Center

Your competitors are already using the Ads Transparency Center to spy on you. You’d be remiss not to do the same. Here are five ways you can use the Center to get a leg up on your competition:

1. Competitive analysis. Identify industry trends, as well as gaps, opportunities and threats, to develop more strategic, customized digital ad campaigns.
2. Design inspiration. Look across industries at the top-performing ads to gain insights on how you could leverage design best practices to make your ads more visually appealing and engaging.
3. Copy inspiration. Again, look across industries at the top-performing ads, as well as within your industry at your top competitors, to find commonalities and trends in the messaging that resonates most with various audiences (and your audience(s), specifically).
4. Performance benchmarking. Compare competitor ad performance to gain stronger insights into how you can expect various ads and campaigns to perform against your KPIs
5. Compliance. Ensure your ads adhere to Google’s ad policies with greater ease, preventing disapprovals or penalties that could adversely impact your ad campaigns or even your ability to run ads through the Google ad network.

Learn More About Advertising Online (FAQs)

What is digital advertising?

Also known as online advertising, internet advertising or web advertising, digital advertising is the practice of delivering promotional content to users through online and other digital channels, including websites, apps, audio and video streaming channels, and search results pages. Digital ads can be created in a variety of media formats including text, image, audio, video and even AR and VR.

What are the primary characteristics of all digital ads?

All digital ads require the advertiser or sponsor to pay for the ad to be served, based on pay per impression (PPI), pay per click (PPC), or pay per action (PPA); all digital ads are goal-oriented (e.g., brand awareness or sales), measurable, and easily integrated with your CDP (and DXP); all digital ads are backed by data, dictating ad type, target audience, timeline and more; and all digital ads fall into one of two categories: personalized, based on user activity, behaviors and interests, or non-personalized, designed to amplify overall brand awareness.

What are the different types of digital advertising?

There once were eight types of digital advertising. In our increasingly young, very online, post-pandemic culture, there are 11: 

1. Search
2. Display
3. Native
4. Mobile
5. Video, CTV and OTT
6. Audio
7. Retargeting
8. Social media
9. Influencer Marketing, Brand Sponsorships and Product Placements
10. Metaverse/In-Game
11. Chatbot

While not every ad format is appropriate for every campaign or even every brand, every digital advertising (and digital marketing) professional needs to know the ins and outs of each. 

Download The Ultimate Guide to Digital Advertising >>>

Does digital advertising work?

Digital advertising has worked since the release of the first banner ad in 1994. By 2025, the market is expected to exceed $500 billion. Digital ads can increase brand awareness by 80%; consumers are 155% more likely to search for brand-specific terms after being served a display ad; and pay-per-click ads (like the ones that appear at the top of search engine results pages) produce a 200% ROI while generating more website visitors and conversions than search engine optimization.

Is our digital advertising working? 

Not sure what equals success? Don’t listen to so-called experts who claim to know the magic number. Every brand is different, and so is every campaign. My advice: 

1. Measure your ROI against your costs, and stay in the black
2. Continue to monitor all your campaigns to develop an understanding of your own opportunities and limitations
3. Iterate and optimize all your campaigns to ensure results steadily rise
4. Invest in a CDP and/or DXP to ensure all your data is being stored and used to increasingly target and personalize your campaigns
5. Take advantage of the Google’s Ads Transparency Center and My Ads Center for research and ad optimization

Need Custom Content for Your Digital Ads?

Even with all the competitive data in the world, not every brand is built for conversion-oriented custom content creation. Fortunately, that’s what we do best. 

Download our media kit to find out how Customer Engagement Insider can help you develop and distribute content marketing that works.

Image Credits (in order of appearance) 

1. Photo by Alex Dudar on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/MpdLxiIg0P0
2. Photo by Wilhelm Gunkel on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/3VQ4AfOKCVc
3. Photo by Tony Liao on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/vlqOuSuc--A
4. Photo by Unsplash+ in collaboration with Enis Can Ceyhan on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/YZ3CN1MkKyQ