• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, October 11, 2023

Google confirmed that its ad platform has been experiencing a technical issue impacting a significant subset of users, after advertisers began reporting their ads have been disapproved by the platform.

The technical glitch affects spend controls and the delivery of active campaigns on the platform.

One advertiser posted a note on Google’s support page explaining that a YouTube video that promotes a fantasy cricket prediction has been disapproved, along with other ads.

“I have already applied certificates for the website, which I promote in my video,” Sandeep Verma wrote.

Others on the forum jumped to the rescue, with actions that included posting a link to the Google Ads Status Dashboard. The dashboard notes incidents affecting Google Ads, such as the ongoing issue that began on October 10.

“We're aware of a problem with Google Ads affecting a significant subset of users,” Google explains. “We will provide an update by Oct 11, 2023, 10:00AM UTC detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.”

That update states that the measure affects serving and spending for campaigns running on Google Ads. This acknowledgement is intended to inform advertisers that the issue is ongoing but is actively being “investigated.”

Are advertisers too dependent on Google Ads? This is a question asked each time a glitch surfaces.

Glitches like these can completely disrupt an advertiser’s campaign progress based on Google’s dominance in search not only on desktop, but in mobile campaigns.

Google holds 91.7% of the global search-engine market, according to a recent report from Techopedia, citing data from StatCounter Global Stats, August 2023.

By comparison in August, Bing held 3.1%, while Yandex held 1.5%, Yahoo held 1.2%, Baidu held 1.1%, and DuckDuckGo held 0.5%.

In mobile search, Google’s dominance took 95.2% of the global mobile search-engine market.

Google’s search volume in June 2023 in the U.S. was more than twice that of its nearest rival, Microsoft Sites Core Search, according to Techopedia, which cited Comscore.

Google is just as dominant in organic search, which works hand-in-hand with paid ads.

The top-ranking pages on Google in September for highly competitive search queries, nine out of 10, are long-form content that exceeds 2000 words, according to Stan Ventures.