A guide to understanding ad quality

Ad quality refers to the clarity, relevance, and trustworthiness of a digital advertisement. It reflects how well an ad communicates its message, respects the user experience, and upholds the integrity of the environments where it appears. High-quality ads load quickly, align with audience expectations, and support a healthy relationship between advertisers, publishers, and users.

When ads fall short of these standards, the consequences can extend far beyond poor engagement. Misleading, intrusive, or slow-loading creatives can frustrate users, damage publisher credibility, and erode brand trust. Over time, poor ad quality drains marketing budgets, weakens campaign performance, and reduces overall ecosystem value.

To promote better ad experiences, the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) establishes creative standards designed to keep the digital advertising ecosystem efficient and user-first. These guidelines address ad formats, file sizes, load speeds, and interactivity to ensure creatives are effective without disrupting the browsing experience. Maintaining ad quality is about protecting users, preserving publisher reputation, and reinforcing confidence across the entire advertising supply chain.

For ad tech platforms, ad quality refers to the delivery of each of their publisher client’s unique ad filter standards in an effective and scalable manner while staying in compliance with industry standards. They typically build their internal policies to ensure they accomplish this.

Malicious advertising, or malvertising, refers to security threats that cause objective harm to a visitor through a digital ad. This can be delivered in a host of ways, including actual malicious javascript in a creative or a bitcoin phishing scam.

Malvertising is an objective ad fraud threat from malicious ads and landing pages that is the same for every publisher. Ad quality, on the other hand, is a much more subjective threat that differs from organization to organization. For example, a publisher may not want to run a competitor’s ad even though the ad itself is inoffensive and safe. An ad platform may not be willing to run gambling ads due the risky nature of that business. Many partners in the ad tech ecosystem wish to block adult content or violence.

Ads are the lifeblood of any publisher, the means of monetizing their content and generating revenue for their websites. Managing the quality of those ads is an important task for all publishers.

Publishers want to ensure that the ads on their websites are high-quality and pertinent to their audiences. When ads are relevant, they can create a better experience for both site visitors and advertisers, as the audiences are more likely to engage with relevant ads. This makes the impressions on that website more valuable to advertisers. And that increased value can deliver increased revenue for the publisher.

On the other hand, poor-quality ads have the potential to harm a website’s trustworthiness to a visitor, weaken the user experience, and much more.

Some of the main consequences of low-quality advertisements include:

• Poor user experience: Irrelevant, slow-loading, or intrusive ads frustrate users, leading to higher bounce rates and lower engagement.
• Negative website reputation: Poorly designed or misleading ads can harm your site’s credibility, causing users to lose trust and avoid future interactions.
• Increased risk of ad disapproval or removal: Low-quality or unsafe ads increase the likelihood that inventory will be blocked by supply-side platforms, restricted by publishers, or removed altogether to limit fraud and reputational risk.

As for ad tech platforms? They’re expected to not only deliver ads in compliance with client requirements but also meet industry standards. By doing this, they mitigate legal and reputational risk while helping their publisher clients to keep the ad experiences relevant for site audiences. This can increase the value of the publisher’s inventory and deliver more effective campaigns for advertisers.

Most publishers turn to programmatic advertising to generate additional revenue for their websites. To maximize those programmatic efforts, they may tap into multiple supply-side platforms (SSPs), exchanges, header bidding partners and other advertising intermediaries or technology.

The fact that ad quality standards are, well, not standard complicates matters. Because ad quality criteria are unique to each organization, publishers need to implement their specific filters with each of the programmatic platforms. They must manage each platform’s unique systems, some of which do not provide the protection for quality concerns needed.

To further complicate matters, cybercriminals continuously target ad inventory with malware, bot traffic, and other types of fraud. These attacks can cause ads to be pulled from platforms and may result in inventory being restricted or blocked due to concerns about high levels of spam or malware. At the same time, click fraud and other types of bot traffic can pollute performance and quality data used to evaluate inventory health.

All of this can have an outsized, negative impact on ad quality if not properly managed and controlled.

Here are examples of how publishers can use ad filters to control which advertisers or content categories appear on their sites:

• Block adult-related ads: A publisher can use a blocking filter to block all ads from websites that are known to display adult-related content.
• Block ads for harmful or misleading products or services: A publisher can use a blocking filter to block ads for products or services that are considered to be harmful or misleading, such as gambling products or weight loss products.
• Block ads from specific advertisers: A publisher can use a blocking filter to block ads from specific advertisers that they don’t want to display on their website, such as competitors.By using ad blocking filters, publishers can protect their audience from inappropriate ads and maintain a high level of ad quality.

Ad quality can make or break a publisher’s inventory performance. High-quality ads are critical to maintaining audience trust, protecting users, and preserving a healthy ad environment. On the other hand, low-quality ads can expose users to harmful content, violate platform or industry policies, and put inventory at risk of being flagged or blocked by demand and supply-side partners.

Understanding these proven strategies allows publishers and platforms to define and enforce ad quality standards while protecting revenue and the visitor experience.

To safeguard performance and protect the integrity of your campaigns, focus on these foundational steps:

• Ensure ad creative is clean and compliant: Avoid misleading content, exaggerated claims, or clickbait tactics that violate ad platform and publisher guidelines.
• Scan for malware and malicious code: Ads should be free of hidden redirects, payloads, or executable scripts that could compromise user devices or violate ad policies.
• Avoid cloaking and domain spoofing: Maintain transparency between what’s shown in the ad and where the user lands to preserve trust and prevent filtering.
• Vet third-party vendors and creatives: Work only with trusted partners and platforms that follow strict security and ad quality controls.
• Monitor for invalid traffic and fraud signals: Use tools that detect signs of ad fraud, such as sudden spikes in CTR, unusually high impressions with low conversions, or activity from flagged IPs. 

HUMAN Malvertising Defense provides publishers the ability to prevent unwanted ads from serving on their sites through a host of parameters, including custom filters tailored to their standards, like:

Brand/Domain: Filter ads from unwanted advertisers due to unwanted content or competitive reasons

Category: Filter ads related to unwanted verticals due to undesirable content or competitive reasons.

Ad Format: Filter ads based on format to maintain a consistent user experience and site performance.

What is a good ad quality score?

A good Ad Quality Score on Google Ads is typically 7 or higher on a scale of 1 to 10, indicating the ad, keywords, and landing page are highly relevant and provide a strong user experience.

What makes a quality ad?

A quality ad is relevant, engaging, and user-focused, with a strong call-to-action (CTA) and alignment with user intent. It also leads to a well-optimized landing page and loads quickly, ensuring a seamless experience for end users.

What is a bad ad quality score?

A bad Ad Quality Score is typically considered to be 3 or lower, indicating poor relevance, low expected CTR, or a weak landing page experience. 

What is the difference between ad quality and ad rank?

Ad quality refers to the relevance and effectiveness of an ad, as determined by various established factors. Ad rank, on the other hand, is the position of an ad on a search engine results page (SERP), which is influenced by ad quality, bid amount, the expected impact of ad extensions, and other considerations.

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