"Which policies?"
"That's none of your business."
"How are we violating them?"
"I'm not going to tell you."
"What can we do?"
"Fix the issues, and then appeal."
"Which issues?"
"I've said too much already."
Obviously I can't say "of the last 2500 ad clicks zero of them had any mouse movement over the ad before the click event" because then the publisher obviously just fixes their fraud software.
This isn't specific to Google or even advertising. Every company has figured out when dealing with abuse and fraud sharing the minimum amount of information is beneficial to the health of the ecosystem as a whole.
It's not a situation like putting someone in prison where "beyond all reasonable doubt" is the appropriate mark; you can refuse to do business based on mere suspicion that may be mistaken. There's a limit where extra investigation or appeals is too costly compared to just accepting the lost revenue, and for small-scale customers, that limit is quite low. With fraud detection, you have to balance the tradeoff between false positives and false negatives, but you'll certainly have both.
There are literally no false positives. It may be fraud, it may be the ad is too close to a back button and gets accidently clicked, it could be the ads don't display right. But at the end of the day, it is a revenue decision.
We viewed them as a cost of doing business. Some small accounts got nuked. :shrug: If we had to have humans investigate everything, and produce reports / interpretations that nuked customers found satisfactory, we wouldn't have been willing to service accounts under probably $40k/year.
And keep in mind the ecosystem is filthy with fraud, particularly on the low end. There very much are groups of organized thieves actively exploiting adtech.
And as @PeterisP says... look, we're not a court. We're a private business that is refusing to do further business with someone. Our right to do this was very clearly explained before the beginning of any relationship, and agreed to by that someone. If that someone doesn't like it, their recourse is to not do business with us.
So you are basically justifying Google behavior. You are not a court, that's right. But every ban process should be easily and quickly prosecutable to settle the issue right in a court. Obviously real fraudsters will never appeal like that, because they know they would incur in even bigger problems.
I now know you have no experience at all fighting online fraud. People, um, lie.
On a serious note, if you require a prosecutable ban process -- whatever that means, because prosecuting is something the government does -- where you'll end is my original point. Ad companies will refuse to do business with publishers that aren't above some minimum threshold. My guess is $40k a year. Because remember eg google or whoever keeps about 1/3 of that money, so a $1k/mo minimum to staff humans and deal with arguing feels ballpark reasonable.
Separately, I'm not justifying anything. I'm explaining the economics driving behavior. If you want to be mad at me for behavior I don't control or influence... :shrug:
It could be better if the issue is fixed, but Google’s skin in the game is small enough it doesn’t matter, and they already chose to get rid of the publisher as an efficient solution.
This ban is not only not explaining how it detected unwanted activity, it is not explaining what activity it detected.
"We detected you faking ad impressions, though we won't tell you how we (believe we) know" is very different to "We detected you (or your app) doing something wrong, stop doing it and you will be fine. We won't tell you what you did wrong".
There is an opposite side to this. If you have a human appeal process your accuracy drops to min(ml_model, humans) and I have bad news about which one of these is smaller.
(What you said makes sense to me, I just don’t know if/how ad networks could differentiate between the account-owner committing fraud and a malicious 3rd party.)
Not saying this is what was happening here, or that y’all didn’t think of it; just a general observation I’ve noticed over the years.