Greetings Wazers,
We are very happy to announce that Waze’s new ad experience will be opening in Malaysia in the coming weeks!
Our plan is to first open ads only to 1% of Prod drivers and 100% of Beta Testers as a trial run, and if successful incrementally increase the audience to 100% of drivers over the course of a few months.
Background on the new Waze Ads experience:
The Waze Ads Platform is fully integrated with the Google Ads campaign platform.
The ad pins will be linked to Google Places results, and launch the user to the Ads Location Preview Page when clicked, which sources Google data. If the Google Place is linked to a Waze venue, the user will be routed to the Waze coordinates.
This matching process is passive, as opposed to the old ads platform which took over Waze venue pins and sometimes caused issues with venue quality. The new ad pins do not have any impact on Waze venues in WME.
Ad pins will appear on the map, and by tapping on them drivers can launch a drive or add a stop to the location:
NOTE: You can only add 1 stop per route. Users will be served this prompt if over the limit:
Reporting Bad Ad Pins
Google’s My Ad Center is integrated, allowing users to get more info on why they are being served an ad, and to report ads when needed.
While we currently don’t support reporting map issues with individual ad pins on the Waze end, we hope that updating venues through Projects Orca and Biggs will have a positive impact on venue accuracy on the Google Maps side. We also encourage you to link Waze venues to Google Maps places in the WME, which will help improve search results overall.
We want to hear from you once this new experience rolls out, so please comment below with any feedback or questions you have!
Leigh, on behalf of the Waze Communities Team