Hello Wazers!
We are very excited to announce that the new Waze advertising experience will open in Israel in the coming weeks!
Our plan is to initially open the ads to 1% of Prod (official version) drivers and 100% of beta testers as a trial run. If the move is deemed a success, we will gradually increase exposure to 100% of drivers.
Background on the new Waze advertising experience:
The Waze Ads platform is now fully integrated into the Google Ads campaign platform.
Ad pins will be linked to Google Places results. Clicking on them will open the Ads Location Preview Page for the user, which pulls data from Google. If the Google Place is linked to a Venue in Waze, the user will navigate to Waze coordinates.
The location matching process is passive, unlike the old advertising platform where the ad took over venues in Waze and sometimes caused venue quality issues. The new ad pins have no impact on venues in WME (Waze Map Editor).
Ad pins will appear on the map. Clicking on them will allow navigation to the destination or adding a stop:
Please note: Only one stop can be added per route. Users will see the following message if they exceed the limit:
Reporting invalid ad pins
All ads contain a link to Google’s My Ad Center, allowing users to get more information on why the ad is being shown and report ads when necessary.
Although we are currently unable to support reporting map issues for individual ad pins on the Waze side, we hope that updating Venues through the Orca and Biggs projects will positively impact the accuracy of places on the Google Maps side.
We also encourage you to link Venues in Waze to places in Google Maps within WME, which will help improve search results in general.
We want to hear from you once the new experience launches, so feel free to comment below with any feedback or questions you have!
Danit, on behalf of the Waze Communities team