14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook is not exactly overloaded with ads, but there are plenty of them. Most of the times, they go unnoticed, but on other occasions they’ll annoy you so much you have to do something about them. So you click the “X” button, and with just that simple move you suddenly become a really interesting user for Facebook.
“Every day, there are millions of ads that are eligible to be shown in News Feed from more than 1.5 million active advertisers on Facebook, and our goal is to show people ads that we think they’ll find interesting. When someone sees an ad that is relevant to them it’s a good experience for them as well as the marketer trying to reach them,” Facebook’s Max Eulenstein, product manager, writes in a blog post.
Therefore, the company is rolling out two new updates to the News Feed that are supposed to help show people more relevant ads.
The option to hide an ad has been around for years, complete with questions about what led to the decision of hiding said content. The company has been reading this data for a while, trying to improve things, but it’s now going to be paying even more attention.
The reasons for hiding ads, taken into consideration as well
“Now, we are going a step further by taking into account the specific reason they didn’t want to see that ad, and use that as a signal to inform whether or not we show the ad to other people. Second, we’re going to pay more attention to feedback from people who don’t often hide ads so that when they do give us feedback we take it as a stronger signal,” the exec writes.
It’s not just ads that people can hide, but also stories in their News Feeds, including those that include ads. Selecting “I don’t want to see this” from the top right menu of every post will hide it for good. While the company won’t push to find out why you chose to dismiss the post, you’ll get the opportunity to do so if you want to.
Whenever a user does that, they’ll get less stories of that kind, including ads. The company says that it has learned that the reason why someone hides an ad can be just as important as the action itself.
So, from here on out, the News Feed will not only take into account the type of ads you rejected, but also why you did so. It’s also a matter of community favor since others will also get less of certain ads if enough people flag them.
Facebook will be giving more weight to the opinion of those who report infrequently since they must have a good reason to do it, or at the very least, aren’t as “trigger-happy” to hide these ads.
