Facebook is working on showing people ads that they’ll find interesting and relevant. Both the advertiser and the user would benefit from a more relevant ad. Facebook recently announced two updates on their news feed that will show people more relevant ads.
These updates will focus on why people hide certain ads and conclude whether or not to show the ads to other users, and also analyzing feedback from people who don’t often hide ads.
If up until now, people only hid ads, now Facebook is asking them WHY they hide these specific ads. This helps Facebook to show fewer stories or ads like the one marked as “I don’t want to see this” in the news feed.
The new update will help define the reasons why people are hiding an ad. If a user doesn’t want to see a certain ad because it’s not relevant to them, Facebook knows they’ll need to do a better job in choosing ads for this user. Or if someone doesn’t want to see an ad because it’s offensive, it’s probably not a good ad for other users as well.
For those users who rarely hide ads, this update will also help in showing more relevant ads. Facebook will look at the feedback differently, based on how often someone hides ads and other content in their news feed. If someone hides stories very rarely, it will be considered when Facebook chooses what to show them.
When testing this update, Facebook saw that people who hide ads quite rarely, hid 30% fewer ads. So this feedback helps in showing better ads even to the silent users.