Facebook is finding a way to better acknowledge the voices of more than one billion online users. The social network introduced two new updates on Thursday to its News Feed that will help the company better understand the type of ads suitable for the site. By showing relevant ads to its users, Facebook will benefit from users' positive response and please itsmore than 1.5 million active advertisers.
The latest move is more inclined toward iusers than advertisers. Users have long been able to hide a particular ad from appearing in their news feed. With the first update, Facebook is asking why someone is hiding a specific ad. Users get a new link, reading "Why don't you want to see this?" after an advertisement is hidden. Users can reason their move by selecting from the various options in the list, which includes being too repetitive, irrelevant, offensive or inappropriate, spam or "something else."
"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," Facebook's Product Manager Max Eulenstein wrote on the company's official blog Thursday. "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."
Based on the feedback, Facebook will show the ad to fewer people across the site. The company already tested the new feature by restricting the ads tagged as offensive or inappropriate. The results were positive with a significant drop in the number of ads being reported for the same reason.
The second update rolled out on Thursday gives more importance to the users who rarely hide ads. If such users decide giving feedback on why they hid a specific ad, Facebook will give more value to the response and carefully decide what ads to show on the News Feed.
Facebook assured its advertisers that there will be no change in their business model. The updates will only affect ads that are reported negatively by a small set of people. As a result, advertisers will be able to reach the right set of audience in an effective manner.
