Facebook Starts Taking User Feedback on the Ads They Hide

Facebook on Thursday announced that it is updating its News Feed to help show people more relevant ads by asking them why they don't want to see it. The company added it will give greater importance to feedback from those people who don't often hide ads.

The social networking giant had previously given the choice to hide an ad from the menu on the top right of every post. Now the company says that they are going a step further by asking people the specific reason for not wanting to see that particular ad, and that this data will help the company ensure similar ads are not shown to the same user, or others who selected similar reasons for hiding the ad.

The reasons listed to the query 'Why don't you want to see this?' are, 'It's not relevant to me', 'I keep seeing this', 'It's offensive of inappropriate', 'It's spam', 'Something else'.

A Facebook statement said that while it was testing this update, it found that if it stopped showing ads that users had flagged as offensive or inappropriate, it saw a significant decrease in the number of adds that received the same feedback.

Max Eulenstein, Product Manager, Facebook, explained the logic in the company statement,"We've learned that the reason why someone hides an ad can be just as important as the hide itself. If someone doesn't want to see an ad because it's not relevant to them, we know we didn't do a great job choosing that ad and we need to improve. If someone doesn't want to see an ad because it's offensive, it probably isn't a good ad for other people on Facebook, either.

"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," added Eulenstein.

Facebook added that "most advertisers will see no change to the delivery of their ads or how their ads perform on Facebook." Instead, the company said the negative feedback will help it to show ads that it thinks are most relevant for people and in the meanwhile, advertisers will be helped to get their messages to the right audience.