Facebook cracks down on unintentional clicks
The social media giant is making new updates to its ad network which it says will reduce advertiser money spent on accidental clicks
Facebook has announced that it will be making updates to its Audience Network over the next few months to stop delivering ad placements that encourage unintentional clicks. These updates include policy clarifications on unintentional clicks, product changes to invalidate these clicks, and proactively pausing implementations that exhibit abnormal click behaviour.
“To understand if a click is intentional, one of the metrics we look at in our delivery models and quality detection systems is “drop off rates” — the time a user spends on the landing page of an ad. We found that people who click on an Audience Network ad and spend less than 2 seconds on a destination page almost always clicked accidentally. Moving forward, we will no longer count clicks categorized as unintentional. We will continually refine and adjust this threshold as we gather more data and signals,” wrote Brett Vogel, Product Marketing Manager (Publisher Solutions) at Facebook.
Facebook has further said that ads that create a bad experience (such as inflated clickthrough rates) due to implementation error or otherwise will be automatically paused. Another new policy prohibits clickable ‘whitespace’ on native ads. The new policies with examples to avoid unintentional clicks have been updated on the Facebook Audience Network blog.
“Going forward, we'll be experimenting with more ways to reduce the number of unintentional clicks by looking further into bounce rates, additional metrics, and trying to prevent users from accidentally clicking in the first place,” the post stated.
