In a bid to create what it calls a ‘healthy advertising ecosystem’, Facebook has said that it would take certain steps to ensure that the platform gets ‘clicks’ that matter. A move in that direction comes as Facebook reduces unintentional clicks.
Ad placements that are built to drive unintentional clicks run counter to that goal. They may be profitable for publishers but fail to deliver good experiences for businesses or people.
Over the next few months, Facebook is making updates to stop delivering to ad placements that encourage unintentional clicks. These updates include policy clarifications on unintentional clicks, product changes to invalidate these clicks, and pausing implementations that exhibit abnormal click behavior.
To understand if a click is intentional, one of the metrics that Facebook looks at in its delivery models and quality detection systems is ‘drop off rates’ — the time a user spends on the landing page of an ad. People who click on an Audience Network ad and spend less than 2 seconds on a destination page almost always clicked accidentally. Moving forward, Facebook will no longer count these clicks.
Publishers sometimes create ad experiences that fail to deliver true advertiser value. This can be due to implementation error, or because the ad is in the wrong flow of the app experience. “When we see abnormal behavior, such as an inflated clickthrough rate (CTR), we’ll automatically pause placements to protect people and advertisers. We’ll also inform publishers so they can make necessary changes,” stated a Facebook post.
The platform has updated its policies with examples to avoid unintentional clicks, and has introduced a new policy that prohibits clickable ‘whitespace’ on native ads. By requiring users to click on an advertiser asset, further reduction in unintentional clicks can be seen.
