In major measurement update, Facebook overhauls metrics, makes corrections, adds viewability

Facebook is also adding more third-party verification and forming a Measurement Council to stay in step with evolving products and metrics.

In a sort of course correction, Facebook made several announcements Wednesday pertaining to audience and ads measurement on the social network.
The news includes several metrics corrections — though none likely to cause as much consternation as September’s revelation that Facebook had been overstating the “average duration of video viewed” due to a miscalculation — more third-party verification, a new blog to communicate ongoing metrics changes, and the formation of a new Measurement Council.
“We want to reaffirm our commitment to the market and provide clarity and transparency into the platform,” said Mark Rabkin, Facebook VP engineering for ads, by phone yesterday. “We know we have been evolving quickly, which has led to new user behaviors and new ad formats, and we have heard feedback that clients want more information and transparency on the behavior and advertising metrics that are also evolving.
“The vast majority of this work has been in progress throughout the year, however once the video view metric issue happened, we doubled-down on focusing efforts on finding issues and communicate them thoroughly.”
Here’s what the company announced Wednesday morning:

Third-party verification & viewability program is expanding

Facebook is launching third-party viewability verification for display ads. The company already offers viewability verification on video ads. This update means all ads on the platform can be measured by viewable impressions, including website link ads and Canvas ads, through Facebook’s measurement partners Moat and Integral Ad Science.
Organic Reach counts are also shifting to viewable impressions. Organic and paid impressions will be counted only when a post or ad enters a user’s screen. Facebook says organic reach will be 20 percent lower on average when the change is made in the coming months. At that time, Page owners will be notified in the interface and on a new measurement blog.
For publishers, Facebook video and Facebook Live video will now be included in Nielsen’s Digital Content Ratings (DCR) to provide third-party verification for video metrics. Inclusion in DCR means publishers will be able to provide comparable metrics for digital and TV in Nielsen’s Total Audience Measurement.

Metrics corrections and clarifications

Following on its Newsfeed FYI blog, Facebook is launching a new communication channel around measurement called Metrics FYI to share metrics updates, bug reports and fixes and other measurement announcements.
The first post on the new blog addresses the shift to viewability for organic reach and a miscalculation on the Organic Reach metric that was one of several detected by Facebook’s third-party measurement partners.

Organic reach overstated

This error affected the Organic Reach metric that appears in the Page Insights overview dashboard. Meant to show unique visitors, it was instead reporting a sum of daily organic reach over a 7-day or a 28-day period. As a result of the correction, Facebook says the de-duplicated 7-day summary will be 33 percent lower on average and the 28-day summary will be 55 percent lower. All data in other fields is unaffected. “This bug has been live since May; we will be fixing this in the next few weeks. It does not affect paid reach,” the company said.

Video completion rates understated

Facebook is changing how video completion rates are calculated. The company says that third-party measurement providers alerted them that end-of-video is often hard to detect due to a number of factors such as a mismatch in audio and video syncing across different operating systems and devices.
While someone may watch a video to completion on their device, the audio may continue to play for a bit longer, for example. The difference is often a fraction of a second shorter or longer. As a result, Facebook says it has been undercounting the metric “video views to 100%” (now renamed “video watches at 100%”). Facebook is updating how it reads video length, and says the change may lead to roughly a 35 percent increase in in that metric reporting.

Instant Articles time spent overstated

Facebook says the average time spent per Instant Article has been over-reported by an average of 7-8 percent since August 2015. The metric was showing the average across a particular range of time spent. It should have calculated the total time spent reading an article divided by total views of the article. Facebook says it has fixed that calculation.

Analytics for Apps referrals overstated

In Facebook Analytics for Apps, the”referrals” metric should reflect the number of clicks to an app or website. Instead it was showing a count of all clicks on the content in the posts, including clicks that open photo or video content on Facebook.
On average, referrals account for 70 percent of all clicks on app posts and clicks to content on Facebook accounts for 30 percent of clicks. So far, Facebook has only looked at the referrals among apps that check the metric most frequently, but found referrals were overstated by approximately 6 percent on average. Facebook says it is still working to clarify this definition and calculation.

Interest lists being retired

Due to low usage, Interest lists, which allow users to group related content for viewing, are being removed. This will impact profile follower counts for profiles that created and were featured in Interest lists, in part because users that followed a profile and an interest list that included that profile were being double counted. The impact will vary — most profiles can expect to see a drop in followers of less than 5 percent, according to Facebook.

More descriptive names & calculations for ads metrics

Ads metrics within Facebook reporting have undergone a complete review and update to try to make the naming conventions clearer and more intuitive for advertisers. For example, “view content” is changing to “website view of content,” and “video views” is changing to “3-second video views”.
Calculations and metric definitions have also been clarified. For example, the Canvas View Duration metric reports time spent in Canvas. Facebook is clarifying the metric calculation to make it clear that it does not include time spent after a user clicks to offsite content from a Canvas ad. Another example: the description of video views metrics (3, 10, and 30 seconds) now includes the term “aggregate” to more clearly explain it is based on aggregate view time of at least the specified number of seconds.
An update in the reporting interface allows advertisers to customize the columns in reports by selecting the metrics that matter to their campaign objective.

Launching Measurement Council

Senior measurement executives from large agencies and advertisers and potentially third-party partners will work with Facebook measurement teams on a new Measurement Council. The goal of the council will be to develop measurement products and standards. The model is built Facebook’s global Client Council that has come up with new products such as Canvas in working sessions.

Industry Reactions

How marketers will react to the discovery of several more reporting errors remains to be seen, but the insistence by advertisers that Facebook open up to third-party verification is certainly further validated. A handful of miscalculations can go a long way to eroding trust and may have implications for trust in the broader digital advertising ecosystem. However, I expect, the acknowledgement of the problems, corrections and initiatives to provide more transparency will eventually instill more confidence that Facebook is maturing its approach to measurement and responding to advertiser concerns in meaningful ways.
Asked about the updates, Randall Rothenberg, president & CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, told Marketing Land, “third-party verification, unifying measurement standards, and open dialogue about measurement among value chain partners are and always have been very big deals in media and marketing. Facebook’s moves certainly will build greater trust in and utility for digital media and advertising metrics.”
“Facebook is taking steps to make its wide array of metrics more clear to advertisers,” said Debra Williamson, principal analyst at eMarketer, when asked. “It is changing the names and descriptions of some metrics, to better fit the way things have evolved on Facebook. That will definitely help marketers make better decisions and hopefully drive more ad spending on the platform.”

Getting a clearer picture of local marketing attribution

It can be a challenge to get a clear picture of how effective your local marketing efforts are, so columnist Brian Smith outlines some of the more effective methods for tracking in-store attribution.

There’s a reason many brands don’t track in-store attribution for local marketing: it’s hard. Really hard. I’m reminded of the old adage that says half the money you spend on advertising is wasted; you just don’t know which half. Similarly, half your customers walk into your store as the result of local marketing; you just don’t know which half.
Proving that someone visited your store because they saw your online local marketing efforts at some point is a complex undertaking. Most out-of-the-box attribution tools don’t make it easy to differentiate between local marketing traffic and a visit from someone who stepped out of a local restaurant and happened to see your store right across the street.
There’s also the challenge of seeing over the walled gardens of Google, Facebook, Bing and the other major platforms to compare notes. In a world of last-click attribution, it can be difficult for brands to determine which media influence had the biggest impact on their local efforts, especially when multiple touch points, both online and offline, national and local, blur your attribution model.
In truth, it’s impossible to get a perfect picture of your local marketing effectiveness. Nevertheless, there are ways to get a clear enough picture that you can form reasonable assumptions about the in-store success of your campaigns.
To help you make sense of it all, I’ve outlined some of the more effective methods for tracking local marketing in-store attribution. The most accurate method (and most expensive) would be to integrate all of the in-store attribution methods I’m about to list. But a smarter approach would be to pick and choose the right attribution models to fit your needs.
[Read the full article on Search Engine Land.]

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Community Marketing 101

Marketing in an online community is one of the most effective ways to garner brand loyalty. But failure to follow these basic guidelines could position you for opening Pandora’s box.

Since the dawn of the internet, people have been drawn to online communities for collaborating and advancing knowledge. Discussions that previously took place in the depths of Usenet are now emerging on Reddit. In a matter of seconds, you can find massive online communities dedicated to everything from astrophysics to Zen.
As a marketer, it’s easy to look at a community devoted to something related to your brand and see green. However, if you plunge into a community with your marketing hat on, there’s a good chance things will go awry. Even the perfect community for your brand can morph into Medusa with the wrong approach, which is why we’re here to share some secrets.
In communities, it can be much more effective to educate (even through advertisements), rather than sell. It’s a longer sales cycle, but it’s often rewarded with a significantly longer customer lifetime value and a fiercely loyal group of brand ambassadors.
At Experts Exchange, we’ve managed one of the largest technical communities online for 20 years now, and we’ve learned a thing or two. In this article, we’ll share our recommendations on how to win over your new community with ease.

1. Don’t pitch, participate

After you find a community that feels like home, create a profile that represents the human you, rather than a brand. Fill out every available field, write a biography, upload a profile picture if you can, and monitor any conversations that are already happening surrounding your brand.

People contribute to online communities in order to share information, network, research and learn. Most people are members of a community because they’re passionate about certain topics.
Nobody wants to get hit with a hard sell when they’re browsing their community of choice, so take off your marketing hat and really participate in the conversations that are happening. Put yourself in your audience’s shoes. If you were discussing your dog’s food allergies with a friend, and a kibble salesman interrupted your conversation to pedal his chow, it wouldn’t leave the best impression. Now if that same salesman entered the conversation and began educating you on a variety of things you should consider (ingredients, servings and so on) in relation to the discussion, you might appreciate the input.
Your audience will respond if you offer up information rather than a pitch, so be sure to add plenty of context and explanation. The link back to your product or service should not be the focus.
Also, as hard as it may be, try not to revive old discussions, as resurfacing outdated conversations may confuse the participants or make you look bad. Instead, start a fresh conversation or circulate a new piece of content.

2. Contribute like an expert

Integrate publishing articles to online communities into your content marketing strategy. It’s a great way to reach your target audience in their natural environment.
Publish educational pieces that are informative and helpful, rather than pieces laced with marketing jargon. How-to articles, tips and tricks and product reviews are all great ways to introduce your brand to the audience and start to build a relationship of reciprocity. Stay away from overtly promotional messaging, and maintain a friendly and approachable tone.

You can take the same approach even if the conversation isn’t about your brand. Be helpful and informative when participating in conversations about similar products or services, even if they’re talking about your competitors. Communication and accessibility make a big difference when it comes to customer loyalty, so be the one who shows up.
When you do it right, community members will begin to seek you out for advice.

3. Be accessible

One of the biggest benefits of participating in online communities is that you have the chance to engage with your customers on a platform built for conversation. Being able to control the narrative surrounding your brand and act as a thought leader is invaluable, so don’t squander it by simply broadcasting and not conversing.
Building a reputation and establishing trust with your audience isn’t effortless. One of the easiest ways to show your authenticity is by communicating openly. Be sure to respond to every comment. Record feedback and offer suggestions when appropriate. It’s important to show that you are human and not a marketing bot. Don’t be afraid to have some personality, while remaining respectful and professional.
Most communities offer notifications to their members. You should opt into notifications about topics you and your audience are interested in. When you receive a notification, a quick response will reinforce that you’re an active community member.

4. Turn influencers into ambassadors

Once you’re an established member of the community, you’ll quickly learn which of the other members are influencers. Pay attention to things like reputation, points, contributions and reviews when you are checking out member profiles to identify who could be a valuable brand ambassador for you. Start engaging with them. Many community members will jump at the chance to support a brand if they feel a connection with it. You can be that connection.
Word of mouth is one of the most powerful marketing tools out there, and by engaging with positive influencers and making them feel like a part of the team, you can create brand ambassadors organically. These ambassadors can act as trustworthy sources for information, expanding your voice within the community and increasing your organic reach.

5. Use community advertising, but differently

Nothing shows your support of a community like being showcased. In some communities, you might attempt to drive direct sales through advertisements. However, you’re much more likely to win lifelong brand advocates if you are a bit more creative in how you advertise.
An advertising technique we’ve seen great success with in our community, is using native ad spots to cross-promote on-site content that you’ve created. Here’s a brief example:
1. Start by creating a content piece that lives in the community, such as an educational article.
2. Next, leverage the advertising options within the community for your article to increase readership.

• Run banner ads that feature your article headline, the community logo and a link back to the content piece you just created.
• Run native ads that show up in line with other similar articles. You might also slightly expand the tag list, so your article gets increased visibility with related content.
• Showcase your article in a sponsored email or newsletter.

3. You may even go so far as to promote your article on other platforms — for example, running an ad on Facebook that promotes your article on Experts Exchange. Generating more views on a content piece can often help increase its visibility on the publishing site.
With the increasing use of ad blockers and banner blindness in general, it’s more important than ever to provide a positive experience to ad viewers. We’ve seen significantly higher engagement with educational pieces that keep viewers on-site, compared to standard sales pitches that send viewers off-site, through the advertising campaigns in our community.

6. Be consistent

There is no magic bullet to building brand reputation. Like any good marketing strategy, your community involvement should focus on the long-term benefits rather than quick and dirty conversions.
By publishing and participating consistently, not only will your clout within the community grow, but your understanding of your own target audience will grow as well. Getting consistent feedback from current and potential customers is worthwhile, so listen, engage and adapt.
Once you’ve identified the appropriate communities, begun participating and generated some loyalists, don’t let up and disappear. Make sure to set time aside each day, week and so on to check into the community and make your rounds, even if it’s just to randomly welcome new members. Eventually, you’ll be one of the regulars, and nobody will think twice if you happen to pitch your product.

Facebook has created its own analytics tool for Messenger bots

Facebook's free Messenger bot analytics tool will cross-reference Messenger interactions with Facebook user data and can tie into mobile app, web analytics.

With more than 34,000 Messenger bots on the market since their April 2016 debut, Facebook is rolling out an analytics tool that will detail to Messenger bot makers how people are interacting with their bots and cross-reference those stats with people’s Facebook profile data, in hopes of improving people’s experiences with those bots.
Developers, including brands and publishers, will be able to use the new branch of Facebook Analytics for Apps in the same way they use Facebook’s analytics platform to track how people are interacting with their websites and mobile apps, and will be able to connect those people across the three platforms. And like the other analytics products, the bot analytics tool will be available for free.
For example, a Messenger bot maker will be able to see how many people opted to stop receiving messages from a Messenger bot, break down that audience into segments according to their Facebook profiles — like their age, gender, job title, relationship status, household income, purchase behavior and whether they’re fans of a brand’s Facebook page — and see which message was sent before the people opted to block the bot, according to Facebook Analytics for Apps product manager Josh Twist. Facebook is aggregating and anonymizing the data so that developers won’t be able to see how specific individuals are interacting or their profile data, he added.
Messenger bot makers will be able to specify which events they want Facebook’s analytics tool to track: certain types of messages, specific individual messages or categories of content included in messages. As a result, bot makers will be able to see, for example, whether messages that include calls to action for people to click on do better with certain types of people and worse with others, and then they can use that insight to segment what types of messages to send to which audiences.
Twist laid out an example of how an e-commerce brand could use Facebook’s analytics tool to understand the in-Messenger purchase cycle.
“If your bot has a purchase stage, you can send a purchase event, send over the value [of the purchase], and then one of the cool things you can do is segment based on behavior. So you can segment the people who made a purchase or the top 10 percent of people who made a purchase by count or value. And then you can use that segment to look at the demographics and really try to understand what is it about these people that makes them more likely to convert,” he said.
The addition of Messenger is the latest example of Facebook rounding out its analytics platform to compete with similar products from companies like Google and Adobe. While Messenger bot makers will still be able to use third-party analytics tools to track their bots’ performance — including in tandem with Facebook’s analytics tool — “obviously we’d recommend Facebook Analytics for Apps at this point,” said Twist.
Obviously it’s in Facebook’s interest to say that. If bot developers use Facebook’s analytics tool, that’s more data Facebook is able to collect about what people are doing on its service, which it can then apply to the ads and organic content it shows those people.
And obviously, there’s an ad revenue angle. “Within a matter of weeks,” Facebook expects to enable Messenger bot makers to use the analytics tool to create audiences, including lookalike audiences, that they can target with ads across Facebook, Instagram and its Audience Network ad network, as they can with Facebook’s mobile app and web analytics tools, Twist said.
Setting aside Facebook’s own interests, Twist made the case for why the company’s analytics tool serves bot makers’ interests.
In addition to incorporating Facebook user data to give bot makers a deep look at their bots’ audiences and offering that look for free, the bot analytics tool can be linked to Facebook’s mobile app and web analytics tools. If a developer uses all three analytics tools, that developer will be able to get a look at how people are interacting across all three platforms and the relationship among those platforms. “We want to roll all of these things together so you can understand the complete customer journey,” Twist said. As a result, a brand can see how many people interacted with its Messenger bot then later bought something from its desktop site, or what types of people checked out a product in its mobile app, then tried to get customer service support through its Messenger bot.
“We can actually tell, in more cases than any other platform, if two devices are actually one user,” Twist said. “If you have a person on a mobile app and you’ve not asked them to log in and you don’t know anything about their identity other than the device that they’re on, there’s a chance that Facebook can identify that person and therefore give you more accurate user counts, more accurate funnel flows as you think about pulling these properties together.”

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Prepping for battle

• Source: Bloomberg Businessweek

• Via: Mashable

Straight from the source

• Source: Wired, Donald Trump (Facebook)
• Via: Politico

But Zuckerberg pushed back

• Source: Wall Street Journal

But the details are murky

• Source: Facebook (newsroom)

More fallout from the Facebook board member's $1.25 million donation to Trump

• Source: Hacker News

Facebook puts some limits on controversial, quasi-racial ad targeting option

Facebook will reject housing-, employment- and credit-related ads from being targeted based on people's 'ethnic affinities.'

No, Facebook isn’t getting rid of its pseudo-racial ad targeting option. No, it hasn’t decided to prevent advertisers from using it to exclude their ads from being shown to people with “affinities” to certain ethnicities (specifically African America, Asian American and Hispanic ethnicities and none other). Instead it’s excluding a few types of ads from being targeted based on people’s “ethnic affinities.”
Two weeks ago Facebook’s ethnic affinity ad-targeting option — which identifies people who may be interested in topics specific to a certain ethnicity but aren’t necessarily of that ethnicity — caught a lot of negative attention, including from members of Congress, after ProPublica drew new attention to how the option could be used as a proxy for discriminating against people of certain races, which can be illegal if those ads are promoting things like housing or job listings.
Now Facebook has come up with a way to identify when ethnic affinity targeting is being used for housing-, employment- or credit-related ads and will reject those ads, the company announced on Friday in a blog post. And Facebook said it will be more blatant in its Advertising Policies, which brands must agree to before buying ads, that brands’ ads are not allowed to discriminate against people.
Facebook expects to have the new system in place by the end of this year and will start with shifting the ethnic affinity targeting options from the demographic targeting category to the behaviors category, according to a Facebook spokesperson.
When the system is finally in place, it won’t be impermeable. It will be like a road work section along a highway, with signs telling drivers to slow down, that penalties are doubled but that can’t physically slow down a driver until a cop pulls them over. In Facebook’s case, the system will show alerts at different points in the ad-buying process. If the Page buying the ad is categorized as a housing page, for example, when that advertiser clicks to begin creating an ad an alert will appear informing them of Facebook’s policy. Same if and when the advertiser opts to use an ethnic affinity targeting option.
If the advertiser doesn’t heed Facebook’s warnings and Facebook’s automated approval system isn’t able to recognize any violations in the ad, then the ad can still be shown to people, and it will be up to those people to recognize if the ad is discriminatory and flag it to Facebook. 
Facebook also said that it’s trying to figure out how brands can use the ad-targeting option for positive ends, but didn’t provide specifics. Additionally the company said it will provide new information to inform advertisers how to keep their housing-, employment- and credit-related ads within Facebook’s new guidelines.

Facebook Q3 2016 earnings call: Ad load issues, ad-blocker blocking, a video-only feed

What advertisers should know from Facebook’s Q3 2016 earnings call

A lot of things can be learned from Facebook’s third-quarter earnings call on Wednesday. For starters, word choice matters.
In July 2016, during the company’s Q2 2016 earnings call, Facebook CFO David Wehner said that the number of ads Facebook can stuff in each user’s face — or, Facebook’s “ad load” — would top out around mid-2017. That’s important because increases in ad load have helped to increase Facebook’s ad revenue. As a result of the ad load deceleration, Wehner said Facebook’s ad revenue growth would be impacted.
Today, during Facebook’s Q3 2016 earnings call, Wehner said roughly the same thing — except for one word. Three months ago, he said ad revenue growth would be impacted “accordingly.” Three months later, he said it would be impacted “meaningfully.”
Apparently that change in adverbs freaked out Wall Street investors. Roughly an hour after Wehner made those comments on Wednesday, Facebook’s stock price had dropped by eight percent in after-hours trading.
Wehner didn’t offer any new explanations for Facebook’s ad load issue or its potential impact on revenue growth. And he didn’t explain his new choice of words. So there doesn’t seem to be much new to say about why ad load has become an important issue for Facebook.
Besides that, there are other things worth mentioning from Facebook’s Q3 2016 earnings call.
Blocking ad blockers works — at least if you’re Facebook
For the first time in two years, Facebook’s Q3 desktop ad revenue exceeded $1 billion. Not only that, but Facebook’s Q3 desktop ad revenue grew by 18 percent year over year, which is stunning for a few reasons: 1) Until Q3 2016, the most that Facebook’s desktop ad revenue had grown in a quarter since Q4 2013 was 10 percent. 2) Facebook’s desktop ad revenue had actually shrunk year over year for three straight quarters in 2015, including Q3 2015. 3) Not only did Q3 2016 desktop ad revenue top the diminished Q3 2015 mark, but it also topped the still-strong Q3 2014 mark.
Facebook’s suddenly reinvigorated desktop ad revenue business might seem as odd as an aging baseball player turning in one of his best seasons ever in his final season. So what gives? Ad blocking, apparently.
In August, Facebook decided to fight back against ad blockers by knee-capping their ability to block the ads on Facebook’s desktop site. The strategy seems to be working. Wehner attributed the uptick in desktop ad revenue growth as “largely due to our efforts on reducing the impact of ad blocking. That’s what led to the acceleration of desktop revenue.”
Facebook’s getting closer to fully rolling out its video-only news feed
A year ago, Facebook started testing a video-only version of its news feed. If you’ve never come across this video feed, you’re not alone. It’s only been available in “a few markets,” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg during Wednesday’s earnings call. But you might see it soon. Pretty soon.
“We’re also hoping to roll that out pretty soon widely,” Zuckerberg said, before describing the feature.
“That’s the new experience, which if you come to Facebook and you specifically want to watch some different kinds of videos or you want to see what videos a recent Page that you follow has posted or the presidential debate is on and you want to find a good place to go online to get that, you can go to Video Home and see that,” said Zuckerberg, who added that Facebook is also considering splitting the video-only feed off into its own app a la Facebook Messenger.

Facebook is blocking ad blockers on desktop, but not on mobile

People can no longer block ads on Facebook's desktop site, but they can block brands from using customer lists to target them with ads on Facebook.

Facebook cares about consumer choice until that choice conflicts with its business.
On the one hand, Facebook doesn’t want people feeling super creeped out when they use its site or apps, so now it’s giving them a new way to control what data brands can use to target them with ads. But on the other hand it wants to ensure it makes money from the people who use its site or apps for free, so it’s not going to let them use it without seeing ads.
On Tuesday Facebook announced that it’s come up with a way to thwart ad blockers and show ads to people who visit its desktop sites with ad blockers enabled. Even though Facebook’s ad business is 84% mobile at this point, it still made $998.2 million from desktop ads in the second quarter of 2016, so today’s move is as much about protecting its money as supporting the wider digital media industry’s fight against ad blocking.
Facebook could have circumvented people blocking ads on its site by paying ad blocker providers to not block their ads, like Google does. But it’s not. Facebook has never paid ad blockers to whitelist its ads and isn’t doing so now, according to a Facebook spokeswoman. Instead it’s taking on the ad blockers directly, at least on desktop.
Facebook’s ad-blocking evasion tactic won’t extend to its mobile site because mobile web isn’t considered as much of a focus for ad blocking, said the spokeswoman.  According to a study published in May 2016 by anti-ad-blocking firm PageFair, in March 2016 14 million people in North America and Europe used a mobile web browser that blocks ads by default. Right now there isn’t a way to block ads within Facebook’s mobile app (or at least not one that doesn’t reroute a device’s internet connection to a third-party server).
According to The New York Times, Facebook is blocking ad blockers by identifying how those ad blockers recognize if a piece of content is an ad and then Facebook will disguise its ads to look like normal content. “For blockers to get around these changes, Facebook said they would have to begin analyzing the content of the ads themselves, a costly and laborious process,” per the Times.
Facebook is far from the first media company to try to foil ad blockers. A number of ad-tech companies have emerged that offer publishers software that prevents people who use ad blockers from visiting their sites unless they turn off the ad blockers, pay for access or agree to be shown some ads. And industry trade group the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has even explored the possibility of suing ad blocker providers. Facebook’s entry into the fray gives cover to these companies and could pressure its competitors like Google that pay ad blocker providers to unblock its ads.
While people can no longer control whether they see any ads on Facebook’s desktop site, they are being given new controls over what kind of data advertisers can use to target them wherever Facebook can serve them ads, an olive branch of sorts to the people who use ad blockers because they feel like too-targeted ads violates their privacy.
Facebook will now show people who use its Ad Preferences tool which brands have their contact info or have added them to lists of people who have visited their sites or used their apps, and people will be able to disable those brands’ abilities to target them with ads on Facebook using that information, a targeting option Facebook calls Custom Audiences.