Changes We Made to Ads in 2018

Facebook Business

December 21, 2018

By Rob Goldman, Vice President, Ads

Over the last year, we have made changes to make ads more transparent and give people more control over the ads they see on Facebook. There is certainly more work to do, and we are committed to continuing to build in line with our ads principles. In 2019, our teams will continue to work on improving people's experience with ads on our platforms. Here are some of the important changes we made this year.

Made advertising on Facebook more transparent

• Sharing more information about ads: People have asked for more visibility into the ads businesses run on Facebook. To help address this, we introduced an Info and Ads section on Pages that allows people to see all the ads the page is currently running. Now every single ad running on Facebook is visible for people to see whether or not they are being targeted by that ad.
• Sharing more information about Pages: To prevent organizations and individuals from creating accounts that mislead people about who they are or what they're doing, we required people who manage Pages with large audiences to be verified. Pages that do not clear the verification process are not able to post. We increased the information people see about Pages to include the date the Page was created, primary country locations the Page is managed, its history of name changes and more.
• Shining a brighter light on political ads: To protect against election interference, we rolled out a new authorization process for advertisers running election-related or issues ads in the US. We also created a searchable public archive so people can see all political and issue ads on Facebook for up to seven years. Recently we've brought these tools for political ads to Brazil and the UK and will offer them in India next. So that researchers and journalists can more easily analyze political and issue ads, we introduced the Ad Archive API in the US and unveiled the Ad Archive Report, which includes top political spenders by week. It’s updated weekly for anyone to download.
• Making ad metrics clearer: To give businesses more insight into how we calculate metrics, we introduced new labels on some of our metrics to specify which are “estimated” or “in development,” and we removed some other metrics to help businesses focus on the more meaningful ones.

Helped prevent potential misuse of ads

• Removed potentially abusive targeting: Ads should be safe and civil. We announced a review of our targeting features, which is ongoing. We also removed thousands of targeting options that had the potential to be misused. And we introduced prompts reminding advertisers about our anti-discrimination policies.
• Improved oversight of third-party data for targeting: To better improve people’s privacy, we shut down Partner Categories, which were targeting options supplemented by information from third-party data providers. We introduced new requirements for businesses that use Custom Audiences. These include requiring businesses to disclose how they obtain information in their Custom Audiences, and offering those details to people who see ads. To create further safeguards in our platform, we also started introducing new requirements for businesses that share the Facebook pixel and offline event sets.
• Made updates to brand safety tools: We gave advertisers more control and visibility into where their ads appear in Facebook in-stream video, Instant Articles and Audience Network. We also made publisher lists and publisher delivery reports available to all advertisers, to allow businesses to see where their ads ran across our contextual placements and then update their block lists with publishers or content categories they do not want their ads delivered to in the future.
• Preventing misleading ad experiences: We want people to be able to give feedback about their experiences buying things from ads on Facebook. We created a way for people to help us identify bad shopping experiences from advertisers. People can now share feedback on their purchase experiences, which helps us promote great sellers and remove bad ones.
• Updated our polices: To stay in front of developing challenges within advertising, we now prohibit ads frequently associated with misleading or deceptive promotional practices. We removed deceptive financial ads, restricted ads for addiction treatment centers and prohibited ads promoting bail bonds.

Our work isn’t done and we will continue to improve ads for people and businesses in 2019 and beyond.

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