Facebook will eliminate accidental Ad clicks for accurate metrics

Ad Metrics on the Facebook Audience Network are about to get a whole lot more accurate as the company works towards eliminating accidental Ad clicks.

These accidental Ad clicks may deliver some inflated metrics that are good to look at, although not truthful or accurate, and are detrimental to the value of a campaign or an ad.

Product Marketing Manager, Brett Vogel writes, “Ad placements that are built to drive unintentional clicks run counter to that goal. While they can be profitable for publishers, they fail to deliver good experiences for businesses or people. For advertisers, these kinds of unintentional clicks can drive down the value of their campaigns.”

Facebook plans on making a few changes that will enhance the overall quality of the metrics gathered by invalidating accidental Ad clicks.

The social network has devised ‘drop off rates’ wherein any user that spends less than 2 seconds on a destination page will be considered an accidental click.

Safe to say, I accidentally click on about 10 different ads every day, and I would hate my fat fingers to mess up some brand’s ad metrics. Thanks, Facebook!

So, these clicks will no longer be counted, and further, Facebook also has something called ‘Pausing Implementations with Abnormal Behavior’. If and when Facebook detects an inflated CTR , the social network will automatically pause placements to protect people and advertisers.

Such ads will no longer be spotted on Facebook as they are working towards getting rid of them.

Facebook also understands that “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.”

And lastly, the company will be clarifying their updated policies with specific examples that are supposed to make things a whole lot easier to understand. ‘Clickable white spaces’ too will be prohibited on native ads since they have a tendency to inflate click rates through unintentional clicks.

They aren’t done yet. “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.” Brett Vogel further states.

For more information, you can visit Facebook’s best practice guide here.