“10 reasons why Facebook will erase low quality ads, number 10 will shock you”… We have all read these kind of headlines or clicked on a link that takes us to a mosaic of other links, where we must click to see if maybe that will takes us the article titled “The 20 things you didn’t know about movies”. It’s that kind of articles with 4 sentences and 6 images that redirect you many times the ones that qualify as low quality and that more often than not include fake news or exaggerations.
Facebook takes control
Facebook has been preparing itself all year for presidential elections in many countries, adding control tools for users, which consist in reporting posts, checking content before posting and overlaying a screen on sensitive content. First and foremost, the platform reports that ads about entertainment, politics and relevant issues are the ones that generally have the lowest quality, which is why the will be on constant and more detailed revision.
Facebook referred directly to various kinds of ads that have called our attention the last couple of years. The first case is clickbait, posts that often have “Like and Share” to promote interaction. Since Facebook already has a special tool for Call-To-Action with its own security protocols, clickbait will be subject to sanction. Also, sanctions will fall on such ads that contain a suggestive image and text that doesn’t provide much information about the post. Finally, sensationalist posts, those that contain “10 reasons…” mention earlier or simply put: any post that exaggerates a fact to call user’s attention without quality content to back it up.
Penalizing and the cost of low quality
The most powerful social network in history (according to their third quarter report for 2018) is more than set on promoting better engagement on their site, so that it’s decided that such penalizing can range from strongly limiting the ad distribution up to rejecting the posts altogether from Facebook. In the end, these measures will impact advertisers, who will have to spend more money on running their campaigns to generate the same KPIs they would get if they had run quality ads to begin with, a punishment that surely no advertiser will risk for.
These days, many talk about quality content, about how it’s one of the main factors that can cost you clients or that generate site rebounds. Now Facebook adds another reason to make sure we are publishing useful information on our social media and more so, what we promote on its platform. If we already see our numbers affected greatly by low quality content, now our ads could be subjected to rejection on the grounds of mediocrity.
sources
www.trecebits.com
www.adweek.com
www.socialmediatoday.com