Facebook is cracking down on businesses that lie to customers in their ads
- Facebook is making it easier for customers to leave feedback on merchants whose ads they saw on the platform.
- The company says it will use the information to help merchants create more accurate ads and weed out scammers.
- The goal is to make Facebook a place where people can trust the businesses that are advertising.
Facebook is endeavoring to make its ads less frustrating for users.
Specially, it's trying to weed out unhelpful and misleading ads for the physical products that consumers are buying. Users who click through and place orders on online-shopping websites that are advertising on Facebook will now be able to easily leave feedback on the merchant.
Examples of feedback that users can provide include that the product was not as advertised, or that its advertised shipping speed was misleading or inaccurate.
Facebook will anonymize and aggregate the data, which will show up in the business' ads dashboard on Facebook. If the business corrects the issues, it can stay in good standing. If not, the ads will suffer until, at a certain point, Facebook will refuse to show them to users at all.
"Most businesses who receive this feedback do want to improve and do take steps to improve the customer experience and setting better customer expectations up front," Sarah Epps, product marketing director at Facebook, told Business Insider.
Some, however, are just looking to intentionally mislead potential customers.
"We have no tolerance," Epps said. "We put people first, and we do what need to do to enforce against bad actors."
Eventually, Epps says, she hopes to see zero negative experiences on Facebook related to online-shopping ads.
"When people have these bad experiences, it is bad for trust with all businesses on the platform, and it's bad for Facebook," Epps said. "The goal is to provide more relevant and trustworthy experiences interacting with businesses on Facebook."
An explosion of e-commerce businesses have flooded Facebook's advertising network, marketing nearly every physical good under the sun. Like any marketplace, however, scam artists have found ways to take advantage of its popularity.
The new tool was announced in a Facebook blog post and is available globally as of Tuesday. The tool is designed to let users who have clicked on an ad to quickly leave feedback.
Some users will see prompts in the form of Facebook notifications requesting feedback. Other users can also leave feedback by going into the settings tab on the website and on mobile.