Facebook Is Trying To Figure Out Why You Don't Want Certain Ads In Your News Feed

Facebook has more than 1.5 billion active advertisers. So it's important for Facebook to know what type of ads its users like seeing on their News Feeds.

On Thursday, Facebook made two updates that will help it better understand what ads work on its News Feed.

The first update is asking why someone's hiding a specific ad. Facebook so far has given users the choice to hide an ad if they didn't like it by clicking on the top right menu of a post. But with today's update, Facebook is also asking why someone's hiding a specific ad.

It looks like this:

Facebook said each of the feedback they receive will be taken into account to decide what to show on its News Feed. "If someone doesn't want to see an ad because it's offensive, it probably isn't a good ad for other people on Facebook, either," Facebook's Product Manager Max Eulenstein wrote on the company blog.

The second update is that Facebook will give more weight to feedback from people who rarely hide ads. "If someone hides things very rarely, we'll consider that when we choose what to show them," Eulenstein wrote. So if you rarely ever hide ads, and one day decide to give feedback, Facebook will give more value to your response when deciding what ads to show on the News Feed.

Today's updates, however, will not affect most advertisers, Facebook said. It's only designed to control ads that "a small set of people" gave negative feedback on, and will help advertisers deliver their message more effectively.