Rob Webb has found an interesting new feature on Facebook SocialAds. While I was not able to get this to work, Rob’s Facebook displayed some interesting rating features that enable you to rank up or down the accuracy and effectiveness of an ad. This is similar to the rating system that Facebook temporarily installed on their newsfeed.

That rating system didn’t seem to last and was ultimately removed. Hopefully this system doesn’t suffer the same fate. When you click on the hands up, a prompt shows up which asks you to say what you liked about the ad. You can select from “Interesting”, “Relevant to Me” and “Good Offer.” There are a number of things that show up when you vote the ad negatively including “Misleading”, “Offensive”, “Pornographic” and a number of others.

This is clearly a first step toward optimizing what was otherwise not effectively targeted ads on Facebook. Given that this is their primary way of generating ad revenue, they need to come up with a way of displaying more effective ads. Hopefully this will help improve them.

Update

Facebook provided the following statement:

Facebook regularly experiments with site changes in an effort to continually improve the user experience. The feedback tool for Facebook Ads that you noticed is currently available to a portion of site users. We are evaluating the response to the tool and considering whether to make it more broadly available.