Facebook has announced two new metrics updates: removing unintentional clicks from Audience Network and total campaign impressions.

When people are browsing across the web or in an app, ads may pop up in places that cause people to accidentally click on them, and Facebook has announced it will no longer count Audience Network clicks where people ‘bounce back’ in under two seconds. The social network found that these clicks are almost always unintentional.

It will also provide two new metrics to offer clarity on the number of ads shown to people including gross impressions, and auto-refresh impressions.

For Facebook to create a healthy advertising ecosystem, says product marketing manager Brett Vogel, it will need “great experiences for people, meaningful business results for advertisers and sustainable growth for publishers.”

“Ad placements that are built to drive unintentional clicks run counter to that goal,” he says. “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.”

In the next few months, Facebook will make updates to stop delivering ad placements that encourage these accidental clicks. Updates will include policy clarifications, product changes to invalidate these clicks, and proactively pausing implementations that exhibit abnormal click behaviour, such as inflated click-through rates.

As for total impressions, Facebook is aiming to give businesses a better view of the total impressions ads receive. Gross impressions will capture all impressions, billable and non-billable, and auto-refresh impressions provide businesses with more granularity into the impressions on right-hand side placement ads.

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Further reading

• World Cup 2018: Are you ready for the biggest Facebook event ever seen? »
• Google and Facebook control 20% of the world’s media ad spend »

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