SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook will stop charging advertisers when users accidentally click on ads which they view for less than two seconds.
This new policy may discourage pestering ads and pop-ups from appearing on the screens.
"Unintentional ad clicks 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," said Brett Vogel, Product Marketing Manager, Facebook.
The social networking giant is also introducing a couple of changes to the way it reports total campaign impressions.
The company would report gross impressions for starters, including both total billable and non-billable impressions.
It would also report ads that autorefresh, starting with placements on the right side of the desktop news feed.
"The company will experiment with more ways to reduce the number of unintentional clicks by looking further into bounce rates, additional metrics and try to prevent users from accidentally clicking in the first place," Vogel noted.
Facebook will also check abnormal behaviour, such as an inflated click-through rate (CTR) and automatically pause placements to protect people and advertisers. The company will also inform publishers so they can make necessary changes.
"Publishers sometimes create ad experiences that fail to deliver true advertiser value. This can be due to an implementation error, or because the ad is in the wrong flow of the app experience," Vogel explained.