Earlier this month, Facebook quietly tweaked its advertising policy to help advertisers and potentially annoy users. The company emailed ad agencies to let them know that brands can now serve more ads per day to the News Feed, within certain constraints.
Digiday obtained the email Facebook sent to advertising agencies. Here is the crux of the changes, which went into effect on August 6:
- A single ad can be inserted in News Feed up to twice per day (up from one).
- Ads from a page that a person is not connected to can be inserted into News Feed up to twice per day (previously only one per page, per day).
- Ads from a page that a person is connected to can be inserted into News Feed up to four times per day (remains consistent from before).
Here is how the email explains the company’s reasoning to advertisers: “We know that businesses like yourself want to get relevant content to people in News Feed, but have historically been limited by frequency caps. To ensure that businesses are better able to build awareness and drive business results through News Feed, we’re making changes that enable businesses to reach people with more relevant content.”
We contacted Facebook, which confirmed the changes in a statement to TNW:
On an ongoing basis, we implement changes to improve the quality and types of content people discover in News Feed. As a part of this, we’re making changes to increase the number of times people can see ads from a Page in their News Feed per day (note: this is not an increase in the total number of ads overall, just in the number of ads form the same advertiser). To be clear, this will not increase ad load. It is important to note that with this update, most advertisers will see very little change, if any, to the delivery of their ads in News Feed.
Someone could perceive this as ‘more ads on Facebook’ – but it’s not. This does not change ad load. We will not show more ads; rather, we are updating the spacing between ads, and relaxing some of the parameters around insertions of ads from the same advertiser.
Facebook is clearly making a point to emphasize that users will still see the same number of ads. The main difference is that of the ads they see, a larger proportion of them can be repeats of ads of they have already seen, or come from Pages that they do not Like.
The 💜 of EU tech
The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!
See also – Facebook unveils larger, but fewer right-hand column ads rolling out ‘in the coming months’ and Facebook starts testing Buy button on News Feed ads and Page posts, currently limited to select US businesses
Image credit: Chris Jackson/Getty Images
Get the TNW newsletter
Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.