socialmediocrity

So facebook have removed the thumbs up, thumbs down vote on ads that appear on the right-hand-side (ASUs) – I thinkn they removed that function a few weeks ago – and have replaced them with single, thumbs up “Like” call to action. (see below)

So pushing the “like” button then displays that I like this, and I can only imagine the same ad will appear on my friends’ pages as “Richard likes this”, in a similar way that fan page ads declare the number of friends who are also fans.

What’s intriguing is how many users do we think will legitimately use this function, and what impact does it have on me as a user?

Click-through rates on sites like Facebook have been well-documented to be low, or at least it takes work to get them anything above 0.02%, so theoretically you would think that adding distractions would only serve to reduce this further.

There is of course a risk here too, insofar as larger advertisers could benefit from paid-for gaming of this particular system. Find a couple of hundred unrelated users to “like” your ad, even if you have to pay them, and the returns could be huge if higher CTRs are the result of friend recommendations of this type.

Of course, the initial reaction of user will be interesting as it is not clear how I stadn to benefit by “liking” certain ads, and if anything I was always more inclined to give a thumbs down to ads I didn’t want to see again, but it is not clear that this will influence the type of ad I might see again in the future. I for one would not have “liked” the first ad in the example here: it is poorly targeted in the first place, and breaches Facebook’s own guidelines. But equally I don’t want my ad space to be inundated with ads for just a small selection of products either, based on the few things I might want to see more of.

It seems it is another attempt to introduce some subjective quality scoring to the ad serving algorithm (if there is one), but I for one struggle to understand what is wrong with CTR as a measure of the quality of the ad – surely if people “like” the ads they see, then they might click on them, and that seems like a fairly robust measure for whether the ad itself has been effective in soliciting a response. For sure CTR can never be the only measure used, but for these purposes it would seem like a fairly useful one.