Facebook will soon stop charging advertisers for people who accidentally click on their ads.
Accidental clicks are currently defined by Facebook as views that last less than two seconds.
But although Facebook product marketing manager Brett Vogel said clicks with a two second bounce rate are “almost always” unintentional, Facebook might increase or decrease this limit in the future.
And starting next week, these unintentional clicks will no longer be added to the click tally, meaning advertisers using the Facebook Audience Network will not pay for them and publishers won’t get credit.
Speaking about the decision to no longer count these views, Vogel said: “We see this as positive because while unintentional clicks can sometimes be short-term profitability for publishers, they don’t allow us to build value for advertisers or deliver long-term goals for publishers as a sustainable business.”
In terms of how this will impact publishers, Vogel said the “vast majority” won’t be affected.
In a blog post, he explained how Facebook aims to evolve this unintentional click policy in the future, saying: “Going forward, we’ll be experimenting with more ways to reduce the number of unintentional clicks by looking further into bounce rates, additional metrics, and trying to prevent users from accidentally clicking in the first place.”
This new policy comes with other Audience Network changes, including that Facebook will now automatically pause placements when it sees abnormal behaviour, such as an inflated clickthrough rate.
Facebook has also updated its policies with examples about how to avoid unintentional clicks, as well as adding a new policy that prohibits clickable “whitespace” on native ads.