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Facebook is Rating and Punishing Advertisers Based on Customer Feedback

January 11, 2019

Facebook’s business plan is simple. Have a free platform where people sign up and in return, they harvest your data that is used as metadata for their advertisers dashboard for the latter to serve you with ads. This has worked pretty well for them for the most part and it is quite a profitable company if you check their quarterly results.

However, there has been a serious problem with this business plan. Last year, the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke out where it was revealed that the company harvested data from millions of Facebook profiles without permission so that they could target US voters with ads based on their psychological profile.

This scandal crippled Facebook stock even with its stellar earnings and the company spent the better part of 2018 putting out fires around handling people’s data. Now it seems Facebook is making some big changes around it with an interesting addition to the advertiser dashboard.

WOAH! Facebook is going to give advertisers a behaviour score card!

Advertisers will have access to a dashboard to review their performance and feedback.

Advertisers with consistently poor customer feedback will get delivery penalties (ads will cost more + reach fewer people) pic.twitter.com/lSV7r5cPyW

— 𝗠𝗮𝘁𝘁 𝗡𝗮𝘃𝗮𝗿𝗿𝗮 (@MattNavarra) January 11, 2019

As you can see form the screenshots, Facebook shows advertisers a score based on customer satisfaction. If an advertiser gets low customer satisfaction, Facebook will penalize you by making your ads more expensive and will reach fewer people. Low customer satisfaction in this case means that your ads cause a mismatch between your customer expectations and what they experience.

Apparently this feature is not new, it was announced way back in November, but this feature seems to have been rolled out to more advertisers.

You would understand why Facebook had to do this. Apparently according to data, people are less likely to buy products on Facebook after a bad purchase experience and to remedy that, they have this feature to ensure that advertisers give good service to their potential customers.