The best way to reach your audience and be seen on people’s news feed is to tap into the power of Facebook advertising but these ads are annoying when irrelevant to the user. Facebook has no provision or set guidelines through which one can remove or get rid of these ads as Facebook earns from advertisements.

To overcome this and improve the relevance and quality of the ads people see, Facebook have expanded the control over ads preferences to users. Users can now view what interests advertisers can use to target them with ads via ads preferences. Remove or add interests to improve the relevance of ads you see. You can also stop seeing ads from businesses or organizations who have added you to their customer lists.

Facebook is going to start forcing ads to appear for all users of its desktop website, even if they use ad-blocking software.

With the announcement of these powerful user controls for ads, Facebook intends to circumvent ad blockers by making its advertisements indistinguishable from post, updates and other content that appears in your news feed. Ad blockers will no longer work when users accessed the social network from desktops. Ad blockers are software made for users who hate Facebook ads so much that they add a plug in to their browser to hide ads from their news feed.

What will be the output of changing ad preferences?

Though Facebook have given the control to users to make changes to their interest on basis of which brands target them does not mean users can completely opt out of ads. They only have more control over the types of ads they see. Removing all the interests will make ads that are poorly targeted and see ads that are less relevant to you.

This announcement will get variation in the distribution of ads as the targeting will change according to the preferences people make, but in the long run they will benefit by reaching the right people.

Targeting based on interest comes from the data Facebook gets when we search or click on something that comes on our news feed. So, while you are running ads, choose interests when there is no other option. As clicking on anything doesn’t mean that the users are interested in it. Now that users can make changes to their interest, interest based targeting will reap more benefits.

The changes will likely also mean more revenue for Facebook, since its ads are now blocker-proof. What are your thoughts on this new user control tools?