Hello I'm happy to present our work on
user needs for advertising controls on
Facebook
To provide a bit of background, Facebook
has a lot of advertising controls.
At the time of our study we counted 36
of them. They're mostly located in the
contextual menus on ads themselves and
inside the Ad Preferences and Off
Facebook Activity settings menus.
We wanted to know if these controls
really align with what users want and
need.
To do so, we conducted a two-part study
consisting of an online survey and a
virtual lab study.
Given that Facebook has so many ad
related controls we first wanted to
identify in our survey which would be
the most interesting for further study.
Our survey included 28 questions related
to participants' attitudes towards
Facebook ads and ad customization, their
current behaviors with regards to how
they use Facebook and available ad
controls, and perceived limitations of of
current Facebook settings.
We collected over 150 responses from
Mechanical Turk and Prolific from
US-based Facebook users.
Our sample skewed slightly male and
mostly identified as white.
The mean age of our sample was 34. Most
participants used Facebook daily and
almost all of them said that they used
Facebook weekly.
The largest proportion of our
participants felt negatively about ads.
Most commonly these negative feelings
were because participants felt that ads
were annoying or they had some concern
about how ads were targeted towards them
or found them creepy overall.
We asked participants if they'd ever
seen an ad that they didn't want to see,
and 44 said that they had. Most commonly
they either didn't take any explicit
action related to the ad or they clicked
the Hide Ad in the contextual menu.
Only one person said that they went to
the Ad Preferences page to change their
settings.
Overall about one in five participants
could recognize the Ad Preferences page
and recalled having used it before but
most participants couldn't remember what
they did when they were there.
Most participants also reported
attempting to control ads on the
internet and other ways such as using an
ad blocker. We asked participants to
describe anything they wanted to control
or change related to advertising on
Facebook but hadn't yet figured out how
to do.
And some of the things they described
were actual available controls such as
being able to adjust interests used to
target to them, the use of third-party
data, and being able to hide specific ads.
Other things described weren't available
controls such as being able to decrease
the number of ads or remove ads
altogether,
controls related to moderation or
quality of the ads that were displayed,
and other broader ways of controlling
targeting completely.
Our survey provided several insights for
our lab study. The first is that users do
want ads that are relevant to them but
that needs to be balanced with privacy
concerns.
The second is that Facebook has many
options related to ads that users seem
to want but they may not have yet
discovered.
And third is that
even those who have used available
controls may not fully understand what
they do.
We further explored a subset of
available ad controls in a virtual lab
study.
To anchor our discussion of available
controls we designed a set of study
tasks that required using available
controls that varied in two regards;
usage and desirability as reported in
our survey.
The Hide Ad control in the contextual
menu was a control that had both high
usage and high desirability.
Another two controls related to data
collected from off of Facebook
and had high desirability but low
reported usage.
A third control related to
advertising lists had both low
desirability and usage but past work has
identified that there's low awareness of
this ad targeting practice and thus we
thought it would be interesting to
explore more deeply.
We also included a task to more directly
explore the discoverability of the Ad
Preferences page as that is where most
ad controls are centrally located.
For our virtual lab study we recruited
English-speaking adult Facebook users
based in the US from Craigslist. Sessions
were held over Zoom
using participants own Facebook accounts.
And participants were compensated $25.
The median length of sessions was 61
minutes.
Each session consisted of a pre-task
interview
and study tasks which we divided into two
groups and a post-task interview.
We conducted 25 sessions from October
2020 to January 2021.
We used a screening survey to
recruit a diverse sample including those
with a mix of technical knowledge as
well as a mix of mobile and desktop
users. Almost all of our participants use
Facebook daily.
We conducted a thematic analysis of
participants' perceptions and behaviors
related to data collection on Facebook,
their opinions and understanding of ads,
and past experiences with ads and ad
controls.
We also analyzed participants
perceptions
of the utility and usability of the
controls that they used in the study
tasks.
In addition to the qualitative data we
recorded participants ability to find
the task-related control without aid, the
time it took to find that control,
whether participants recognized that the
control was related to the task, as well
as the pages and menus visited during
the task.
Here we want to highlight some results
that demonstrate that just offering
different choices is not enough -
usability testing plays an important
role in understanding what types of
privacy
controls are actually wanted and needed.
For example we found that some Ad
Preferences controls were better
understood than others. Controls that
were specific to ads, advertisers, or
information used in ad targeting were
better comprehended than general
controls related to the collection of
data.
We found that the Ad Topics menu which
allowed users to see fewer of four
predefined categories was not well
understood. Participants were confused as
to how these four categories were chosen.
Our study also identified four user
groupings related to the ad experience.
One group which we called the Privacy
Concerned felt that ads were creepy and
exhibited in a high level of engagement
with controls.
Their primary goals were to prevent
tracking and achieve less
personalization.
Another group which we called the
Advertising Irritated felt that ads were
annoying.
They had some level of engagement with
controls but they primarily wanted to
see fewer ads and stop repetitive ads.
A third group which we called the
Advertising Disengaged
had expressed a resigned acceptance of
ads and mostly ignored them.
This group exhibited low engagement with
controls and had
various goals related to their
advertising experience.
And the last group which we call the
Advertising Curators felt that ads are
sometimes helpful and also had a high
engagement with controls - mostly to
achieve more personalization.
Based on our results we discuss whether
current Facebook ad controls meet user
needs...and the answer is yes and no.
For the Advertising Curators and
Irritated, controls for specific interest
categories, advertisers, and ads do
somewhat align with their objectives.
However we think that the Ad Topics
could be better designed to meet their
goals.
Tnterestingly, Facebook recently
redesigned Ad Topics to be more in line
with what our participants expected - that
the categories selected for that menu
were based on their inferred interests
instead of pre-selected.
For the Privacy concerned and Ad
Disengaged
current controls
don't meet their needs as much.
The Off Facebook activity menu
does prevent some cross-platform sharing
but doesn't doesn't turn it off
completely.
Furthermore most controls are related to
the use of third-party data and not the
collection of it to begin with.
I'd like to end with a few takeaways
from our study. The first is that
existing Facebook ad controls may have a
discoverability issue.
Second, some controls are better
understood than others - specifically
controls related to cross-platform data
sharing were confusing.
And last we identified four user groups
with varying needs related to the
advertising experience.
Thank you for watching today, please feel
free to reach out with any questions.