A peek under the hood of one of Facebook’s most important algorithms.
Fidji Simo, Facebook product management director on the ads team, on the left.
Fidji Simo and Hong Ge have, quite arguably, some of the most important jobs at Facebook.
It's their job — and their team's job — to pick from the tens of millions of ads running on Facebook every day and winnow the glut down to the hypothetical ten or so ads that each Facebook user sees in their News Feed every day. To do that, the team has had to build a complex algorithm that not only maximizes value for advertisers, but also ensure that the user experience stays pleasant.
The process of placing an ad on News Feed is a complicated dance. Facebook has to decide not only which ad to show to its users, but when to show it to them. There isn't a dedicated "slot," so to speak, for an ad in News Feed, so the team must time the ads based what the user is doing on Facebook at that given moment.
BuzzFeed / Matthew Lynley
Each day, there are between 11 and 12 million active ads on Facebook, from roughly 1.5 million advertisers running campaigns, Simo told BuzzFeed News. Part of the reason for that glut of advertisers is thanks to the trove of data the that Facebook has from its users over the social network's ten years that can be used to target ads more effectively, eMarketer principal analyst Debra Williamson said.
"One of the things that has set Facebook apart from other media platforms is the information it has about its users," she said. "Right from the start, Facebook was able to develop an ad platform that took advantage of actual, real information as opposed to guesses and estimates of who was looking at the page, where they were coming from."
Using that targeting data — which ranges from what college the user is attending to where they are in the universe or where they work — Facebook is able to quickly whittle away the number of ads that are relevant to a specific user to between 5,000 and 7,000 ads. At this point, the job is only around halfway done.
In News Feed, any given user has around 1,500 stories they could see each day. The News Feed ranking algorithm's job is to determine which of those stories should be shown highest on each user's News Feed. The company does this through a rather complex algorithm that weights how engaging each post is — how many likes and comments it has — and a wide range of other signals it can use to determine what's most important. For example, a News Feed story that has a comment that says "congratulations" is weighted more strongly than other stories, since it implies that some major life event may have occurred.
Ads effectively follow the same rules, though there are a few other things happening under the hood, Ge said. What determines whether an ad is shown in News Feed is a careful optimization problem that ensures that Facebook users still have a high quality experience, while advertisers are still driven value.
0 Response to "This Is How An Ad Gets Placed In Your Facebook News Feed"
Posting Komentar