Meta is giving users greater control over their ad experience. Thanks to a recent update, Meta users are now able to manage their account settings (including new advertising controls) in a centralised location.
Meta is making the changes to its Accounts Centre across Facebook, Messenger and Instagram. Announcing the change, the director of product management, Robert d’Apice, said that the tech company is rolling out changes in an effort “to make finding and managing certain settings easier across multiple apps.”
All changes will begin to take effect today and will roll out gradually in the coming months to all Facebook, Messenger and Instagram users.
What changes have Meta made?
Thanks to the update, each user’s personal information, passwords and security preferences, payments, permissions and advertising preferences for Facebook, Messenger and Instagram will now be housed in one centralised location. On top of this, if a user operates more than one account on any given app, they’ll be able to add different accounts to the same consolidated Accounts Centre.
By making this change, Meta intends to improve the overall account management and ad experience for users. Now, for instance, a user will be able to seamlessly make changes to ad topic preferences and these will be consistent across different Meta apps.
On top of this, the company is also aiming to provide users with greater transparency into how their data is used and shared with other websites and applications. Meta aims to achieve this through the newly rebranded ‘Activity information from ad partners.’
As part of this move towards greater transparency, Meta is also exploring ways to make the ad experience more customisable and relevant. The company aims to achieve this by enabling users to choose to see fewer ads that don’t interest them.
Why does this matter?
In recent months and years, Meta has suffered major blows to its advertising business. For example, the consumer privacy changes introduced by Apple that allow users to block the cross-app sharing and selling of their personal data is causing Meta to lose upwards of $10bn annually in ad revenue.
These changes were made in early 2021 and Meta is still struggling to regain its previously irrefutable dominance in the ad space almost two years later. It’s more than likely that changes to Meta properties’ advertising settings is part of a wider strategy for the company to regain this lost revenue and re-establish its dominance in the space. After all, these changes will incentivise users to share more of their data consensually.
Author spike.digital