Facebook – the place every one of us who has little idea regarding Internet would visit to, almost every day. With nearly 1.5 billion active users per month, Facebook is the unmatched king in Social Media. With it’s growing market, the platform is rediscovering itself. One of the major consequences of this is Ads on Facebook. Even though Ads are not new at all for Facebook, but people noticing a lot now and they are coming in different sorts

such as this

If you are wondering why you are seeing such ads being poured in your feed among posts by your friends, fortunately there is a way. There is no way for using a ad-free facebook though, but all one can do is to control what one can see on their feed. In settings of your Facebook profile, there is a dedicated section where in you can alter what kinds of ads you want to see in future, or block some ads if they are bothering you. But if you haven’t done anything yet and the settings are by default, you would see two kinds of ads appearing in your feed
1. Interest based ads
2. Ads paired with Social Actions of your friends

Let’s take a deeper look individually

How to Control Interest-based Ads on Facebook

As the name suggests, interest-based ads are what Facebook thinks might interest you depending on the websites your browse or the apps you use which use Facebook technologies. For example, if you visit an e-commerce site, you could see ads regarding product deals on your feed. Below is the Facebook Ad

If you find these ads bothering you much, then you can simply get rid of them by turning them off. All you need to do is navigate to your profile->Settings->Adds or use this link and set show online interest based-ads to off. Here is a snapshot of it-

Mind you, you are not turning Facebook Ads off. If you set your option to off here, the number of Ads you would see won’t get reduced. You are just replacing Ads which are pertinent to your usage of websites or apps with something else.You would always see ads based on what you do on Facebook.

Ads paired with Social Actions

Facebook displays what your friends do in the form of Adds for Example – someone liked something, someone joined on an event etc which would look like this Facebook Ad –

Facebook does this because you may wanna know what your friend likes are and sometimes you may like them too. Same thing applies when you like something, an ad would get automatically generated and appear on your friends feed. Here you can’t do anything regarding seeing ads your friends activities, but you can stunt your amigos from viewing them. To do so, navigate to Settings->Ads->Ads with my Social Actions and set Include my social actions with ads for to No one. Below is something you would see-

How to Manage Facebook Ad Preferences

Facebook categorized ads depending on their type. If you don’t want to see ads belonging to a particular kind, then you can remove it in your Ad preferences. Facebook curates this list depending on the information you provide and some actions you perform on Facebook. For example your age is above 50, Facebook would display ads regarding insurance or something. Or if you like movies, you may see ads from bookmyshow. Ads you would see on Facebook might depend upon the business which is sitting other side. For example,the ad above regarding MysmartPrice came into my feed because it wants to reach men aged 20 to 36 who live or recently been to India.

But if you do not want this, navigate to settings->Ads->Ads based on my preferences->Edit->Visit Ad preferences. You would see a new window getting opened which would look something like this-

You can expand each category to explore, and hover your mouse to see more info regarding it. You can remove by choosing cross mark on right hand side, or read about it by selecting info icon.

How to Control/Edit Ads Individually on Your Feed

Not only you can alter settings at one go, you can perform some actions on an Ad individually also. For example, you got to see an ad regarding your friend liking some page which is not of your type. You can tell Facebook the same by selecting drop down menu on the right side of the ad, and selecting Hide Ad. When you select that option, you are telling to Facebook that you wouldn’t want to see ads of this sort. If you select This Ad is useful, you would see similar Facebook ad in the future.

You can also select Why am I seeing this option to know why you are seeing that in your feed. Mine says this –

Here you can also see option to hide all ads from that particular page which if you select, Facebook stops displays ads with that page. You can also manage your ad preferences from here choosing that option.

On the contrary, you can use this link to learn how to create a Facebook Ad for your business.

Did you find this tutorial helpful? Do let us know in comments.