Facebook wants to know why you hide ads

The social network said Thursday that it's updating the News Feed ad-hiding tools to find out why users don't think certain ads are relevant. Now when you hide an ad plopped in your feed, Facebook will prompt you to answer why. Additionally, Facebook will put more weight on the answers from folks who don't typically hide ads because this could be an indicator of a particularly inappropriate or ineffective advertisement.

"We've learned that the reason why someone hides an ad can be just as important as the hide itself," Facebook Product Manager Max Eulenstein wrote in a blog post. "If someone doesn't want to see an ad because it's not relevant to them, we know we didn't do a great job choosing that ad and we need to improve. If someone doesn't want to see an ad because it's offensive, it probably isn't a good ad for other people on Facebook, either."

In these cases, Facebook will place the ad in front of less people. The social network is constantly tweaking its News Feed, which uses an algorithm to decide which posts people should see. The social network is a dominate force in US advertising, second only to Google, according to eMarketer.