Facebook will release its ad preferences tool to Australia, giving users more control over the types of ads on their timeline.
The tool enables manual curation the types of ads they want to be served on the social networking site, making advertisements more relevant rather than just being served what previously visited sites and cookies suggest may be relevant to the user. Ad preferences, which went live in the United States six months ago, will be rolled out over the next few weeks in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland and the UK.
The release will be available for all devices, so that users only need to update their preference once for them to be seen across multiple devices. With the increase in the level of targeting available to advertisers, due to users tailoring their own profiles to what interests them, this could be the price of Facebook inventory rise.
As part of the ad preferences announcement, Facebook has also introduced privacy basics which will give users tips and a how-to guide for taking charge of their privacy settings on the social site. Privacy basics offers interactive guides to answer the most commonly asked questions about how users can control your information on Facebook.
Furthermore, Facebook also announced that it is testing a buy button which would allow purchases without users leaving Facebook.