Facebook has ramped up its crackdown on so-called clickbait news that appears on the social network. Carrying intriguing and misleading headlines, these articles are solely designed to lure consumers into clicking. This type of tactic is purely designed to drive traffic to the website and in most cases will lead to a high bounce rate. They are famous for employing alluring phrases such as “you’ll never guess what happened next” and “his response was priceless” to drive web traffic.
Facebook says it can now automatically suppress these stories through built-in technology that scans for tell-tale signs of clickbait headlines on its news feed section and then flags them accordingly. This technology was created by a team who manually reviewed thousands of headlines to put together a list of commonly identifiable clickbait traits.
All Response Media Viewpoint
Facebook is constantly changing and I have mentioned in the past that one of the most important factors in getting Facebook right is to know your audience and understand Facebook’s quality score.
Clickbait was designed to generate as much traffic as possible to sites, but it does not necessarily mean that it was quality traffic. From a direct response (DR) perspective, this strategy is frowned upon as it generates high clicks, low conversions (sales) and tends to have a high bounce rate, so it’s no surprise that Facebook is finally taking action. The best approach to Facebook has always been to constantly test; an example of this is something as simple as using male creative to target men and female creative to target women. In our tests, we have historically found that the right creative can affect click-through rates (CTR) by as much as 51% and reduce cost-per-conversion by 45%.