Facebook sharpens ad-shifting tool: Soon users will eat creepily SPECIFIC ad-gloop

Facebook is refining its algorithm to better serve up tailored advertising to its userbase in yet another move to satisfy its actual customers: advertisers.

In recent months the Mark Zuckerberg-run company has made a number of strategic tweaks to its free content ad network – a move which has helped drive Facebook's stock to its highest price on Wall Street since its inglorious market debut in May 2012.

Facebook is injecting more and more ad goo into its service, while attempting to limit the damage of more intrusion to its users.

The result? A blog post penned by the firm's engineering manager Hong Ge who told Facebookers that "more relevant ads" would start to appear in their News Feed.

He added that they should be pleased about the fact that meaningless ads will disappear from view.

When deciding which ad to show to which groups of people, we are placing more emphasis on feedback we receive from people about ads, including how often people report or hide an ad.

That means people should see ads that are increasingly relevant to them, and fewer ads that they might not be interested in.

For marketers, this means we are showing ads to the people who might want to see them the most. For example, if someone always hides ads for electronics, we will reduce the number of those types of ads that we show to them.

Advertisers will start to notice "some variation in the distribution of their ads in the coming weeks," Hong said.

They ought to be pleased, however, as Facebook is now being more precise than ever before about targeting ads at the huge personal data trove it holds on more than 1 billion people around the globe.

Shares in Facebook are now at their highest point since the company's flotation on the Nasdaq last year. They are currently trading at just above $51 as copper-haired billionaire Zuck sucks ever harder on the big ads cash pool generated by the millions of user bods who seem only too happy to "Share". ®