Glossary
Ad-comment moderation, defined
Plain-English definitions of the terms that matter when you moderate Facebook and Instagram ad comments.
Buyer-intent comment
A comment on a Meta ad that signals someone is ready to buy — asking about price, availability, shipping, or how to order.
Ad comment moderation
Reviewing, hiding, and replying to the comments left on paid Facebook and Instagram ads to protect ad performance.
Dark post
An ad creative that runs in the feed without being published to a Page timeline, so its comments are easy to miss.
Private reply
A one-time direct message sent in response to a public comment, allowed by Meta within a limited window after the comment.
Comment-to-DM
The flow of moving a public ad-comment conversation into a private message (a one-time private reply), used within Meta’s policy window to answer a buyer-intent comment privately.
Social proof
The signal that other people trust a brand or product — and on a paid ad, the comment section is live social proof that unmoderated spam can quickly erode.
ROAS
ROAS (return on ad spend) is the revenue a campaign generates for every unit of currency spent on ads — the core efficiency metric advertisers protect.
Ad creative
An ad creative is the image, video, or copy that makes up a Facebook or Instagram ad — the asset whose comments need moderating.
Sentiment analysis
Sentiment analysis is the automated classification of a comment as positive, negative, or neutral — used to triage ad comments without reading every one by hand.
Engagement bait
Engagement bait is content that pushes people to comment, tag, or share purely to game distribution — which Meta down-ranks, and which can flood ad comments with low-value noise.
Auto-moderation
Auto-moderation is the use of rules and AI to hide, flag, or respond to social media comments automatically, without a human reviewing each one first.
Brand safety
Brand safety is the practice of keeping a brand's ads and messaging out of harmful or inappropriate contexts — including the comment section under its own paid posts.
Comment spam
Comment spam is unsolicited, repetitive, or malicious content posted in comment sections — scam links, fake giveaways, and copy-paste promotions that hijack an ad's paid audience.
Cost per result
Cost per result is the average amount spent to achieve one instance of a campaign's optimization goal — a purchase, lead, or click — calculated as total spend divided by results.
CPM
CPM (cost per mille) is the price an advertiser pays for one thousand ad impressions — the base rate at which a campaign buys attention.
CPC
CPC (cost per click) is the average amount an advertiser pays each time someone clicks their ad, calculated as total spend divided by clicks.
CTR
CTR (click-through rate) is the share of people who click an ad after seeing it — a core measure of how well creative, audience, and message line up.
Engagement rate
Engagement rate measures how often people interact with a post or ad — reactions, comments, shares, saves — relative to how many people saw it.
Ad frequency
Ad frequency is the average number of times each person in your audience has seen your ad, calculated as impressions divided by reach.
Negative feedback
Negative feedback is Meta's term for the actions people take to avoid an ad — hiding it, reporting it, or hiding all ads from that advertiser — which the delivery system reads as a signal of poor ad quality.
Profanity filter
A profanity filter automatically hides comments containing blocked or offensive words — Meta ships a built-in version, with limits that dedicated moderation tools exist to cover.
Quality ranking
Quality ranking is one of Meta's ad relevance diagnostics: a comparison of your ad's perceived quality against other ads that competed for the same audience.
Social listening
Social listening is the practice of monitoring social media conversations about a brand, product, or topic to extract insight — including what people say under its paid ads.
User-generated content (UGC)
User-generated content (UGC) is authentic content created by customers or creators rather than the brand itself — a staple of modern ad creative, and something ad comments produce for free.