[HN Gopher] Facebook reported fake numbers to advertisers
___________________________________________________________________
Facebook reported fake numbers to advertisers
Author : elorant
Score : 494 points
Date : 2021-02-19 14:34 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.yahoo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.yahoo.com)
| matchagaucho wrote:
| I'm unsure how the label "Potential Reach" can be improved upon.
|
| Whether an Advertiser can _potentially_ reach 100M people or
| accounts is not their objective when setting up a campaign.
|
| The invoice at the end of the month ultimately reveals the number
| of ad impressions.
| Razengan wrote:
| To me the whole advertising racket has always seemed like a case
| of an emperor with no clothes. Has anyone here ever made a
| purchase that was influenced solely by an ad, or known any common
| folk who did?
| chillacy wrote:
| I have but I don't click through the ad anymore. I just search
| on Amazon for the thing and buy it, since it's usually cheaper.
| LargeWu wrote:
| I've done this occasionally. But really, how advertising works
| is it builds up demand by repeated exposure. The rule of thumb
| is that it takes somewhere around 7 interactions, on average,
| before somebody makes a decision to purchase.
|
| You want proof that advertising works? Facebook's revenues last
| year were $85 Billion, mostly from advertising. And it's
| growing every year. Merchants wouldn't be spending that kind of
| money over a sustained period if they were seeing negative ROI
| on their ad spend.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| I've worked places where marketing seems like just a big shell
| game.
|
| Paying other companies for advertising on their platforms
| meanwhile they are paying someone else, and that third party is
| paying us.
|
| All three marketing departments probably get a net 0 value from
| it, all three marketing departments get to report their budget
| spends and not get defunded, meanwhile producing nothing
| concrete of value.
| ttt0 wrote:
| I hate ads so much, that the only influence they have on me is
| that I will be _less_ likely to make a purchase.
| lovecg wrote:
| May I ask what brand of toothpaste do you happen to use?
| bordercases wrote:
| For me - one based on its expected functional properties
| over brand recognition.
|
| Not all advertising is educational.
| Razengan wrote:
| The cheapest/nearest. In most categories sometimes I can't
| even recall the name of what I last bought.
| bkirkby wrote:
| i usually go with the cheapest.
| davidivadavid wrote:
| If by "solely by an ad" you mean the kind of scenario where you
| once saw a single display ad on the side of a website, picked
| up your phone and your credit card and ordered something --
| that's not how advertising works.
|
| But if you've heard of something like QVC, or have an
| approximate idea of the revenue generated by the advertising
| industry and the humility to think all of their customers can't
| be wrong, you should be able to dispose of the notion that
| you're pushing here.
|
| Yeah, some people waste money on advertising. For some others,
| it's a money printing machine. _Shrug_
| Kamshak wrote:
| I've done a few impulse purchases from FB / Instagram ads (a
| razor, two ebooks, signed up to a subscription service). I'm
| very happy with these purchases.
|
| Are you saying advertising on FB/IG doesn't work in general?
| phrogdriver wrote:
| Marketing spend, especially online, is one of the most studied
| inputs to business strategy. Long term lift studies of both
| brand and direct response advertising show that it absolutely
| drives consumer behavior. Whether or not that's good for
| consumers might be debatable. I'm happy to buy unbranded
| consumer packaged goods if I can ensure quality but there's a
| reason Procter and Gamble can make >50% gross margins.
| bkirkby wrote:
| i recall one time in my teens watching saturday morning
| cartoons and seeing an ad for golden grahams. i said to myself
| "i'd like some golden grahams right now," so i hopped in my
| car, drove to the grocery, and bought some golden grahams.
|
| that's the only time i was consciously effected by
| advertisement, but i also suspect the mind bending happens so
| much on a sub-conscious level.
| zupreme wrote:
| It took time, and many thousands of dollars, before I realized
| that the vast majority of "likes" my pages received as a result
| of paid campaigns on FB were from accounts which were clearly not
| real people.
|
| A simple look enough of their profiles revealed that, like would
| he expected from any fly by night CPA network, FB was using bots,
| or at least straw man accounts run by low-cost staff, to like and
| view content which FB was paid to advertise.
|
| Worse, I found that the clickthrough metrics reported by them to
| off-FB destinations I advertised NEVER was anywhere close to what
| was reported on the destination, including when tracked by Google
| Analytics.
|
| In short: like-fraud, click-fraud, and more.
|
| I cannot be the only person to notice these things. I assume it
| persists because most people, self included, simply complain and
| move on once we notice the "game" but don't sue.
| benlivengood wrote:
| Click-bots abuse everyone; a feasible strategy is running ads
| on random news re-aggregator sites or other worthless sites and
| buying the lowest cost ads on FB pointing to them. The click-
| bots game the engagement/quality metrics to make the ads seem
| legitimate enough to keep serving, and the click-bots have to
| click on a wide selection of ads (including yours) to avoid
| drawing suspicion. Normal traffic mixed with more click-bots
| gets the revenue from the worst scammy advertisers (who may
| also be operating the sites and injecting their own scammy ads
| over legitimate ads they promised to serve)
|
| It's basically arbitrage to sell spammy clickbait ads for
| scammers at higher prices than FB would pay if they would even
| allow the ads on their network.
|
| Advertising networks try to detect and filter click-bots but of
| course some percentage will slip through.
|
| Switch to ad networks where you pay for conversions, not
| clicks/impressions.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| You're not the only person. Here's Veritasium reporting on it
| in 2014:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag&ab_channel=Verit...
| f430 wrote:
| When I ran a campaign I experienced similar problems.
| Received likes from very dubious looking Facebook profiles
| who likes all sorts of random stuff.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Fraud in advertising isn't just a Facebook issue. The entire
| digital advertising ecosystem is chock full of fraud. Of
| course, ad networks aren't incentivised to do much about it,
| because they get their cut even when ad impressions are
| fraudulent.
|
| I spoke with Augustine Fou late last year for my podcast about
| digital fraud, it was pretty eye-opening to say the least.
|
| https://www.mql.fm/002-60-million-60-billion-ad-fraud-questi...
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| > _but don't sue_
|
| Ok, so, honest question, why not? If you're correct then it
| seems like a class action would be a slam dunk and wouldn't
| cost you anything personally because class action lawyers are
| happy to skim millions off the top of the settlement.
| time0ut wrote:
| Do they even have a right to sue or does FB force them into
| arbitration?
|
| I honestly don't know as I have never bought ads on FB. It
| would not surprise me if all but the biggest enterprise
| customers have horrible terms of service...
| TLightful wrote:
| 100%
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| In theory.
|
| In practice FB's lawyers will produce a compelling bullshit
| excuse to explain the poor results, the fake clicks, the
| fake accounts, and the lack of sales.
|
| Likely it will be the user's fault and FB can't be held
| responsible if the user keeps spending money etc etc.
|
| This is really an antitrust issue, because it's a
| particularly nasty form of market monopolisation combined
| with cultivated mental and emotional manipulation to keep
| buyers locked in and spending.
| xwolfi wrote:
| Oh yeah organizing a class action against facebook, a "slam
| dunk" :D
| alpaca128 wrote:
| If it's anything like the situation in Europe you can't
| effectively sue Facebook without at least a couple millions
| to potentially throw out the window. They pay a lot of good
| lawyers to make the court proceedings as long-winded and
| expensive as possible for the opposing party, relying on the
| fact that very few have the resources, time and determination
| to put up with this.
| erehweb wrote:
| Unlikely that these accounts were run by FB. More likely by
| other companies with their own objectives, such as creating
| plausible fake users.
| cyberlab wrote:
| > such as creating plausible fake users
|
| Define a 'plausible' user? Facebook just wants your phone
| number and uses that as the only metric to determine it's a
| human behind the account. And as we know, there is no
| shortage of phone numbers to use from places like Twilio
| where you can mass-generate an army of Facebook users.
| marketingtech wrote:
| Page Like ads are the least ROI effective ads on Facebook. You
| tell their machine learning algorithm to optimize for people
| who will click "Like" on every page they see. That'll increase
| your vanity metric and meet your stated objective, but it
| doesn't drive business results for you because you're getting
| the wrong type of customer.
|
| If you tell Facebook's machine learning algorithm to optimize
| towards purchases on your website or visits to your stores or
| to users onboarding to your app, then you'll really see the
| power of their beast. Those are the ads that people are
| spending billions of dollars on, because the outcomes drive
| real business value and have too much friction to be faked at
| scale.
| sjg007 wrote:
| There is some adage that 50% of advertising is effective, we just
| don't know which 50% it is.
| dazc wrote:
| Didgital advertising is touted as an answer to this with
| targeted ads and tracking of conversions but, in truth, there
| is still a lot of wastage and cannabilisation of sales you'd
| have got anyhow.
| annadane wrote:
| And with the money they get they buy up Whatsapp and constantly
| lied about it to regulators. Good to see where that money is
| going :/
| shadowtree wrote:
| And why would the numbers of _any_ other platform be any better?
|
| TikTok, Clubhouse, Snap - nobody independently verifies their
| numbers.
|
| It is even used to create virality. Those 1.5mil likes on a
| TikTok? Why _wouldn 't_ TikTok spike that number to get
| attention?
| jimkleiber wrote:
| Exactly this. Companies can use these numbers to appear bigger,
| richer, more popular, more successful, etc., than other
| platforms and we just trust they're reporting accurate numbers.
|
| I also wonder what we could do to change it. Do you think
| someone independently verifying the numbers would help? Who do
| you think might do it and how?
| blueblisters wrote:
| Add LinkedIn too - I think they were reporting wrong numbers
| for years. I think reddit is likely the worst with click fraud.
| Reddit is not gated by user login so bots can click on ads
| without having a user account. Being new to the ad space, they
| likely don't have the sophisticated bot detection tools that
| Google has to invalidate fraudulent clicks.
| vmception wrote:
| Please, regulators, hit FB with a gigantic securities fraud
| lawsuit
|
| They're not even well connected politically, there is no reason
| not to curb stomp them
| soared wrote:
| Id be curious to see how potential reach is affecting revenue.
| Like the article says the only way it has an impact on revenue is
| through media planning. But it seems like very few large
| advertisers would move some budget off Facebook if potential
| reach was 10% lower. Very few advertiser's budgets are
| constrained by audience size.
|
| This honestly doesn't seem all that terrible, especially compared
| to their past of inflating actual performance metrics. Yeah they
| should've fixed it, but adtech platforms have hundreds of metrics
| with little opportunity to verify them so I'm sure it's nowhere
| near the worst example.
| hobs wrote:
| So your last sentence seems to let them off even more than they
| are already being let off; given their take of billions of
| dollars why should we give them extra leeway to keep fucking
| up?
| soared wrote:
| I just don't think this is as major as many news outlets will
| make it seem.
| bogwog wrote:
| > But it seems like very few large advertisers would move some
| budget off Facebook if potential reach was 10% lower. Very few
| advertiser's budgets are constrained by audience size.
|
| Why wouldn't an advertiser invest less in a campaign if it
| reached less people? That's why companies are willing to pay so
| much more for a superbowl ad than a regular TV ad, because they
| have more reach.
|
| The problem I think is that a lot of advertisers, especially
| smaller ones, wouldn't want to risk pissing Facebook off with a
| lawsuit. Plus even if Facebook misleads advertisers in a way
| that results in them spending more money than they otherwise
| would...the fact is, Facebook could likely double or triple
| their current prices and those same advertisers would still pay
| it because they have no choice.
| soared wrote:
| Agencies/big brands look at each digital channel and how much
| they could potentially spend reaching their target market and
| then assign budgets months in advance. So if the potential
| spend on Facebook is lower, it may get less budget in the
| plan because the agency knows they won't be able to spend
| more budget there.
|
| My initial wording is weird.
| indymike wrote:
| "The problem I think is that a lot of advertisers, especially
| smaller ones, wouldn't want to risk pissing Facebook off with
| a lawsuit. Plus even if Facebook misleads advertisers in a
| way that results in them spending more money than they
| otherwise would...the fact is, Facebook could likely double
| or triple their current prices and those same advertisers
| would still pay it because they have no choice."
|
| If the ads don't work, or do not deliver enough results for
| the price, the advertiser will take their spend somewhere
| else.
| bluGill wrote:
| The big advertisers are doing this. They know their real
| numbers because they track results. They don't care what
| facebook reports, they care about results vs costs. If
| between fraud and ads that don't work only 1% of the ads
| result in a customer, then the cost to get a customer is
| 100 times the cost to get an impression: from there is is
| easy math to decide if that is a worthwhile cost of sale to
| buy all 100 ads to reach 1 customer.
|
| If FB would/could cut down on fraud the cost of sales would
| go down making their ads more valuable.
| davidivadavid wrote:
| This simple mechanism seems to escape a lot of people, it
| seems.
|
| Anyone moderately familiar with a concept like ROAS, even
| with its limitations, should be able to avoid making such
| wrongheaded arguments.
| FatalLogic wrote:
| In addition to the obvious conflict of interest in relations with
| advertisers which is the focus of this story, this also implies
| it would be in Facebook's interests to go easy on fake accounts
| and tolerate their existence. That's troubling, and just in
| itself it appears contrary to their public facing policy
| elorant wrote:
| I have a few fake accounts on FB, and my theory is that they
| allow them as long as the engagement is high, aka having tons
| of "friends" and likes/posts.
| notahacker wrote:
| My experience is that they don't care at all. Had a couple of
| friendspam requests from profiles that made no attempt to
| look like a real person, but were simply a pouting photo and
| am invitation to follow a URL to an "adult dating" website
| with a sketchy looking URL. Reported them both and Facebook
| sent a polite generic message advising they had passed a
| review but I could prevent them from attempting to contact me
| in future if I wanted to.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| Why do you have fake accounts? Just curious. The only reason
| I'd want a fake account is because they don't have developer
| accounts. I hate doing anything at a job that requires me to
| use my personal Facebook account.
| elorant wrote:
| I use them to extract data, mainly liked pages from where I
| can find specific companies, and there is a usage limit per
| account.
| nindalf wrote:
| Why? Wouldn't the people working on fake accounts only care
| about their own metrics? How would it affect them if some other
| team's metrics are affected?
| elorant wrote:
| Say you and I both have a shop selling shoes online. If I use
| fake accounts to click on your ads I "burn" your budget by
| driving less sales to your bottom line, since the traffic to
| your site is all fake. Assuming that you have a limited
| budget that can make a lot of difference to your bottom line
| versus mine.
|
| This is a tactic broadly used in AdWords in the past, and I
| assume that it's also used on FB too.
| bluGill wrote:
| Right, but if I track ROI I will notice and the value of
| the ad spend goes down. I may decide not to buy the next
| round of FB ads - there are other places to place ads, and
| I'll keep trying until I find the ones that work. If
| someone else gives a better ROI because while they have
| less reach they prevent your click-fraud I'll go with them.
| Sure I lose the FB only customers, but I may be able to get
| enough to grow my business, particularly if I target repeat
| customers well and so I don't need to constantly attract
| new customers my smaller ad spend (including word of mouth)
| may make me more profitable in the long run which is what
| counts.
|
| The above gets even worse when I tell my brother-in-law
| that he shouldn't bother with FB ads for his new pet food
| store, this other platform is a better value.
|
| Thus it is long term to FB's advantage to make their
| numbers real. I can't say if they will or not, but it would
| be to their advantage.
| buran77 wrote:
| There may be clickfarms that have their interests
| (accidentally) aligned with FB's in specific cases, which
| would mean FB has no interest in cracking down on them. And I
| wouldn't put it past FB to even indirectly operate such
| clickfarms if this means they can offer some support for the
| overinflated promises they make to advertisers.
| nindalf wrote:
| You misunderstand me. You speak of Facebook as a large
| amorphous blob. But think of it in terms of people working
| on these problems. Why should the fake accounts team care
| about the metrics of the ads team? They will be rewarded
| based number of fake accounts caught, presumably. Not ad
| spend. So why would they not do their jobs?
| buran77 wrote:
| > Why should the fake accounts team care about the
| metrics of the ads team?
|
| Ok, now I understand what you meant. In this case it's
| because the strategy comes from high up and (putting
| plausible deniability of individuals like FB's CEO aside)
| the manager of the "fake accounts" team got some
| instructions from above to focus "here" not "there", and
| this just happens to be in the best interest of the "ads"
| team.
|
| The employees themselves may be individuals but they're
| there working for the vision of the company and CEO
| (because it's usually the CEO who sets the course and is
| aware of all these directives). They're not doing it for
| the other team, they're doing it because whoever set the
| strategy decided it's in the best interest of the
| company.
| nindalf wrote:
| > focus "here" not "there"
|
| What does this mean? Are they removing fake accounts or
| not?
| buran77 wrote:
| Both? We don't live in a binary world my friend. They are
| removing some fake accounts and not others. I have worked
| in plenty of companies who were doing such a selective
| job (I'd say all companies do this when it comes to
| defending their interests) to know this isn't at all far
| fetched.
|
| Some departments are routinely instructed to turn a blind
| eye to the actions of some but not others. Sexual
| harassment is one topic that rubs me the wrong way since
| I worked (and quit from) companies who were pursuing
| these cases only if they were below a certain level in
| the hierarchy. Above that it was "blind eye" all around.
| bagacrap wrote:
| You could easily imagine that team being understaffed
| because of decisions made at the organizational level.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| So, the fake accounts team does its job and identifies a
| huge group of accounts that it alleges are fake. It goes
| up the chain and nope, we won't shut them down, this
| isn't clear-cut, we need more evidence, etc.
| nindalf wrote:
| Right right. But according to public statements, the fake
| accounts team detects and takes action on tens of
| millions of fake accounts a day. So ... maybe such a
| directive doesn't exist?
| buran77 wrote:
| You started with a presumably correct statistic but then
| drew the wrong conclusion. The police catches thousands
| of criminals daily. So there must be no corruption
| whatsoever at higher levels or else, presumably, the
| police would catch them.
| mountainb wrote:
| Inflating user metrics is positive for manipulating advertisers
| and for manipulating investors both. So far, the regulatory
| agencies have been willing to look the other way despite the
| potentially lucrative penalties it could extract from Facebook
| by policing this practice.
| agilob wrote:
| When Uber discovered that 80% of their ads where (allegedly fake,
| please don't sue me), it was a big issue, everyone was talking
| about it and case is in court. When Facebook is doing the same
| thing again and again and again, there's not massive backslash
| against them? Do we even expect them to change a bit?
|
| https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cub21ueWNvbnR...
| chillacy wrote:
| Uber's issues were with shadier ad networks afaik. Despite the
| noise, fb is actually one of the better sources of digital ad
| data, which speaks a lot about the dysfunction of the space
| overall.
| burmer wrote:
| The article mentions fake or duplicate accounts but not those
| that exist for dead people either [1] which would seem to become
| more and more important over time.
|
| 1. https://metro.co.uk/2019/04/29/50-years-therell-dead-
| people-...
| Bukhmanizer wrote:
| This is one of those things that I've seen HN complain about
| numerous times, but would you really want FB trawling through
| the obituaries trying to find out if you're dead?
| bluGill wrote:
| Yes I would. There are a lot of people on my friends list (ie
| those I went to school with years ago) who I wouldn't get any
| notice they are dead without facebook telling me. I think of
| one person who died in a motercycle accident, if it wasn't
| for facebook I wouldn't know the difference between dead and
| just quit showing up in my feed. It doesn't matter in the
| long run as we never were more than classmates, but I'm still
| glad I know.
|
| The knowledge that someone is dead isn't very sensitive. I
| still control how much facebook knows about me, but some
| information is worth giving facebook because they will let my
| friends know.
| dd36 wrote:
| An aside, I still receive Inc. magazine despite not renewing my
| subscription 7 years ago... Is that to inflate the reach? I'm not
| arguing it's illegal or anything. It makes me wonder how
| widespread misleading audience numbers are in ad-based
| businesses. Do I count? Do I count as reach for all the other ad
| mailers I get but immediately toss in the recycle bin?
| ezekg wrote:
| This seems like a common practice for startups, at least in my
| experience. I've worked at companies that boast they have
| hundreds of thousands of users to their investors and on their
| sign up pages, but in actuality, they have less than a thousand
| active users. It's deceptive. Most users were never active to
| begin with, yet outwardly they stretch the truth. Yes, you may
| have a high user row count in the database, and you may also
| have a high spam user count, but that means nothing and they
| hide it.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| You say it's common so I suppose investors are used to it and
| find out quickly?
| jm20 wrote:
| Yes any semi-experienced investor will immediately screen
| for active users vs signups, and if they find out you're
| trying to game the numbers it's usually a dealbreaker.
| ezekg wrote:
| You would think so. I've seen the presentation slides,
| and I've seen the real production analytics. Totally
| different. But alas, I've since exited the life of
| startup employee and won't return.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Probably. If you toss them out, they don't know. With digital
| ads, they supposedly have a way to know if you clicked (or even
| bought something after clicking).
| dylan604 wrote:
| Great, I have to deal with a broken web experience because of
| the heavy blocking all because of a suppoda?
| biffstallion wrote:
| What!?? A Left-leaning hi-tech company ... LYING ?? Come on now.
| Don't forget they do all this "fact checking"... apparently NOT
| on their own company.
| abarringer wrote:
| A contrary perspective... It could be they are using fake numbers
| but also are effective for some small businesses. I used it for a
| business and it drove tremendous sales. Everyone in the town that
| we inquired of had seen at least one ad on their facebook feed in
| a very short amount of time. All of this for a couple hundred $$.
|
| Im a fb hater too. But it works for some small businesses.
| worker767424 wrote:
| The mid-size players I have friends in marketing at all have
| decent success with running ads on Facebook, and they're all
| tracking ROI. I've heard the platform isn't as mature as
| Google, and I suspect a lot of issues are rooted in "move
| fast."
| sputr wrote:
| I keep warning small time (ie most) FB page owners who advertise
| on FB to be very very careful as they are being subjected to a
| beefed up version of the psychological manipulation that regular
| users face as they, not the regular users, are the main
| customers.
|
| Facebooks corporate incentive is to get you to FEEL like your
| getting good value out of advertising on Facebook and to get you
| addicted to doing it.
|
| Not to actually deliver results.
|
| So don't trust any metric they show you, because even if its not
| a total fabrication it's still presented in a way to deceive you
| to think its better than it is.
|
| Always monitor your ROI and always calculate it using your truly
| end goal (sales, or in the case of civil society some sort
| engagement off Facebook that's tightly bound to you mission).
| Likes, shares, comments and reach should NEVER be the goal. Even
| if FBs interface is trying to convince you otherwise.
| TechnoTimeStop wrote:
| Facebook is probably lying about much more insidious things at
| this point
| soheil wrote:
| > subjected to a beefed up version of the psychological
| manipulation
|
| Can you provide sources or evidence of this?
| sputr wrote:
| It's my pet name for "User experience". Because that's what
| UX is. My sources are: any book on UX or website design :).
|
| In it's good form it's learning how to design interfaces that
| are intuitive (i.e. they lead you to what you need). In it's
| bad form it's used to lead you to what the owners want (i.e.
| conversion to sales in it's purest form, or, in the case of
| Facebook, something much much worse).
|
| I've been debating publishing a blog calling on the EU to
| stop using the utterly incorrect term "social network" and
| start using something more appropriate like "advertising
| platform" or, even more appropriately something that includes
| a nod to their primary factor of success - induction of
| emotional liability and reactivity in humans.
| jjj123 wrote:
| There is no need for sources on this. This is how design
| works in modern tech.
|
| You build UIs in a way that improve your own metrics, which
| in this case is probably ad spend. They've likely run
| hundreds of A/B tests on the way ad data is displayed to try
| and optimize for that metric.
| dna_polymerase wrote:
| Facebook is the company that admitted to fueling the Myanmar
| genocide. If anyone has to produce receipts it's them.
| soheil wrote:
| As it relates to the ad UI.
| dna_polymerase wrote:
| Read into the books of Nir Eyal. Whatever systemic thing
| large SV companies do tries to replicate his design
| patterns.
|
| A company that has a value system as crooked as
| Facebook's can't be trusted.
| orhmeh09 wrote:
| What is Facebook's value system? Is it different from
| other companies' value systems?
| mrweasel wrote:
| Not that it justify Facebook lying, but if Facebooks
| advertisers are repeat customers, then apparently the fake
| numbers doesn't matter. Customers apparently still feel that
| their advertising campaigns have paid of... Or do they simply
| don't measure the results independently?
|
| Facebook is repeatable shown to be lying, manipulating, failing
| to properly moderate their platform and having a general shady
| business practise, yet their stock price keeps climbing,
| they're not really punished in any meaningful way. It's
| disappointing that business are allowed to operate in this way,
| but I don't think anyone really care.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Or do they simply don 't measure the results independently?_
|
| My observation has been that for many, it's both "don't" and
| "can't."
|
| Facebook makes it easy for people to advertise. Auditing your
| Facebook buy is a different skill set that requires different
| thinking, and more time than most small business owners have.
| So they just trust Facebook isn't lying to them, the way that
| they trust the metrics that the local radio station salesman
| gives them. Except that the radio station salesman will lose
| his job if the numbers aren't right. There is no punishment
| for Facebook lying to its advertisers.
| BbzzbB wrote:
| In a way, the more trouble FB gets without being scratched,
| the more the sustainability of its business model is proven.
| Regulatory changes are basically the main risk behind their
| stock IMO, or else they wouldn't be trading at a discount
| from their FAAAM peers. The more these attempts go no where,
| the more FB bulls have a reason to remain as such.
| Alupis wrote:
| To make this worse - FB actively undermines your ability to
| validate their results!
|
| They remove OrderId's because they deem them "PII" (what!?) and
| just report number of conversions and conversion dollar
| amounts.
|
| This, coupled with the complexity of referral tracking,
| lookback windows, browsers clearing cookies, etc... it becomes
| nearly (or completely!) impossible to validate any results from
| FB's ad platform.
|
| Added to that, FB's ad platform's goal seems to be to spend
| your _entire_ daily budget... every single day... regardless of
| ROAS. That 's just absurd.
|
| Trust Us - they say...
| tomnipotent wrote:
| > They remove OrderId's because they deem them "PII"
|
| This has always been a pet peeve of mine, and is clearly
| intentional by Facebook to prevent businesses from confirming
| and digging into results.
|
| No other major advertising partner does this. Not Google Ads
| or Bing, not even Outbrain or Criteo. If these services
| report a conversion, they return to me the ID I passed to
| them for the conversion (even if last-click doesn't match).
| jariel wrote:
| Anyone who is spending any reasonable amount of money knows
| that. Remember that ad spend that's not conversion oriented is
| really fuzzy anyhow. Small timers are not spending huge dollars
| just to show people images of things.
| JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
| After spending $~25 on ads and getting absolutely no
| conversion, I can assure you Facebook did a terrible job at
| making me feel like I got any value.
| sputr wrote:
| You know the concept of "conversion".
|
| So, so, so many people don't. Idea of ROI is foreign to them.
| Facebook is going this whole "be your own advertiser" thing
| and ... well, it's working.
|
| They see the pretty graphs and big number ("You reached 50k
| people!") and they thing it's fantastic. The idea that the
| conversion from 50k impressions could be 0% ... does not
| compute, because they imagine 50k people spending cognitive
| energy on their ad ... not 50k people scrolling past the ad
| never even noticing it.
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| $25 is a very small amount, you need to experiment more,
| driving traffic is only one part of the puzzle, you haven't
| got enough data to confirm which part of your campaign is the
| bottleneck to conversions.
| [deleted]
| seppin wrote:
| I'm sure Facebook would say the same thing. "You need to
| give us more money before we give you any value, or signs
| of value."
| wiether wrote:
| You forgot a "k" after 25 I guess ?
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| No way!
|
| 25k gets you more than 50k clicks, which would require less
| than a 0.002% conversion rate to produce no results.
| throwawayfb69 wrote:
| I have previously got a decent ROI from Facebook ads, but it
| was also very evident that they were not providing the service
| that they claimed. Whenever I ran specific locally targeted
| ads, large numbers of apparently fake accounts from around the
| world would like my business page: representing a significant
| percentage of the clicks that Facebook was claiming.
|
| Clearly, FB was reaching some relevant users, since I picked
| some up as customers, but this was ridiculously padded with
| users outside the demographic that I was paying for, and I had
| to again figure out whether people were potential customers
| (re-qualify them). This left a sour taste and, as a result, I
| will not use Facebook advertising again.
|
| I'm not sure why it's in Facebook's interest to lie like this.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| > I'm not sure why it's in Facebook's interest to lie like
| this.
|
| Looks like you are doing your homework. Not everyone does
| though. Even if 60% of people who buy ads try to correlate
| the data, well there is a 40% that doesn't. That's easy
| money.
|
| What surprises me is the coincidence that you ad drew the
| attentio of fake accounts. So, who preserves a network of
| fake accounts that will give you the false validation that
| you ad is working?
|
| I see the benefit to FB that these fake accounts exist (and
| are NOT detected/eradicated).
| throwawayfb69 wrote:
| I was less immediately bothered about the fake accounts
| ('like'-and-run at least is ignorable and does me no
| significant harm, even if it harms my belief in FB's
| authenticity and harms FB's reputation with me).
|
| But, I was extremely bothered about apparently real people
| contacting me who were well outside the demographic of
| people that I was paying for. I spent time dealing with
| them, and - as expected - they were unlikely to convert
| into customers.
|
| I would have re-employed FB 10 times over if I didn't
| actively have to deal with so many contacts outside of what
| I was paying for.
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| Could a fake account network be trying to hide themselves
| in plain sight by engaging with advertisements?
| rtkwe wrote:
| If the OP is targeting a specific region with their ads
| why are random accounts from outside seeing those ads?
| and if they're just looking around for random companies
| to like why is that being credited to the ad buy?
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| Spoofed gps?
| jfk13 wrote:
| My understanding is that the default behavior for
| location-targeted ads on FB is that they get shown both
| to users _in_ the relevant location _and_ to users who
| have said they are "interested" in it, even if their own
| location is the other side of the world.
| jcpham2 wrote:
| Past experience echoes parent under multiple _local_
| businesses. I feel like scammy and bogus likes might convert
| better for a non local internet only type of business, not so
| well locally
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Buying likes is a pointless endeavour at the best of times,
| and these are not the best of times to be buying likes on
| Facebook (maybe 2008-11 it worked?).
| rightbyte wrote:
| You might buy likes to impress your boss' boss if you are
| a marketer.
|
| Ofent I feel marketing is some kind of scheme to keep
| money flowing to marketing departements.
| _jal wrote:
| If would be more honest if FB would just outright sell likes.
|
| What they're doing now is more like loot boxes.
| tremon wrote:
| _[company 's] corporate incentive is to get you to FEEL like
| your getting good value out of [product]_
|
| Isn't this the entire raison d'etre of marketing, in general?
| sputr wrote:
| Well, yes. But while the targets used to be people employed
| by companies dishing out company money ... now it's A LOT
| small time advertisers. Like civil society. You would be
| surprised how few people, who advertise on Facebook have
| heard of the concept of ROI. Most of these people are not
| advertisers ... but are spending a lot of money on it.
| seppin wrote:
| If Facebook was a small company, this would constitute fraud.
| spideymans wrote:
| >Facebooks corporate incentive is to get you to FEEL like your
| getting good value out of advertising on Facebook and to get
| you addicted to doing it.
|
| Even more reason for us to be doubtful about FB's claims that
| small businesses would be decimated without FB's invasive
| tracking.
| cm2012 wrote:
| If FB was actually completely forbidden from tracking, I'd
| estimate 85% of small shopify stores would die with it. The
| winners would be giant marketplaces like Amazon, who would be
| the only reliable sources left of customer acquisition.
| dannyr wrote:
| So how did small businesses survive before Facebook? I'm
| pretty sure small businesses existed back then.
|
| /s
| cm2012 wrote:
| Reread my comment, I said Shopify stores. Local small
| businesses have other acquisition methods (walk through
| traffic, local search, etc.) and don't rely on FB.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Local small businesses have other acquisition methods
| (walk through traffic, local search, etc.) and don 't
| rely on FB._
|
| Facebook disagrees. It's even taken out full-page
| newspaper ads to tell people that if small businesses
| don't advertise (and permit invasive tracking) on
| Facebook, they'll go out of business and take the economy
| with them.
| cm2012 wrote:
| Small shopify stores are small businesses. Probably the
| fastest growing category of small businesses.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| > It's even taken out full-page newspaper ads
|
| LOL. This is quite a comment on their own opinion of
| their ad platform's influence.
| dillondoyle wrote:
| HN loves to praise the digitization & automation of other
| industries. Why is this different?
|
| Retail is dying, malls are bankrupt.
|
| COVID amplified this change and small business struggles.
| Even big corps are losing retail to online sales, GME is
| a meme example lol.
| cwkoss wrote:
| What percentage of small shopify stores' whole business is
| dropshipping cheap Chinese garbage at huge mark ups?
| notahacker wrote:
| probably not higher than Amazon marketplace's...
| bluGill wrote:
| Less than you might think because of all the small stores
| where the whole model is to offer something, collect
| money, and not ship at all.
|
| I don't buy from shopify or facebook anymore, and
| probably won't even if they clean up their act.
| stickfigure wrote:
| Probably not as large as you think? Print-on-demand is
| huge, and almost everyone prints domestically.
| Spivak wrote:
| That's the whole business of most stores. Trying to pin
| that on the web hosting platform seems odd. Being on
| Shopify is basically zero signal as to whether the
| product is any good.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| > That's the whole business of most stores
|
| Most stores buy and hold inventory, taking on the risk of
| not selling that inventory. Dropshippers send the order
| to someone else to fulfil, and are essentially glorified
| lead generators.
| pie420 wrote:
| 105%
| iamacyborg wrote:
| > I'd estimate 85% of small shopify stores would die with
| it
|
| And nothing of value was lost.
| dillondoyle wrote:
| It's patronizing to just throw out and blanket judge so
| many people and products just because you don't think
| they have value.
|
| There is value to the consumers purchasing products -
| many of which are innovative and to be copied later once
| successful. It's a giant AB test.
|
| There is also value to the business owners, small, medium
| and large.
|
| You could apply that opinion to any product whether on
| shopify or even bigger open marketplaces like amazon,
| walmart
| iamacyborg wrote:
| I mean, I think you could pretty safely cull 95% of the
| absolute junk on Amazon without any real loss (except to
| Amazon's advertising business).
| ahoka wrote:
| Most of those are probably just drop shipping with no
| real economical value.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Except for Shopify.
|
| I wonder what the ecological impact of all these
| dropshippers is.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Isn't it roughly the same as any other online shopping?
| The main difference is it's not getting warehoused in the
| US first but most of the products will flow through the
| same shipping channels.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| My assumption is that a traditional approach where a
| retailer orders thousands of units at once has a lower
| ecological impact than shipping items out on a purchase-
| by-purchase basis. I could definitely be wrong though.
| bluGill wrote:
| I doubt it. Everyone driving to the local retailer uses a
| lot of fuel. The truck uses more fuel than any two cars
| (this varies, but we can assume one is a SUV so close
| enough) for any distance, but the distance is overall
| much less because each car is going to the store, while
| the truck only needs to get from one house to the next,
| something shipping companies optimize. thus the amount of
| fuel assigned to any one package is less for the truck.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Depends a lot on the shipping method used between the
| dropshipper and retail right? If the DS store is using
| boats for their packages they're probably about the same
| as that's at best what the retail group is using.
| rightbyte wrote:
| You are probably not wrong. In my experience online
| retail ofent package stuff in the most ridiculously sized
| containers too. Trucks driving around with air.
| LexGray wrote:
| Facebook has users build huge profiles on themselves. Is
| there really 85% additional value stalking people over what
| they are already willing sharing?
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| What's your basis for this thesis? Likewise, how many of
| those shops are dropshippers that never touch product?
| jariel wrote:
| Facebook is one of the only means to do reasonably
| targeted advertising with a broad reach.
|
| Google is keyword only, and that's limited. Banner
| network display ads are useless.
|
| The privacy debate is woefully lopsided by people who
| have never spent a dime marketing. I suggest all the
| startupy people on HN spend some time trying to get the
| word out and then they'll realize what the 'hard part' of
| the business is because it's not code.
|
| Efficient advertising, which is to say getting in front
| of people who have a legit curiosity for your product
| with ads that are not distracting, is possible and ideal
| for everyone, but can only be done with at least some
| data.
|
| The economy would grow literally by 1% more if we could
| get people connected with the things they need, when they
| need them and we'd all be better off.
| Closi wrote:
| > The privacy debate is woefully lopsided by people who
| have never spent a dime marketing.
|
| Why should marketers influence how much privacy I have?
| Their incentive is for me to have as little privacy as
| possible.
|
| This is like saying anti-war campaigns are woefully
| lopsided by people who have never sold munitions.
| forgingahead wrote:
| Suprised at the downvotes on your comment, but you're
| right, Facebook provides an advertising targeting engine
| that doesn't have a parallel. Whether that's good or bad
| for is separate from whether it's a useful business tool.
|
| @jariel can you share any resource for people looking to
| understand and dip their feet running their own FB ads?
| jariel wrote:
| I would but there's actually quite an enormos amount of
| information out there already.
|
| Also, the pitfalls of FB ads are generally well known as
| well, we all know their numbers are a little ragged and
| we all know that 'likes' don't have much value in most
| scenarios.
|
| Frankly, I would encourage anyone to stick $20 into FB ad
| platform and just run a few ads to drive some traffic to
| their own pages. It's a powerful and revelatory
| experience, advertising is a 'dark art' to too many
| people but it shouldn't be.
|
| The moment you are in a position of having to market and
| sell a product, especially coming from another
| discipline, your world turns upside down and you see
| everything differently.
| forgingahead wrote:
| I've tinkered with it, and had poor experiences hiring
| people to run FB ads, so any specific resources you can
| recommend would be appreciated. Kind of like how I would
| recommend Michael Hartl's Rails tutorial for someone
| looking to explore Rails in a productive way.
|
| There is certainly a lot of information out there but
| much is generic, others are paid, and many are scams.
| leesalminen wrote:
| When it was time for us to start PPC ads for my B2B SaaS
| product, I took a whack at doing my own FB and AdWords
| campaigns. I found FB to be much more intuitive than
| Goog. I uploaded some collateral I threw together and
| targeted it towards people who were in specific Groups,
| people who liked specific things and excluded people who
| already liked our page. I clicked submit and after a day
| we started seeing an uptick in leads. Real, actionable
| leads. Meeting people at industry trade shows told me
| that they saw our FB ad. It worked (and still works) well
| for us in that small niche of the world with a well
| defined target demographic. I never felt compelled to
| hire anyone to manage it. I don't have any books to
| recommend for you, but why not do some trial and error
| with small budgets to see what works for you?
| bart_spoon wrote:
| This entire thesis hinges on targeted advertising being
| effective. There is a growing group of people who are
| increasingly doubtful of this [0].
|
| I personally have worked as a data scientist trying to
| assess the value generated by various advertising
| campaigns, and I personally found that the field is rife
| with egregious statistical misuse, usually because it was
| necessary to prove significant ROI on advertising.
|
| [0] https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-
| bubble-is-h...
| jariel wrote:
| "This entire thesis hinges on targeted advertising being
| effective. "
|
| Targeted ads are unequivocally more effective than non
| targeted ads, on the aggregate - there is no dispute
| other than at the margins.
|
| Do you think that advertising makeup to the general
| population has the same effectiveness than advertising it
| to women? Or women who have shown an interest in makeup?
|
| Ads are complicated and nuanced, but everyone in the
| industry already knows this.
|
| There will always be science at the margins as we
| discover the means by which people truly engage, but
| otherwise, there is no arguing with core demographic
| targeting. It would be like completely non-technical
| people saying "Javascript is completely ineffective
| because of null ambiguity" whereas it's universally used,
| and the limitations of JS are recognized to all but the
| most junior developers.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| The general consensus is that personalized advertising,
| specifically, is no better than contextual advertising
| that came before it. Everyone was fine and happy with
| contextual advertising.
| bluGill wrote:
| Which targeted is ineffective.
|
| Keywords can be useless while the whole field can be
| useful. Which is to say noting that I'm searching for C++
| and so advertising your compiler or programing class is
| useless - I'm already a programmer (I just forgot the
| exact spelling or order of arguments to the thing I need)
| and my company has chosen my compiler. However if you
| know I my hobby you can target me with your new drill bit
| and be better yet.
|
| Though the largest advertisers don't care. Coke doesn't
| care that I don't like soda, they still want to target me
| just in case I'm called to bring drinks to some event.
| Ford can safely assume all Americans own a car and be
| close enough to right. Likewise everyone uses toilet
| paper (bidet users can be ignored) and soap (if you don't
| use soap you should be the highest target, though the ads
| perhaps should be different from those who use soap)
| jariel wrote:
| The 'C++' keyword however, already narrows the target
| down to the 0.2% of the population, i.e. C++ devs. making
| it 500x more effective than a non-targeted ad.
|
| If only 10% of those typing C++ would ever be interested
| in a course, then those are not bad numbers.
|
| More nuanced: at the 'non-targeted' threshold the ad
| would not make sense at all, total inefficiency. At the
| targeted threshold of being able to target at least C++
| devs, the ad probably starts to work.
|
| _That is the difference between a viable business and
| not_
|
| That means engagement, value creation, sales, C++
| developers trained and ready for the market. This is
| _extremely good_ for society. We definitely want aspiring
| C++ devs hooked up with quality courses.
|
| This anecdote very tangibly demonstrates the
| effectiveness of targeting for individual companies ...
| but it also points to the market efficiency that comes
| along with good advertising.
|
| If you have a startup, and you can't reach any of your
| audience, you're dead. This notion of 'word of mouth' is
| ridiculous as a business plan, it's exceedingly rare, and
| usually it's not that anyhow in reality - it's usually a
| form of effective social marketing by the early movers.
| Clubhouse for example is being helped by the 'celebrity'
| of the VCs behind it - they don't have mass market
| following, but a very avid following in a certain niche
| that will come onto the platform. I'm noticing a lot of
| Marc Andreseen on Clubhouse, too much for a busy VC, but
| not too much for someone who's hyping his own investment
| and bringing in a lot of viewers, helping out a lot of
| panels.
|
| The essential nature of basic targeting is not
| controversial, it's quite obvious at least at the most
| crude level.
| godelski wrote:
| Coke doesn't advertise to get you to buy the product. In
| many situations you don't actually have a choice
| (restaurant, theatre, etc). They advertise to make you
| feel a certain way about the brand. Car companies do
| something similar. They aren't advertising to get you to
| buy the car but associate a certain prestige with the
| vehicle which in turn makes their actual target buy their
| car. I'm not sure why everyone thinks ads are strictly
| about buying things. There's political ads, religious
| ads, pubic service announcements, etc. Ads are versatile.
| bluGill wrote:
| Thanks for making my point better than I did.
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| This is an advertisement for _advertising_...
| [deleted]
| andreilys wrote:
| They aren't forbidden from tracking.
|
| They are being asked to get user consent to track, very
| different things.
| cm2012 wrote:
| "If", I am proposing a hypothetical.
| jandrese wrote:
| I've heard a claim that Facebook used to lie extravagantly about
| the numbers on video pieces, which is why so many outlets
| "pivoted to video" abruptly a few years ago. Many people think
| abandoning or cutting back on written content was a mistake and
| those outlets are in worse shape today.
| wwv25 wrote:
| This has been well known for many years now amongst those in the
| digital advertising business. And it's not just Facebook, but
| Google, Pinterest, Bing, Amazon, etc. They use vague definitions
| and slightly polished data to embellish the effect on marketing.
| For example, by Pinterest's definition, they consider a
| "conversion" to be an impression for an ad that converts to a
| sale sometime within the next 30 days, regardless if a user
| interacted with the ad (click, double click, etc) or had been
| exposed by an ad for the same product on a different site. It's
| an absurd metric definition.
|
| No digital marketing managers are fooled by this. I mean c'mon,
| given these companies' track records, you wouldn't blindly trust
| their performance reporting. Those who manage ad campaigns almost
| always correlate performance to metrics that are measurable on
| their end. The most common are ROAS (return on ad spend) and
| revenue. I think the only victims of this may be the individuals
| and super small-time marketers with small budgets who are
| inexperienced or lack measurable business outcomes.
| marketingtech wrote:
| No major advertisers rely on Facebook or any other ad platform's
| reported numbers. The platforms are grading their own homework,
| and even their abilities to do that are increasingly limited.
|
| Companies spend millions of dollars on these platforms because
| they know, directionally, that some amount of the advertising is
| effective. Sales go up when they advertise, sales go down when
| they stop.
|
| They use the reported metrics from the platforms to see which of
| their ad campaigns is relatively more effective than the next. No
| experienced marketers rely on these metrics to be accurate when
| making budget decisions.
| ishjoh wrote:
| > Companies spend millions of dollars on these platforms
|
| I agree with your point on the large companies that can spend
| millions of dollars.
|
| The folks that really get hurt by this stuff are the smaller
| businesses. It can be an expensive lesson when you think you're
| getting value from these services because they're providing
| bogus metrics. It's even more difficult if you can't correlate
| it to online sales, things like restaurants/retail locations
| this is especially difficult.
| bquest2 wrote:
| One thing that would help these small businesses would be SDK
| of sorts that would help them do proper attribution
| themselves.
|
| Something that would help tie an ad click to an actual
| purchase or an app download.
| marketingtech wrote:
| Right now, that's extremely difficult to do without leaking
| private data. Google and Facebook experimented with it for
| a while, but both killed the test products because it would
| require them to trust advertisers with data that could
| easily be de-anonymized. It's kind of a funny twist that
| Google and Facebook are able to avoid offering this in the
| name of user privacy, while the advertising industry is
| begging them to share more user data.
|
| That said, they're all part of an industry consortium
| that's working on differential privacy algorithms that will
| ideally allow businesses to check each other's attribution
| without actually sharing the personal data involved.
| https://developers.googleblog.com/2019/09/enabling-
| developer...
| efwfwef wrote:
| I thought the pixel was exactly this?
| suref wrote:
| I had an ad on facebook for a website and I saw a lot of
| attention on the post in form of likes and even comments but
| almost zero clicks to the actual website. I'm never buying
| another ad there, that's for sure.
| TechnoTimeStop wrote:
| Would anyone else be surprised if FACEBOOK IS COMMITING
| SECURITIES FRAUD?
| cm2012 wrote:
| The genre of people who don't work in advertising complaining
| about how Facebook is bad for advertising is a true HN favorite.
|
| We get it, you don't like FB. That's fine. As an advertiser who
| knows that FB is far and above every other attention based ad
| platform (in effectiveness, transparency, scale, etc.), its like
| listening to nails on a chalkboard to read 90% of the comments in
| threads like these.
| omginternets wrote:
| I don't think that's fair. I can both recognize that FB is
| better than nothing, whilst also accusing them of fraudulent
| behavior.
| HonestOp001 wrote:
| What have been your strategies on Facebook that you have found
| to work?
| cm2012 wrote:
| Depends what you're trying to do. This is a good place to
| start: https://adespresso.com/guides/facebook-ads-beginner/.
| I am not associated with Ad Espresso in any way.
| efwfwef wrote:
| This ^
|
| It's mostly a hate post about facebook, rather than an
| interesting post. When you pay for advertising, you are always
| in the dark about the value you're getting unless you actually
| actively try to measure it yourself. If you don't, then you're
| committing a newbie mistake.
| whatshisface wrote:
| You should write a counter blog post explaining the case, and
| evidence, for Facebook being a good platform. Then we could
| have a real debate instead of flowing along with the
| counterzeitgeist.
| cm2012 wrote:
| There are many counter posts. They will never, ever be
| upvoted on Hacker News.
| eslaught wrote:
| Then show us some instead of waving your hands.
|
| For what it's worth, I have no real stake in ads one way or
| the other, but I would upvote a post if it was backed by
| solid data.
| hiq wrote:
| > for Facebook being a good platform
|
| That's not what OP claimed. OP claimed:
|
| > FB is far and above every other attention based ad platform
| (in effectiveness, transparency, scale, etc.)
|
| So OP didn't say FB was good in absolute terms, but that it's
| better than anything else. That's quite different, especially
| in the context of HN, where we talk a lot about FB, but not
| so much about other ad platforms.
| glitcher wrote:
| I agree with your nails on a chalkboard sentiment, but for me
| it comes from the genre of people who do armchair meta-analysis
| of the entire HN population.
| lapnitnelav wrote:
| What about actual open (to an extent granted) platforms as
| opposed to those proto publishers / platforms like FB / TW /
| ... ?
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| Twitter has the absolute worst ROI on ads I've ever seen, it
| doesn't surprise me that Facebook inflates/fakes their numbers at
| all.
| [deleted]
| spunker540 wrote:
| The issue here is the "potential reach" calculation when setting
| up an audience/targeting for a campaign. It has nothing to do
| with the billing for actual impressions. If you say you want to
| target "English speakers in the US" the potential reach may say
| 200M. However your ad spend limits and frequency and bid options
| and ad creative ultimately determine who sees the ad at what
| price, and generally prevent you from ever hitting that max reach
| anyways. Apparently that potential reach calculation was known to
| be off by some percentage (maybe overestimating potential reach).
| It has no bearing on what you get charged as an advertiser and I
| doubt this disrupted any campaigns.
| tylermenezes wrote:
| The issue here is actually that the "potential reach" was
| inflated by a large number of accounts which Facebook knew were
| fake, but didn't care to remove. Those accounts were not
| distributed evenly across all targeting parameters, which means
| advertisers were setting up their audiences differently than
| they may have otherwise.
| supernovae wrote:
| I totally believe most of facebook advertising is fake... but man
| you're damned if you do and damned if you don't when it comes to
| consumers.
|
| Stop spending money on facebook and you will lose marketshare to
| those that do - even if much of it is fake.
|
| Make a better website with no ads, no trackers, no popups and no
| distractions and people visit and leave quickly...
|
| But.. if you do everything people hate, you seem to get enough
| conversions to still be viable.
|
| I guess tl;dr - most consumers don't care and especially the ones
| who have money to spend. The ones that do care, don't spend money
| and certainly don't do so with any altruism to those places that
| respect their privacy/browser/sessions.
| Havoc wrote:
| Ouch. Not a good look when your business is essentially based on
| trust that you'll show ads to as many real people as you say
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-02-19 23:01 UTC)