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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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
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?).
> 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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
This is incredibly not true. For one, the best data point FB has on predicting personal likelihood to click an ad is which ads that person has clicked in the past.
I don't know what you are objecting to i.e. Social Media surprisingly not knowing a lot about us - or - the need only for relatively small amount of solid demo data.
On the first point - they just don't know that much about us. That's what the whole post is about (!) They were lying advertisers ad to the probabilistic estimates of who we are.
Google will show what they know about you if you have that on. It's not very accurate at all. It's very fuzzy. For me they have wrong age, a lot of wrong interests.
So they surprisingly don't know a lot, just because someone clicks on an add ... that is not a lot of information - there's so many reasons we click on ads. Google thinks I'm into cars and I don't even drive, I hate cars!
As for basic targeting - it's mostly what advertisers need. So age, education, income, zip code (or zip code classification), rough location would be great. Plus just a few, solid interests (real ones, not estimated) - and that would be a big step forward for ads.
So yes - our privacy is fairly aggressively invaded at the same time they can only glean so much from it. Seems like a Paradox.
Do you have any evidence to back this up? I can't find any published literature where Facebook has hinted this, including this paper [0] saying:
> As expected the most important thing is to have the right features: those capturing historical information about the user or ad dominate other types of features.
Wow, the "general consensus". That's why FBs advertising revenue is so low compared to Reddit! If only personalized advertising were effective, FB could be worth something.
Google search also uses personalised advertising. If you search for restaurants you will get ads for restaurants nearby, if you search for clothes it will match the ad results to your gender if google knows it, you can also do the same remarketing techniques with other ads (eg if someone has visited your website and they search for a related topic you can make sure your ad is displayed).
> There is a growing group of people who are increasingly doubtful of this
Most targeted advertising, sure.
Targeted ads based on interests? Diet? General age range? Of course those will be more effective.
Showing me targeted ads for fitness products has been very effective, I have a yoga and a workout app I use that are both 100% due to targeted ads. I also have tried out various food products (keto cereal!) due to targeted ads.
Interest based ads work, if done well. Now that said, ads for stuff I already bought, eh, less so. Even worse if I buy something from an ad, get it home, unbox it, then google for help. Now I get ads trying to sell me the same product again. Though I'm not sure how horribly invasive ads would have to be to avoid that scenario.
I've generally found FB ads to be, honestly, useful at times.
What I really don't trust are kickstarter campaigns running YT ads. Shouts 'scam!' to me almost instantly.
Also that YT ad that was playing a few months ago for the $20 adjustable dumbbell set that went to a super shady site. (Normally adjustable dumbbells go for $500+...) It appeared to be a fake storefront, but YT kept happily running the ad day after day.
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)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
No specific resources, but I’ll give you a tip that has turned around a lot of campaigns and helped a number of clients figure it a profitable FB advertising strategy.
Offer something free, like an ebook, webinar, etc. and gather email addresses to access it.
This gives you a chance to follow up and grow your email lists. So even if they don’t buy, you at least get a lead. When you just buy a click, you always gotta hit a Homer. Figure out it a way to make base hits count.
The economy is growing 2-3% these days, so another point on that is about a 30% increase in growth and would be a spectacular for humanity.
Your privacy is not compromised by Facebook. Nobody is harmed. There are zero cases of people being hurt or their lives being denigrated due to targeted advertising.
FB is not perfect, I think there are better ways, I don't like them, but it's hyperbolic to suggest there is material systematic harm. Nobody is really losing that much.
Do you and I live in different universes? The one I live in blamed FB for allowing 3rd partner apps to download loads of personal information, and then use it to send targeted adds to influence an election. Also, adds spreading misinformation about Covid 19. At the early part of FB, kids could upload pictures with their EXIF data that included GPS coordinates- which were then used for kidnapping or serial molestation.
With location tracking for adds, no one even needs a legitimate reason to buy location data. Thus can be used for thugs to track down and kill people they don't like.
Nobody is harmed by virtue of invasion of their privacy.
Ads, which relate to misinformation about COVID and elections are completely separate issue, and basically have nothing to do with the detailed nature of targeting.
'Harmful Ads' can be on any platform in the world - Google, Television, Magazines, Billboards.
There is no harm to you due to the fact that FB has a 90% chance of knowing your gender, age, and a couple of your interests. None.
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.
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.
I don't consider the majority of drop-shippers to be economically productive businesses: they are charging a premium because their customers don't know that they can buy the exact same SKUs from AliExpress. Customers of these business often pay 2-5x mark up on items based on marketing and lack of information, because these business are effectively just pure marketing plays.
There are certainly good small businesses, both on Shopify and elsewhere, and some would be hurt to some small degree by this change. I'm simply arguing that the majority of business which would go broke without the use of the FB ad system tracking panopticon are not the sort of small business which are societally useful or that we should mourn their loss.
"Small businesses going bankrupt" typically is thought of a negative thing, but there are flavors of small businesses where it is really a net societal good.
> I don't consider the majority of drop-shippers to be economically productive businesses: they are charging a premium because their customers don't know that they can buy the exact same SKUs from AliExpress.
That's certainly selling drop-shippers short.
They provide products, at prices people are willing to pay for convenience, trustability, etc. They handle complaints, shoulder the risk of returns and/or damaged in shipment items, pay for their own advertising/marketing and more.
Many Tier-1 distributors enjoy their relationship with drop-shippers... and many customers enjoy that very same relationship too.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
$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.
I spent a few hundred dollars, in $25 increments. I ran different ad copy, different visuals, different times of day.
The difference in effectiveness between different visuals and ad copy ranged from "no one clicked this" to "10% conversion after hitting my landing page."
For the right audience, with the right campaign, FB ads do work.
But you have to play around, and what does work might not be intuitive.
Also I found out that the ad copy that worked on FB didn't work on Reddit, and vis versa.
Wouldn't finding a well converting copy and targeting combo throw all the statistical significance issues out the window?
I mean you can start experiments with statistically significant results branching from that, but when you are tight on budget, and just want to start out, it might be better to just randomly find something which can get the ball rolling?
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.
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.
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.
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.
The technology site Silicon Alley Insider got hold of some of the messages and, this past spring, posted the transcript of a conversation between Zuckerberg and a friend, outlining how he was planning to deal with Harvard Connect:
FRIEND: so have you decided what you are going to do about the websites?
ZUCK: yea i’m going to fuck them
ZUCK: probably in the year
ZUCK: *ear
In another exchange leaked to Silicon Alley Insider, Zuckerberg explained to a friend that his control of Facebook gave him access to any information he wanted on any Harvard student:
ZUCK: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard
ZUCK: just ask
ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns
FRIEND: what!? how’d you manage that one?
ZUCK: people just submitted it
ZUCK: i don’t know why
ZUCK: they “trust me”
ZUCK: dumb fucks
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
The fraud Facebook habitually engages in is one thing. The psychological effects of their apps on their users is another. Machine learning gears the content toward what spikes emotion in the moment. Social media is the new cigarettes.
The thing that confuses me about the Facebook like, follow, or click fraud is: it seems like Facebook is stringent with their real name + real person policy and bans people that violate it. So how are all of these bots surviving? And if somehow they are real people's accounts: how are they getting outside the geo fencing / geo targeting?
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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...
The pixel would be controlled by FB which in this case isn't incentivized to give you true results. I'm assuming the parent comment meant some kind of independent SDK.
Of course when it comes to the GDPR both would be illegal unless proper, informed consent has been obtained beforehand.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
Well, realistically speaking there is no alternative to Facebook. If you want to target individuals by interests FB is the only platform that allows it. Sure, there are other places where you could place your ads, and depending on the market if you can find niche sites, or even better communities, you might even get an order of magnitude better ROI, but the great thing about FB is that it's too easy to utilize as an advertiser.
As for click-fraud is pervasive in the online world. I don't think there's any major platform that doesn't have a fraud problem, and I can't realistically think of a solution that's not too much of a problem to work it out. Google is supposedly on top of it for more than a decade, but I haven't met a single person advertising on AdWords who doesn't think that they get fake traffic. I've even read reports that state that one third of global ad traffic is fraudulent.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
When Google Adwords started I found it useful both as an advertiser and buyer. At some point it became too intrusive as a buyer and ineffective as an advertiser.
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.
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.
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.