Weren't the advertisers paying for the results by proxy -- clearly they saw that the results were worth the payment made. And they continued paying what they felt was a fair price for the results they saw.
So while the numbers measured may be different, the advertisers weren't naive enough to use that as the only metric to plan ads.
I think that assumes that advertisers can immediately see the effect of brand advertising on the bottom line or some other metric, something I wouldn't assume especially for big businesses focused on awareness advertising.
Smart advertisers were (and not just direct response advertisers... brand advertisers to), but not advertisers are savvy enough to know what to measure. Also, Facebook could benefit from clarifying some of their definitions definitions as you might think they represent one thing when really they are another.
I get the impression a lot of Facebook/Google advertisers aren't making any money on their campaigns, I know from my own experience it was a lot of work to get a positive result from them.
This is not new, and I've spoken about this here before. Facebook used fraudulent methods to artificially inflate their view counts, and pedelled those fake and grossly exagerrated #s for "eyeballs" to the unsuspecting advertizers.
"How Facebook is Stealing Billions of Views" - Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell exposed this with detailed analysis and evidence. Watch it here => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q
I contracted with their Ad team for a few months, and can't say more for NDA reasons, hence I am pointing you to publicly available media / expose.
I watched the video you linked to, which is mostly about people who rip content from YouTube and upload it to Facebook.
The people who view the pirated content are still viewing content on FB. That isn't "artificially inflat[ing] their view counts." Those are real views, which is what advertisers are paying for, even if what they are viewing is stolen.
The point about counting 3 seconds of auto-play as a view is problematic, unless advertisers know that is what they are paying for. Maybe 3 seconds is enough for someone to glance at it and at least read the brand name in their mind, which does seem to count as an "impression".
Bit into the video they mention explictly that "Facebook is cheating" and "they autoplay and count 3 seconds (even with no audio on) as view", meaning that if you are scrolling trough your feed slowly enough, you count as viewer, event if you don't.
> When I paid to promote my page I gained 80,000 followers in developing countries who didn't care about Veritasium (but I wasn't aware of this at the time). They drove my reach and engagement numbers down, basically rendering the page useless.
> I thought I would demonstrate that the same thing is still happening now by creating Virtual Cat (http://www.facebook.com/MyVirtualCat). I was surprised to discover something worse - false likes are coming from everywhere, including Canada, the US, the UK, and Australia. So even those carefully targeting their campaigns are likely being duped into spending real money on fake followers. Then when they try to reach their followers they have to pay again.
Yes, this one also. If anyone thinks this is a 'Conspiracy theory', you can confirm or refute it yourself for less than 50$, the way I did and the way the BBC reporter in this above video did.
After I left the Ad Team, and horrified at what I saw as widespread fraud, I registered a throwaway domain, put some viral videos from youtube, injected google analytics on the site / blog, bought a pre-paid visa card for 50$ (so facebook doesn't keep auto charging my card) and 'promoted' my blog posts shared on a Facebook page I set up.
Just like the BBC author, I noticed most of my 'Likes' on the FB page were from Indonesia, Pakistan, and many from Vietnam. And I checked some of the profiles, and they either appeared down right fake (i.e. no activity other than liking a 1000+ FB pages, or they weren't active since like 2011 or 12.
Worse still, for the pages I did promote - i.e. blog posts shared on FB wall for 5$ / day, I barely got 10 click-throughs to the actual post, but the Ad analytics said I "reached 600 / 700 something" viewers.
WTF does that mean??? ( I know what it means, that they "displayed" it in their feed) But how does this help any one, think small businesses, grow their brand or business??)
FB audited a bunch of metrics and found issues with 4 out of 220. The narrative being pushed here is that all of them nefariously favored FB. The only problem with that is that it's not true.
> """Elsewhere, Facebook admitted to exaggerating the number of full views that video ads received"""
You can tell they didn't do any homework, since the issue was that full views were under reported when the audio and video tracks were not the exact same length. The result is that full views were actually roughly 35% greater than what page managers saw reported.
http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/11/an-update-on-metrics-and... goes into the details of what the issues with each metric calculation is. You can draw your own conclusions as to whether each was (a) important and (b) favored FB. That link also goes into FB's plans for next steps in making metrics externally audited and more transparent.
Actually in this case VT refers to View-Throughs, ie. post-impression performance or conversions that occur from someone who sees a display ad impression, doesn't click, but later converts.
So what? That's what FB can do when they find an issue. You are free to sue them if you feel that you have lost money because of this. Go ahead, that's what courts are for.
But I guess what many really want is for government to step in and use government force to punish FB until people feel that some kind of justice has been done. (burn the witch!)
That's why democracy is fundamentally incompatible with liberty.
On a side note: The media is attacking FB because they feel that FB doesn't censor and steer public opinion in the way they would like it to be. They are all up in arms claiming that Trump is FB's fault after they themselves have reported 24/7 on Trump. (but so biased, even Stalin would have cringed) That's the only reason why this article even exists.
It's not a question of "doing their homework". That's the naive cop-out. The inflation of metrics and numbers is company-wide, and I am pretty certain most - if not all of it - is deliberate. Especially after 'Zuck' took the Company Public.
The NY Post are the ones that didn't do their homework. Their source for this article is FB trying for transparency.
If you have proof of inflating metrics and numbers, especially deliberately, you're welcome to post some. Posting detailed reports of errors discovered during an internal audit when under no obligation to do so, on the other hand, is not in keeping with your conspiracy theory.
A public company is obligated to report quarterly, in a prescribed format, a bunch of high-level information material to the business by Regulation S-K and Regulation S-X.
A public company is not obligated to rush out details like "We’ve determined that the average time spent per article had been over-reported by 7-8% on average since August of last year. This was caused by a calculation error: we were calculating the average across a histogram of time spent, instead of reflecting the total time spent reading an article divided by its total views."
Forget about this article and consider the video metrics they inflated. They counted a 3 sec play as a video view and that's a big thing. 4 out of 220 is still a big number for a big company such as FB to be wrong at.
> I get the big brother corp hate, but let's be reasonable and factual with it if we must go this way
I fail to see how calling FB out on cherrypicking criteria for counting conversion on videos is invalid because those criteria were made know ealier. This is IMHO alike of arguments over e-bay auctions doing "image scam" not being scam because you knew what was sold, after all it was there in auction's description. It's still dishonesty.
What I don't understand is why people think FB lying about metrics helps them. Aren't these people keeping track of sales? Those should show that if FB was getting all these views they aren't worth much as their sales didn't go up.
Course the clients might be running several campaigns at once and can't tell what is driving sales. If only they knew what half of advertising dollars worked!
Is there any way for advertisers to independently verify FB's reported numbers at will? Or do they all rely on FB being honest? If FB's self-reporting is all that advertisers rely on, that seems like it would be an obvious problem, and the same goes for any other platform. The problem seems so obvious there must be checks in place, so I'm curious what they are.
Yes. If you see reports of sdks proliferation in the top apps you will see strange sdks like "mobileapptracking" from has offers. They are independent firms that can check ids from clicks and perform auditing. These firms are under assault by Apple & fb by means of removing traceable ids (uuid is gone, mac is gone, idfa is now resetable). Larger firms rely on dumb money and their audits can be crushing.
Facebook advertising ROI is horrible. Not worth the effort. Sure, it works our for some but most end up learning the hard way that FB is a great way to burn cash, fast.
Not trolling but genuinely curious what kind of things you are trying to advertise. I have read elsewhere exactly the opposite that Facebook ROI is very good due to the precise targeting. I am just a back-end developer!
A variety of consumer products by our customers. Google has better ROI and pretty decent targeting.
One of the most blatant issues with FB is what they did with their pages. You spend tons of money and effort building an audience and they don't let you reach it unless you pay. And pay through your teeth you must, every time you want to reach your followers.
In other words, you never own your audience. This is a huge business mistake. You want to own your audience. Your list is worth gold. Here's where email marketing (to a vetted list) still beats FB.
If you use FB to drive traffic to a site, have people hop-on to your email list and then market directly, sure, yeah, that works. You can do that with Google just as well.
Someone hit a 'like' for your post or your page is not a follower. I see this assumption in people who think that convincing people to hit the like button on whatever click-bait they throw out there is somehow building an audience. I, and just about everyone else, is quite happy that FB forces you to pay a toll to spam my page as it cuts down on the marketing BS I have to wade through every day.
I truly hope everyone follows your advice to drive traffic over to an email list, being able to dump your marketing into my spam folder takes fewer clicks than marking your follow-up posts as something I never want to see again in my FB news feed.
I was over-simplifying the "like" thing. Of course, you are right. It takes a lot more than clicking a "like" button for someone to truly engage with your business.
And this is exactly one of the problems with FB. So many people pay good money for what effectively translates to nothing. I have personally watched a campaign delivered 400 visitors per minute (peak) to a site and produced exactly zero sales in three days. Not blaming FB 100% for this, of course. But, if you measure it, they do tend to produce a lot of useless clicks.
Here's the difference between FB advertising and AdWords. It's simple.
People to to FB to chit-chat with friends and family. Not to buy.
People go to Google because their are looking for something and, yes, they are far more likely to be in a buying mindset. Particularly when compared to FB.
When was the last time anyone said: "I need to buy a rug. Let's go check them out on Facebook". Never. It's Google or Amazon.
The thing is that ad ROI is super hard to measure for branding campaigns. Coca-Cola can't tell exactly what their Facebook ROI is and a lot of the people who buy ads for those types of companies have incentives to overrate the ROI of these ads, too (because thats basically the rating of their work).
Interesting, I suppose I never thought about it from the perspective of an advertiser who is not direct response driven. That is, there may actually be players in the exchange who are buying eyeballs -- not conversions.
Your math doesn't work out. If 10% are real, you'd need to bid 90% less. And that also totally ignores that you are bidding against others and wont get clicks for 90% less.
This is true. However, Facebook & Google deal mainly with 'dumb money', eg, ad money not analyzed or checked. Fraud doesn't affect people that know how to calculate ROI from a CPC campaign -- fraud affects "Coke" trying to run a large spend near the end of the quarter. Thus when these large companies ignore fraud or view inflation -- it does steal from ad companies that could have offered a real ROI and it steals from the client.
And as long as there are dumb clients out there spending vast sums of money indiscriminately without demanding to see results, there will be very little motivation to fix anything. Those clients are mentally still stuck in the TV age, where measuring results is hard and hoping for the best is the mindset.
Lol what? Facebook and Google promised to solve the measurement problem and uhh... they haven't.
As far as I can tell the entire ad industry is just all the various parties either fudging numbers or blatantly lying to each other. So long as no one calls anyone else out, they all walk away with a happy sum.
It gets even funnier. Because of dumb money - the costs per CPI goes up. Thus startups can never tell why fb ads have little to no return. AND fb and google are incentivized to make the system less transparent.
I've got to throw in my two cents, I recently ran an ad campaign that was extremely successful with very low cost per not only click, but cost per conversion/acquisition. Keep in mind this ad campaign only dealt with people located and posting in the US but even if some of the "clicks" were fake it still was the cheapest and by far most effective campaign that I've ever ran.
I was constantly updating and monitoring my campaign just like an Adwords campaign which you should. These aren't "set and forget" hope you get customers. Monitor your return, if results are poor move your ad dollars elsewhere.
I've spent millions on FBX. Unless I'm missing something, Facebook has nothing to gain and a lot to lose from "artificially inflating" views.
FBX is an ad EXCHANGE where inventory gets sold to the highest bidder. If FB over-reports views by a factor of 2X to advertisers, the average CPM that advertisers are willing to pay will simply fall by 50%. Sure, there may be a short time period before bids equilibrate, but FB is liquid enough that this would happen extremely quickly.
The same principle applies to people up in arms concerning "click fraud" on Facebook and/or Google's ad networks. As an advertiser, you really should not CARE if there is click fraud. So long as it impacts all advertisers equally, we're all bidding for the same quality inventory.
It's useful to keep in mind that the vast majority of advertisers on any liquid ad network will not be successful. It's easy to rationalize that the reason you aren't able to make the channel work is that the network "rips off" its advertisers. In reality, there is no incentive for them to do so.
Besides, if click fraud is rampant it is no consolation to say "well, at least everyone's ads are being clicked by bots!" The end game isn't to win the ad auction, it's to be seen by real people who might buy your product.
This assumes an even distribution of click fraud and wrong measurement along all advertisers and the ability to perfectly measure the ROI of your Facebook ads which is as strong (and in my opinion wrong) assumption to make...
That's fair. It's not fair if advertisers are impacted differently. But, my main point is Facebook has a lot more to lose than gain by inflating clicks/views, so it's very likely to be an honest mistake.
So naive. Inflating clicks / views let's them charge more to advertizers (who falsely think that advertising on facebook is more ROI than on Google or elsewhere). And what Facebook gains is increases in share price every time they declare their earnings.
The only anecdote I can give where I know for a fact Facebook ads have a real and clear ROI is people who build pages and groups to sell stuff exclusively on Facebook. The 3 or so people I've asked tell me the ads work. Of course Facebook fully determines the "doesn't work" outcome as well, so...
Good. Regardless of the details in this particular disclosure, the sooner these huge online companies are properly accountable for the money they take and the results they provide, the better it will be for everyone using them.
But remember kids, there are only two metrics that truly matter here: how much did you spend on Facebook ads, and how much revenue did you bring in as a result? Everything else, all the other metrics, all the different forms of advertising and different relationships Facebook invents in their world, these things are merely tools to optimise the ratio of the two metrics that count and they have value only to the extent that they do so.
"It’s not difficult to measure engagement." => with video ads it's doable but it's always approximations when it comes to ad viewability (and for example, even if I can see an ad, it does not mean I'm watching it)
"Online advertising has a history of opaque reporting" => compare this to TV or radio
It's clearly an article against Facebook Ads, even if they are miscalculating things, it seems too biased to be taken seriously.
If you're generating metrics to benefit yourself, chances are that those would be broken. If those are broken in ways obvious to the users (advertisers in this case), it'd cause headache too.
I take Facebook video view numbers about as seriously as the Google+ numbers from a few years ago. Remember that monster growth in users month after month that didn't really exist? Feels like the same thing.
FB ads are complete scam. I tried to run few ad campaigns on fb for my pet project, and the got hundred likes from absolutely irrelevant people, with zero engagement.
Is there any surprise here? A platform whose existence is based on clickbait and other worthless content was not careful in tracking ad success metrics?
This is why we don't pay programmers to find bugs, but from the opposite perspective.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 83.9 ms ] threadSo while the numbers measured may be different, the advertisers weren't naive enough to use that as the only metric to plan ads.
"How Facebook is Stealing Billions of Views" - Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell exposed this with detailed analysis and evidence. Watch it here => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q
I contracted with their Ad team for a few months, and can't say more for NDA reasons, hence I am pointing you to publicly available media / expose.
The people who view the pirated content are still viewing content on FB. That isn't "artificially inflat[ing] their view counts." Those are real views, which is what advertisers are paying for, even if what they are viewing is stolen.
The point about counting 3 seconds of auto-play as a view is problematic, unless advertisers know that is what they are paying for. Maybe 3 seconds is enough for someone to glance at it and at least read the brand name in their mind, which does seem to count as an "impression".
Yes. Exactly this. And a few more 'hacks' the 'Zuck' way ... :)
> When I paid to promote my page I gained 80,000 followers in developing countries who didn't care about Veritasium (but I wasn't aware of this at the time). They drove my reach and engagement numbers down, basically rendering the page useless.
> I thought I would demonstrate that the same thing is still happening now by creating Virtual Cat (http://www.facebook.com/MyVirtualCat). I was surprised to discover something worse - false likes are coming from everywhere, including Canada, the US, the UK, and Australia. So even those carefully targeting their campaigns are likely being duped into spending real money on fake followers. Then when they try to reach their followers they have to pay again.
Yes, this one also. If anyone thinks this is a 'Conspiracy theory', you can confirm or refute it yourself for less than 50$, the way I did and the way the BBC reporter in this above video did.
After I left the Ad Team, and horrified at what I saw as widespread fraud, I registered a throwaway domain, put some viral videos from youtube, injected google analytics on the site / blog, bought a pre-paid visa card for 50$ (so facebook doesn't keep auto charging my card) and 'promoted' my blog posts shared on a Facebook page I set up.
Just like the BBC author, I noticed most of my 'Likes' on the FB page were from Indonesia, Pakistan, and many from Vietnam. And I checked some of the profiles, and they either appeared down right fake (i.e. no activity other than liking a 1000+ FB pages, or they weren't active since like 2011 or 12.
Worse still, for the pages I did promote - i.e. blog posts shared on FB wall for 5$ / day, I barely got 10 click-throughs to the actual post, but the Ad analytics said I "reached 600 / 700 something" viewers.
WTF does that mean??? ( I know what it means, that they "displayed" it in their feed) But how does this help any one, think small businesses, grow their brand or business??)
> """Elsewhere, Facebook admitted to exaggerating the number of full views that video ads received"""
You can tell they didn't do any homework, since the issue was that full views were under reported when the audio and video tracks were not the exact same length. The result is that full views were actually roughly 35% greater than what page managers saw reported.
http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/11/an-update-on-metrics-and... goes into the details of what the issues with each metric calculation is. You can draw your own conclusions as to whether each was (a) important and (b) favored FB. That link also goes into FB's plans for next steps in making metrics externally audited and more transparent.
Now if only they'd let me use DCM tags to measure impression data and VTs.
'VT', in this context, probably meant 'viewability tracking' or 'viewability targeting'.
But I guess what many really want is for government to step in and use government force to punish FB until people feel that some kind of justice has been done. (burn the witch!)
That's why democracy is fundamentally incompatible with liberty.
On a side note: The media is attacking FB because they feel that FB doesn't censor and steer public opinion in the way they would like it to be. They are all up in arms claiming that Trump is FB's fault after they themselves have reported 24/7 on Trump. (but so biased, even Stalin would have cringed) That's the only reason why this article even exists.
It's not a question of "doing their homework". That's the naive cop-out. The inflation of metrics and numbers is company-wide, and I am pretty certain most - if not all of it - is deliberate. Especially after 'Zuck' took the Company Public.
If you have proof of inflating metrics and numbers, especially deliberately, you're welcome to post some. Posting detailed reports of errors discovered during an internal audit when under no obligation to do so, on the other hand, is not in keeping with your conspiracy theory.
You dont think a public company is obligated to audit internal controls and keep shareholders and regulators in the loop?
A public company is not obligated to rush out details like "We’ve determined that the average time spent per article had been over-reported by 7-8% on average since August of last year. This was caused by a calculation error: we were calculating the average across a histogram of time spent, instead of reflecting the total time spent reading an article divided by its total views."
3+ seconds representing a single FB view has been the definition of a video view on FB since the metric became public.
https://medium.com/@hankgreen/is-facebook-lying-about-video-...
I get the big brother corp hate, but let's be reasonable and factual with it if we must go this way
I fail to see how calling FB out on cherrypicking criteria for counting conversion on videos is invalid because those criteria were made know ealier. This is IMHO alike of arguments over e-bay auctions doing "image scam" not being scam because you knew what was sold, after all it was there in auction's description. It's still dishonesty.
Course the clients might be running several campaigns at once and can't tell what is driving sales. If only they knew what half of advertising dollars worked!
Now if you want to post a lynching or ads for ISIS feel free to do so
One of the most blatant issues with FB is what they did with their pages. You spend tons of money and effort building an audience and they don't let you reach it unless you pay. And pay through your teeth you must, every time you want to reach your followers.
In other words, you never own your audience. This is a huge business mistake. You want to own your audience. Your list is worth gold. Here's where email marketing (to a vetted list) still beats FB.
If you use FB to drive traffic to a site, have people hop-on to your email list and then market directly, sure, yeah, that works. You can do that with Google just as well.
I truly hope everyone follows your advice to drive traffic over to an email list, being able to dump your marketing into my spam folder takes fewer clicks than marking your follow-up posts as something I never want to see again in my FB news feed.
And this is exactly one of the problems with FB. So many people pay good money for what effectively translates to nothing. I have personally watched a campaign delivered 400 visitors per minute (peak) to a site and produced exactly zero sales in three days. Not blaming FB 100% for this, of course. But, if you measure it, they do tend to produce a lot of useless clicks.
Here's the difference between FB advertising and AdWords. It's simple.
People to to FB to chit-chat with friends and family. Not to buy.
People go to Google because their are looking for something and, yes, they are far more likely to be in a buying mindset. Particularly when compared to FB.
When was the last time anyone said: "I need to buy a rug. Let's go check them out on Facebook". Never. It's Google or Amazon.
Most of views, if not all, are from click farms. Stop wasting your money.
FBX is a RTB ad exchange. If only 10% of clicks are real, you simply bid 10% less than you would otherwise. You'll get the same ROI.
As far as I can tell the entire ad industry is just all the various parties either fudging numbers or blatantly lying to each other. So long as no one calls anyone else out, they all walk away with a happy sum.
I was constantly updating and monitoring my campaign just like an Adwords campaign which you should. These aren't "set and forget" hope you get customers. Monitor your return, if results are poor move your ad dollars elsewhere.
FBX is an ad EXCHANGE where inventory gets sold to the highest bidder. If FB over-reports views by a factor of 2X to advertisers, the average CPM that advertisers are willing to pay will simply fall by 50%. Sure, there may be a short time period before bids equilibrate, but FB is liquid enough that this would happen extremely quickly.
The same principle applies to people up in arms concerning "click fraud" on Facebook and/or Google's ad networks. As an advertiser, you really should not CARE if there is click fraud. So long as it impacts all advertisers equally, we're all bidding for the same quality inventory.
It's useful to keep in mind that the vast majority of advertisers on any liquid ad network will not be successful. It's easy to rationalize that the reason you aren't able to make the channel work is that the network "rips off" its advertisers. In reality, there is no incentive for them to do so.
That's a huge assumption.
Besides, if click fraud is rampant it is no consolation to say "well, at least everyone's ads are being clicked by bots!" The end game isn't to win the ad auction, it's to be seen by real people who might buy your product.
So naive. Inflating clicks / views let's them charge more to advertizers (who falsely think that advertising on facebook is more ROI than on Google or elsewhere). And what Facebook gains is increases in share price every time they declare their earnings.
But remember kids, there are only two metrics that truly matter here: how much did you spend on Facebook ads, and how much revenue did you bring in as a result? Everything else, all the other metrics, all the different forms of advertising and different relationships Facebook invents in their world, these things are merely tools to optimise the ratio of the two metrics that count and they have value only to the extent that they do so.
"It’s not difficult to measure engagement." => with video ads it's doable but it's always approximations when it comes to ad viewability (and for example, even if I can see an ad, it does not mean I'm watching it)
"Online advertising has a history of opaque reporting" => compare this to TV or radio
It's clearly an article against Facebook Ads, even if they are miscalculating things, it seems too biased to be taken seriously.
Potential causes would include greed.
This is why we don't pay programmers to find bugs, but from the opposite perspective.