Or even better, a mobile app install ad on mobile and a FB app ad on desktop.
I'd love to see one of these experiments that isn't trying to get website signups / sales which is something FB is notoriously bad for.
I spent a few years at an SPMD, and I would really advise against anyone who doesn't know exactly what they're doing to use the FB self-serve anyway...
I think the evidence of something being wrong is very compelling. But one of the problems I see is that if Facebook even attempts to fix the problem, their revenue drops by 30% and investors/advertisers sue for fraud.
They're in a tough spot. But they should at least start to turn the ship in the right direction before their total ad business collapses as "ineffective".
Let's fix the title: "Facebook - Don't Waste Your Time or Money." Who wants in on the Facebook cash cow? Well, you need to be on the other side of this international scam. The click farms, the fake likes, the fake pages, the dark side that actually MAKES Zuck rich and he has no incentive to block.
If I click a link on my phone and it tries to get me to install an app, I'm instantly hitting the back button.
Do people really install random apps because they saw a one-sentence advertisement on facebook? I really don't know what normal behavior is for the average facebook user.
I assume you are a mobile app developer looking for a job.
I don't know a single user who enjoy being sent to a mobile app instead of the website.
If being hated by your users is not enough of a deterrent, then factor in the cost of building said apps on mobile platforms and maintaining them through time and new smartphones versions while having a website versus simply having a website.
Unless you're a big corp with tons of money to throw out the windows, the wise path is a well thought and designed website.
Not really, I used to work at one of the main Facebook SPMDs so I'm saying that out of having seen the performance of mobile app campaigns on advertisers that spend $100k+ a day on fb.
I don't see why you would be hated by your users? The ad makes it super clear that it's an app, it takes you straight to the app store where you can read reviews / description / screenshots and then you just install it.
I think you are making the mistake of thinking that the average user is like you, most people will just want to get the app ASAP when they see an ad for something that seems useful; not having to navigate a website which doesn't have a mobile version (try budgetsimple.com in an android phone, it's impossible to use !)
I don't know enough about your business to know whether you will ever get a positive ROI on Facebook ads, but a clear call to action and more targeted copy will have a world of difference in terms of conversion.
Compare the author's: "Easy to use, free online budget" to
"Scared of being in debt? Get your FREE budget report instantly. Click here to request info."
I'm not saying that's the ideal copy, but you have to get people's interest and explain more. Make it specific to a location like "Virginia" or "Sydney" or "Melbourne" or "Kentucky" and target those specific places you'll get a higher CTR and conversion. The mobile vs. desktop part is a whole other discussion.
I'm getting pretty good results from Facebook CPC. I pay $0.12 per click and get around 50% "conversions" from that. I run a service which doesn't require any registration though and a conversion is just someone doing anything in it.
I think it highly depends upon how you're targeting and what kind of product your selling. I've got a friend who is using fb CPC for physical products (that includes a concierge service) and my jaw hit the floor when he told me the ROI. Admittedly, they have a pretty high revenue per customer, but my point stands that it depends on what you're selling.
CPC is just the wrong model for Facebook. It turns into "spray and pray". In this case, nobody is looking for a personal budget app, it just shows up uninvited. Whereas with Google, we know someone is likely looking for it when the ad appears.
I don't know what Facebook's long term business model is. IMO, this isn't it.
CPC is just the wrong model for Facebook. It turns into "spray and pray". In this case, nobody is looking for a personal budget app, it just shows up uninvited. Whereas with Google, we know someone is likely looking for it when the ad appears.
That's true. Since people spend a lot of time using Facebook (i.e. as a "third place" with no specific search intent), I would guess that brand advertising, brand-awareness marketing, and especially targeted ad remarketing would be their sweet spots.
Google's intent based ad platform is relatively effective. Facebook is a little bit like old school TV and Radio advertising. Ad buyers are lured in about 'reaching' target demos. Age, sex, geography, brands they like (affinities). But yeah, it's still somewhat noisey since the users are really just interested in using facebook. Maybe your brand will see some recognition boost, but measuring against a funnel conversion is likely going to be worse than those who use Google and show intent to actually do something.
This is a single campaign, and a single test, with one set of variables. Concluding something overreaching like "Facebook CPC ads don't work" after a test like that is like saying, "I tried mixing two chemicals, and there was no reaction, chemicals must not cause reactions."
Think of it like a computer program. If 99% of the program is right but one thing is broken, the entire thing won't work. Marketing is, in a lot of respects, the same way. You can be missing one single variable and your entire campaign falls apart.
Look at all of the variables in this campaign - title, image, targeting options, whether you do sidebar ads, newsfeed ads, or mobile newsfeed, and most importantly the product/service offered on the other side (not to mention the conversion rate of the specific landing pages). Apparently this campaign wasn't profitable, but I run a half dozen profitable campaigns on Facebook at any given time (most of them CPC), and I know people who spend $10,000/day on Facebook ads.
Facebook ads do work under the right circumstances. Concluding that they don't after one try is a little absurd.
Part of me suspects you didn't actually read the article. While the title is sort of link-baity, the actual content is interesting in that it compares Google Analytics, server logs, and his Google Adwords campaigns to the Facebook one. I don't think his conclusion is that Facebook ads don't work. It's more that Facebook is charging him for false clicks and non-unique clicks. His last sentence sums up his own experience:
"But it definitely doesn’t seem like you are getting what you pay for, and certainly the value, at least for my site is not there."
Screw the cpc and the fake clicks :) they exist, nothing you can do about it, live with it.
The only thing you should consider to get to any conclusion is the overall CPA.
Facebook is a different beast from AdWords, you cannot simply target people searching for "Online budgeting tool". You have to find a good demographic and that requires lot's of testing. From that point of view $50 is actually meaningless.
Yeah ... he can say that Facebook is charging him for fake clicks ... that's an old news :)
You're saying that if Facebook is fraudulently charging advertising customers for more than they are really supplying, that's OK and we should all just deal with it? Really?
FWIW, the last few small scale Facebook campaigns we've run at one of my companies followed a broadly similar pattern to the one described in the article, and we too have checked against our various analytics tools and server logs for comparison, finding the quality of Facebook's referrals far lower than any other source.
However, we do have some other plausible theories about why this might be the case. For example, if visitors to our (B2C, leisure-related) site first see the ad on mobile while they're at work, they're unlikely to explore significantly at the time, but might come back later. We do tend to see a significant spike in both direct visitors and visitors via search engines while we're running FB campaigns that would be compatible with that theory.
Even so, it's very awkward to audit what is really going on with Facebook ads. This is partly because it's hard to determine which clicks claimed by Facebook are actually coming through to our landing page and which are either phantom clicks or other events like Facebook "Likes" that aren't worth anything unless they ultimately translate into paying visitors. It's also hard to track how much money is ultimately charged, because the charges they actually make where they collect real money and the corresponding notifications they send out seem to be based on arbitrary billing periods that don't necessarily correspond to specific days/campaigns where you originally set your budget.
At this point, given the number of reports of strange patterns that do correspond to our own experience, we are sceptical both about how many clicks we get through FB are deliberate rather than "accidental" and about how FB accounts for clicks and calculates its charges. As a small business in a niche market, our FB campaigns only have a small budget and usually they at least break even almost immediately, so we tolerate the uncertainties because our bottom line is usually positive anyway. Even so, the lack of transparency and amount of potential funny business we see at FB is disconcerting, and it certainly makes us hesitant to commit serious money to any FB campaigns in the future.
Of course I'm not saying that it's extremely frustrating both to have click fraud and having little data from Facebook to better understand what's going on. I totally agree with that.
However:
1) I don't think Facebook would be so stupid to intentionally fraud on clicks ... the damage could be much bigger than the gain. I'm pretty sure this is mainly due to click farm, bots and so on.
2) I don't care about the click fraud. I don't advertise to get clicks. I advertise to get customers. As long as the overall CPA I get from Facebook is lower than AdWords I'll keep advertising on Facebook.
Strongly agree. I was expecting another low-quality Facebook-bashing article but was pleasantly surprised with how thoroughly the author tracked the visits (FB reports > server logs > Analytics). The whole mis-clicking on mobile rings true for me, particularly. I'm forever accidentally 'liking' posts when just trying to view the comments.
I've run a few campaigns and always managed to break even. I believe the key to success is very selective, and often slightly obscure, targeting.
What is the driver of false clicks on FB? So far as I know it isn't like Google where a third party will be paid something for the click. Isn't FB the only one getting paid when I click a FB ad?
> How fake clicks that don't generate business results would improve Facebook reputation as an effective advertiser ?
In online advertising, there's a pretty big chasm between when people think is going on, and reality. Facebook has every incentive to increase their apparent standing in the online advertising business, and the fact that some of the traffic is bogus may not matter to anyone but a purist (or a client).
Consider that everyone in the business has some bogus traffic. Maybe the players feel they can compare statistics without bothering to find out how much is nonsense masquerading as business.
> Actually every time these posts comes out (once a week lately) Facebook reputation is hurt.
Yes, that's true, but a corporate strategy might be to simply say, "We're working on this problem", and hope no one pays too much attention to the actual level of effort.
They get to claim a certain percentage of the online advertising market. Online advertising has a self-referential aspect -- if you can produce convincing statistics, you will get more business, which will further increase your statistical standing, ad infinitum. The fact that a percentage of the traffic is bogus might be overlooked by some of the providers, and even some of the clients.
I'm getting fed up with these post saying "Media X" is bad (where X is usually something to do with Facebook or Google display).
Two comments:
1. This media is sold in an auction. If the quality of the traffic vs what you pay for it is bad value then the bids are set too high. If I pay over the odds for something on ebay it isn't just ebay that is at fault.
2. Doing online advertising well is harder than Facebook and Google are incentivised to make clear. In some cases this stuff is very hard which is why there are people whose full time job it is to get it right.
As someone with some expertise in biddable media reading posts like this must be like a coder reading about how a programming language is flawed because the Todo app scaffolding doesn't quite do what the author expects.
The OP is not stating the approach is bad. I think the claim is that Facebook CPC is implemented somewhat fraudulently. What is promised is not what is delivered.
So long as the fraud is uniformly distributed, that is true. But more significant is the fact that you really can't estimate your costs and benefits correctly when the vendor (Facebook) is giving you incorrect or fraudulent data.
I agree with what you say about the estimation of costs.
The benefits to site owners normally take place outside of Facebook and so should be measurable regardless of what Facebook do.
In the case where the benefit is within Facebook then the buyer is purchasing likes or similar and then they are in for a world of hurt (in my experience) because of the difficulty in valuing what is being bought.
In this case the advertiser presumably knows the value of what is bought. Then valuing a click involves working back from that towards a CPC bid based on the conversion rate of the traffic source.
As you say, things get interesting when value is not evenly distributed and are complicated further when incrementality is taken into account. But who said it was meant to be easy?
That only happens with greater transparency. Essentially, you have to recognize the fraud to evaluate prices properly, and my impression is that most people don't.
That is true. If you only evaluate the effectiveness of advertising based on the number of clicks you get then you will be unable to set bids to take fraud into account.
Yes, assuming everyone prices everything perfectly rationally and knows what they are buying. I expect a good deal of Facebook expenditure is people trying make it work for them, and assuming they are doing it wrong. In the long run perhaps the price will reflect a lower value.
I don't know about the bot/fraud accusation, but do not listen to the conclusion here. Those bounce rates are not the overall average and it's irrelevant anyway. With any online advertising you need to track conversions. Optimize & spend based on those, not based on hearsay or anecdotes. Hearsay and anecdotes are for deciding to try it and Facebook is so big that you should try it anyway.
There are unlimited examples of failed advertising campaigns on every single medium where failure can be seen measured. Most campaigns fail. They are a cost of doing business. Generalizing based on those would be very mistaken. Facebook is a new but giant ad program. The tools are still rough and "best practices" are even rougher. The consultants...
That doesn't mean that good campaigns can't be run on facebook. Facebook allows campaigns to be run that would be impossible to run anywhere else. In some cases the ROI is ridiculous. In others it's one of few things that works.
The number one reason for all these Facebook sux rants seems to be "it's not adwords." People want their adwords campaign to work on Facebook. If Coca Cola wanted to tell you that they're "the real thing" on adwords, it would be an uphill battle. A budget app on Facebook might be hard going on fb. Maybe not impossible, but it's a squeeze.
If you want to advertise a local children's art exhibition taking place this weekend, Facebook ads will work like magic. 'Friends of friends of the gallery who live close by and have kids.' There is no other platform that gives you anywhere near the reach, relevance and context that FB gives you for a campaign like that. I would expect the "ROI" to be under a dollar per physical ass-through-door.
I think people just want to know what they're paying for...
I don't think the article in anyways suggest that they have a perfect advertising campaign.
He's just talking about the discrepancy between what FB reports and what he sees. I don't see how any of what you wrote actually relates or is pertinent to the article.
It looks like you just took offense, along with a lot of other commenters, to criticizing Facebook.
Why are you wasting your money sending mobile users? Even mobile web users are useless as most are drive-by visitors that might not get the FULL impression they'll get through a desktop browser.
Even if you optimize for mobile web, I'm sure they won't experience the true power and wow-ness of your app unless they visit it thru a desktop.
The article raises some great points and it's very frustrating to read these articles as the founder of a Facebook Ads Optimization tool aimed at SMBs (AdEspresso - http://adespresso.com - Shameless plug :P).
I'm not going to say that copy was not good or that the number Facebook tracks are correct. I find the copy of the ad used pretty good overall. However I've some consideration about it:
- I totally agree that Facebook must improve its tracking and must do more to prevent clicks fraud ... a problem which is still very relevant
- Lot's of Facebook Ads traffic comes from mobile nowadays. This can be good or bad. If you're promoting a website and aiming at conversions on a non mobile-friendly website you MUST disable mobile targeting.
- Overall $50 budget is not enough to get to any relevant conclusion.
- On a product like this (budgeting, finance, etc.) it's critical to find a very good audience to target. I'd suggest using a lot custom audiences.
- Facebook Ads bounce rate & overall quality is very often lower than Google, Yahoo & Bing, this is implicit in the nature of the platform. On Google you're getting traffic from people who are actively searching for a keyword strictly related to your product. On Facebook you're targeting people based on demographic profile and a vague interest. However Facebook is very often much cheaper than Google.
- CPC & CTR are meaningless metrics. You should always have conversion tracking and measure the overall CPA to acquire a customer. Click frauds, wrong reportings etc. ... they exists. You cannot do anything about it. You should not give a crap about it. Just check your Cost to acquire a customer and see if it makes sense.
- Sometime for some markets Facebook Ads for direct conversions simply don't work. Create valuable content like eBooks, webinars etc. to get cheaper leads and then close the sales funnel with targeted emails.
I made this comment the other day in a thread about children accidentally clicking on google display ads, but I think it also applies here. The problem is measuring the effectiveness of early funnel ads from clicks.
Here is a good presentation from the quantcast guys about the "natural born clicker" problem. The people clicking on your display ad are probably anything but actual potential customers.
Clicks is just an easy holdover metric from the paid search side of digital advertising. It doesn't make sense in the context of early funnel ads. You need to measure the effect your display ads are having on your purchasing endpoints. Which is what the whole cross channel attribution industry is about.
Its quite possible your are getting good value from facebook ads, you've just inadvertently focused in on the worst subpopulation, the clickers.
Facebook ads don't work for us anymore because they disabled them, without warning, without explanation, with no apparent recourse. The ads aren't against any TOS and our competitors continue to advertise without issue.
Interesting. I wonder if users flagging ads have any impact.
I say this only because I had a habit of flagging ads with the reason of 'other' and entering 'wrong language' when FB showed me ads in the wrong language.
FB ignore browser language for ads, preferring to use IP address. Duh.
It might just be that x% of people flagged a number of your ads for similarly odd reasons and you got banned automatically.
Also I'm testing a theory that FB will at some point just tag me as an 'ad hater', because any ads that show in the timeline I mark as 'don't show me again', reason 'not interested', purely because I don't like the feature.
Within the last week I performed a similar "experiment" for newly created facebook.com/AmeriStartup.
I created two FB mobile advertisements to direct traffic to the website, though the website is more eCommerce/service than any type of sign up. Budget $50 over 3 days reach was ~20,000+; the click through rate was .5% and .4% for the 2 ads; just under 100 clicks to the website with none resulting in conversion.
More disturbing was the fan page promotion through FB (paid "Likes" in my own words). $10 budget per day over 3 days; reach = 3,000+; total likes 34. What disturbed me though was when I would go to the profile page of the users who "liked" the fan page as a result of the promotion, many of the user profiles did not appear to be legit. Moreover, the majority of these users who liked the page had a single facebook post in their entire facebook timeline. As unlikely as it is that of ~30 paid likes nearly all were were inactive facebook users who were otherwise compelled to interact with my paid promotion, it is equally unlikely that facebook would be so brazen in committing fraud on advertisers by creating and managing fake accounts to click paid promotion/ads which could easily be proven. Nevertheless is begs the question what are these accounts (fake, bots, ect...) and who controls them and why?
You could be correct that only legit users clicked the FB ads and upon review of my site they had no interest in using my service or my pricing scared them away (or any other legit number of reasons).
However, it would be willful blindness to ignore what I can verify vis-a-vis the FB paid promotion. Moreover, when I can verify the majority of likes are from illegitimate users/profiles, based on not having any posts and otherwise being inactive, then I have no expectation the users clicking the ads are any more legit than users clicking the promotion. If FB had faith this was not the case I see no reason they would not disclose the users who clicked the ads so advertisers could confirm their legitimacy.
There was a video released recently talking about fake accounts and clicking on paid like ads. It explained pretty well why they do it. That doesn't really carry over to other paid ads though.
As for the second part probably because it's a huge privacy violation.
This is the important question. I've seen copy for largely untargeted convert at wildly different rates dependent on the copy quality and the quality of what's being offered.
Yup copy on the destination, copy on the ad itself can change the conversion rate quite a bit too if you're attracting the wrong sorts of people for your product. Too many variables left unexplored with 1 or 2 ads on one traffic source to one landing page.
It was posted on HN a while back. The gist is that there's a high chance that your ad was clicked by click farms, even though you bought it legitimately from facebook (in an effort to fool clickfarm detection, apparently).
What's even more interesting is that not only are you wasting money buying the ads, you also end up with less legitimate "likers" seeing your content because of the way facebook propagates new posts. So you're actually paying to get negative results.
Plus, you won't be able to remove that negative as you can't remove likes and your page will be seen less forever. What does this show? Don't ever, ever pay for likes.
No, there isn't any need for that. There will of course be some spread but it isn't intentional or planned. They don't need a solid distribution of verticals and locations for what they offer to clients since they don't need to see their clients ads just click like on their pages.
If you pay for 500 likes, and 500 different accounts are created to like your page its obvious your page is gaming the system. Likewise, if you have a voting ring of 500, its easy to see what pages those 500 accounts are liking. However, if you have a voting ring that votes randomly while ensuring anyone that pays gets 500 of the votes then its much harder to find out who is gaming the system.
Can I ask how you saw who liked your page? Was this a feature of the Ad campaign? As a page manager, there is no way I can see who liked my page who isn't a friend. This makes me sad as I believe I'm getting spam likes which lower your "engagement quotient" and make it harder for me to get content to actual people.
When on the page as an admin at the top it tells you the most recent activity for the page. Example: John Doe and 10 others liked your page and you can click John Doe or the 10 others and it will show you a page of those people.
How can Facebook fix this? They need to work like Google.
but they simply cannot/unwilling to do this because they are NOT google, otherwise they'd already have done this. I think come earnings report, they will have a lot to answer to, possibly lawsuit or investigation happening.
Like others have said, it really depends on what you're selling and who you're targetting.
Our example (country specific mobile app for doctors), spent 100 € on AdWords, end result was literally 0 app installs, 0 sign-ups, 0 everything. Medical keywords are expensive, no chance of sending them directly to the App Store/Play Store (that we saw at least), and no other useful targetting.
Here come Facebook mobile install ads. 40 € spent so far, 500+ app installs, 200+ sign-ups, great retention. We can roughly target medical professionals, take them directly to the app stores, and the clicks are cheap as hell.
I have no doubt that AdWords work much better in other cases, and that FB can be useless, but it's not black and white, you need to know which tool fits the purpose.
I don't know if you're doing it already, but in the interest targeting you can include professions too and it will target people who have it set to their "work" on FB; plus adding hospitals to workplace targeting you can quickly close the gap
Thanks for the tip! Were professions added recently? "Doctor of Medicine" wasn't on the list at the time we put up the ads a month ago.
For workplace targetting, it looks like none of the hospitals in our current markets (Balkans) are in the system, so it's not as useful. We had a similar problem when trying to target people with "Medical School" as education and got something like 10 people total, seems education as an attribute is counted only for US-based users.
Are you really getting $0.10 installs via Facebook Mobile ads? If so you're performing better than any FB ad account I've seen in the last 6 months (and I've seen a lot). Even gaming doesn't perform close to this well.
If this is actually true you should be doing affiliate installs which routinely pay out $1 with no (or high) caps. You could literally make tens of thousands of dollars daily.
Where can you find affiliate arbitragers like this? Totally get that he/she should be doing this, but how do you find the people doing this effectively? I'm all for paying when someone has figured this out, because the installs I get often make me want to give up trying. Thanks!
The installs you get from mobile affiliate are usually shit in terms of performance fwiw. The install flows are things like ads that say [get the app now] then link directly to a random app in the app store, so there is very little intent.
I think it is due to multiple factors, but mainly the small, targeted scale of the audience, the usefulness of the product to that audience, and our first mover advantage.
For example, with less than 50 €, the ad has already been seen by around 15 % of the total audience. No matter how much we throw in, it's going to be going slower and slower from now on. But it is enough for us to get seeded among a few hundred medical professionals, and then rely on word of mouth to carry us forward.
Edit: It's also a free app, just to make that clear.
"I think it is due to multiple factors, but mainly the small, targeted scale of the audience,"
This is just good marketing advice for smaller businesses. Find as specific a niche as possible and market to that. Maybe the parent's product serves a very general audience which may make it harder to market.
Not necessarily. Prices increase pretty significantly with a smaller target audience. (It definitely depends on the vertical and product). For example, it's generally slightly more cost effective for a sushi restaurant in a small city to target the city than target people who "like" sushi on Facebook in that city.
I totally agree, "it depends". Facebook advertising can be much more useful than the OP and many others are suggesting. One tiny little thing that 99% of people are completely overlooking:
-Page owners have the ability to restrict access by country.
This means it's literally just a couple clicks, and you can completely disable the "click-farm" countries from seeing your page (+ advertisements).
How much of Facebook's traffic is mobile these days? I personally prefer the desktop version, but I spend unhealthy amounts of time at the computer anyway. I know that my mom uses FB almost primarily through her iPad since she got it.
If FB's traffic is almost or even largely from mobile devices, paying to show ads for a non-mobile site to that traffic seems just silly. The site is downright hostile to mobile users; the text loads last, it starts with a video and a worthless image, and the actual text ping-pongs across the page to accommodate the clip art and screenshots.
Given this exact same data, the OP could spend a week making at least his landing page mobile, run another FB ad, and make a blog post about A/B testing your landing page for mobile users. But no, it's all Facebook's fault, because bashing Facebook will always, 100% get you upvotes on this site...
A recurring complaint in most of the post is the inability to separate desktop users from mobile users. This makes it very difficult to optimize their advertising strategy.
I find it hard to believe that Facebook is not capable of separating mobile (smartphones, wearables and tablets) and desktop traffic in a reliable fashion. I don't know if that's intentional, or why it takes so long to address this problem. But it's hard to deny that right now the only beneficiary of this foggy situation is Facebook.
>I created a Facebook CPC campaign (“Clicks to a Website”), and targeted females aged 22-40 in the USA and Australia who like several of my competitors pages and have an interest in Personal Finance.
(Sorry, this is a little off topic.)
Can the OP or someone else fill me in on how he was able to target people who like other pages (that he doesn't own)? Is it through lookalike audience or is there a more direct way to do it? I've been trying to do the same (target similar pages) but I'm clueless as to how to do it.
People with no idea of how to run ad campaigns should not be bad mouthing X ad platform.
There are so many ways this post is wrong. First, a .4% CTR for a newsfeed ad sucks. That means either your demo targeting sucks, or your ad sucks, or both. Second, if android visits don't convert, change targeting to desktop visitors only. Third, traffic sources behave differently. You can't jump to the conclusion that they're scamming you just because one traffic source worked and another one didn't. Another possibility is that you haven't tried hard enough.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 234 ms ] threadFB do let you set a Desktop Only audience for ads. You need to use Power Editor (Google Chrome only) and select Desktop under Placements.
I'd like to see a re-run with Desktop targeting only.
Edit: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/ads-api/targe...
I'd love to see one of these experiments that isn't trying to get website signups / sales which is something FB is notoriously bad for.
I spent a few years at an SPMD, and I would really advise against anyone who doesn't know exactly what they're doing to use the FB self-serve anyway...
They're in a tough spot. But they should at least start to turn the ship in the right direction before their total ad business collapses as "ineffective".
You can target only desktop users, if you want to send people to a website
Do people really install random apps because they saw a one-sentence advertisement on facebook? I really don't know what normal behavior is for the average facebook user.
I don't know a single user who enjoy being sent to a mobile app instead of the website.
If being hated by your users is not enough of a deterrent, then factor in the cost of building said apps on mobile platforms and maintaining them through time and new smartphones versions while having a website versus simply having a website.
Unless you're a big corp with tons of money to throw out the windows, the wise path is a well thought and designed website.
I don't see why you would be hated by your users? The ad makes it super clear that it's an app, it takes you straight to the app store where you can read reviews / description / screenshots and then you just install it.
I think you are making the mistake of thinking that the average user is like you, most people will just want to get the app ASAP when they see an ad for something that seems useful; not having to navigate a website which doesn't have a mobile version (try budgetsimple.com in an android phone, it's impossible to use !)
Compare the author's: "Easy to use, free online budget" to "Scared of being in debt? Get your FREE budget report instantly. Click here to request info."
I'm not saying that's the ideal copy, but you have to get people's interest and explain more. Make it specific to a location like "Virginia" or "Sydney" or "Melbourne" or "Kentucky" and target those specific places you'll get a higher CTR and conversion. The mobile vs. desktop part is a whole other discussion.
Simply run your campaign for $X and measure your resulting sales, $Y, and now you know if you are wasting money or not.
If Facebook 'fix the problem' then the CPC rate will simply increase.
I don't know what Facebook's long term business model is. IMO, this isn't it.
That's true. Since people spend a lot of time using Facebook (i.e. as a "third place" with no specific search intent), I would guess that brand advertising, brand-awareness marketing, and especially targeted ad remarketing would be their sweet spots.
This campaign failed after a few days and now it will go away. That's as it should be.
Think of it like a computer program. If 99% of the program is right but one thing is broken, the entire thing won't work. Marketing is, in a lot of respects, the same way. You can be missing one single variable and your entire campaign falls apart.
Look at all of the variables in this campaign - title, image, targeting options, whether you do sidebar ads, newsfeed ads, or mobile newsfeed, and most importantly the product/service offered on the other side (not to mention the conversion rate of the specific landing pages). Apparently this campaign wasn't profitable, but I run a half dozen profitable campaigns on Facebook at any given time (most of them CPC), and I know people who spend $10,000/day on Facebook ads.
Facebook ads do work under the right circumstances. Concluding that they don't after one try is a little absurd.
"But it definitely doesn’t seem like you are getting what you pay for, and certainly the value, at least for my site is not there."
The only thing you should consider to get to any conclusion is the overall CPA.
Facebook is a different beast from AdWords, you cannot simply target people searching for "Online budgeting tool". You have to find a good demographic and that requires lot's of testing. From that point of view $50 is actually meaningless.
Yeah ... he can say that Facebook is charging him for fake clicks ... that's an old news :)
FWIW, the last few small scale Facebook campaigns we've run at one of my companies followed a broadly similar pattern to the one described in the article, and we too have checked against our various analytics tools and server logs for comparison, finding the quality of Facebook's referrals far lower than any other source.
However, we do have some other plausible theories about why this might be the case. For example, if visitors to our (B2C, leisure-related) site first see the ad on mobile while they're at work, they're unlikely to explore significantly at the time, but might come back later. We do tend to see a significant spike in both direct visitors and visitors via search engines while we're running FB campaigns that would be compatible with that theory.
Even so, it's very awkward to audit what is really going on with Facebook ads. This is partly because it's hard to determine which clicks claimed by Facebook are actually coming through to our landing page and which are either phantom clicks or other events like Facebook "Likes" that aren't worth anything unless they ultimately translate into paying visitors. It's also hard to track how much money is ultimately charged, because the charges they actually make where they collect real money and the corresponding notifications they send out seem to be based on arbitrary billing periods that don't necessarily correspond to specific days/campaigns where you originally set your budget.
At this point, given the number of reports of strange patterns that do correspond to our own experience, we are sceptical both about how many clicks we get through FB are deliberate rather than "accidental" and about how FB accounts for clicks and calculates its charges. As a small business in a niche market, our FB campaigns only have a small budget and usually they at least break even almost immediately, so we tolerate the uncertainties because our bottom line is usually positive anyway. Even so, the lack of transparency and amount of potential funny business we see at FB is disconcerting, and it certainly makes us hesitant to commit serious money to any FB campaigns in the future.
However: 1) I don't think Facebook would be so stupid to intentionally fraud on clicks ... the damage could be much bigger than the gain. I'm pretty sure this is mainly due to click farm, bots and so on.
2) I don't care about the click fraud. I don't advertise to get clicks. I advertise to get customers. As long as the overall CPA I get from Facebook is lower than AdWords I'll keep advertising on Facebook.
I've run a few campaigns and always managed to break even. I believe the key to success is very selective, and often slightly obscure, targeting.
Facebook's reputation as en effective advertiser is improved. As Deep Throat said during the Watergate scandal, "Follow the money."
Actually every time these posts comes out (once a week lately) Facebook reputation is hurt.
In online advertising, there's a pretty big chasm between when people think is going on, and reality. Facebook has every incentive to increase their apparent standing in the online advertising business, and the fact that some of the traffic is bogus may not matter to anyone but a purist (or a client).
Consider that everyone in the business has some bogus traffic. Maybe the players feel they can compare statistics without bothering to find out how much is nonsense masquerading as business.
> Actually every time these posts comes out (once a week lately) Facebook reputation is hurt.
Yes, that's true, but a corporate strategy might be to simply say, "We're working on this problem", and hope no one pays too much attention to the actual level of effort.
There's other ways of doing exactly that which maintain user privacy and are within the guidelines though.
Two comments:
1. This media is sold in an auction. If the quality of the traffic vs what you pay for it is bad value then the bids are set too high. If I pay over the odds for something on ebay it isn't just ebay that is at fault.
2. Doing online advertising well is harder than Facebook and Google are incentivised to make clear. In some cases this stuff is very hard which is why there are people whose full time job it is to get it right.
As someone with some expertise in biddable media reading posts like this must be like a coder reading about how a programming language is flawed because the Todo app scaffolding doesn't quite do what the author expects.
As the adverts are sold in an auction, shouldn't the cost per click reflect the proportion of fraud?
E.g. if value of true click is $1 and 50% of clicks are fraudulent then CPC should surely approach $0.50?
The benefits to site owners normally take place outside of Facebook and so should be measurable regardless of what Facebook do.
In the case where the benefit is within Facebook then the buyer is purchasing likes or similar and then they are in for a world of hurt (in my experience) because of the difficulty in valuing what is being bought.
In this case the advertiser presumably knows the value of what is bought. Then valuing a click involves working back from that towards a CPC bid based on the conversion rate of the traffic source.
As you say, things get interesting when value is not evenly distributed and are complicated further when incrementality is taken into account. But who said it was meant to be easy?
There are unlimited examples of failed advertising campaigns on every single medium where failure can be seen measured. Most campaigns fail. They are a cost of doing business. Generalizing based on those would be very mistaken. Facebook is a new but giant ad program. The tools are still rough and "best practices" are even rougher. The consultants...
That doesn't mean that good campaigns can't be run on facebook. Facebook allows campaigns to be run that would be impossible to run anywhere else. In some cases the ROI is ridiculous. In others it's one of few things that works.
The number one reason for all these Facebook sux rants seems to be "it's not adwords." People want their adwords campaign to work on Facebook. If Coca Cola wanted to tell you that they're "the real thing" on adwords, it would be an uphill battle. A budget app on Facebook might be hard going on fb. Maybe not impossible, but it's a squeeze.
If you want to advertise a local children's art exhibition taking place this weekend, Facebook ads will work like magic. 'Friends of friends of the gallery who live close by and have kids.' There is no other platform that gives you anywhere near the reach, relevance and context that FB gives you for a campaign like that. I would expect the "ROI" to be under a dollar per physical ass-through-door.
I don't think the article in anyways suggest that they have a perfect advertising campaign.
He's just talking about the discrepancy between what FB reports and what he sees. I don't see how any of what you wrote actually relates or is pertinent to the article.
It looks like you just took offense, along with a lot of other commenters, to criticizing Facebook.
Even if you optimize for mobile web, I'm sure they won't experience the true power and wow-ness of your app unless they visit it thru a desktop.
I'm not going to say that copy was not good or that the number Facebook tracks are correct. I find the copy of the ad used pretty good overall. However I've some consideration about it:
- I totally agree that Facebook must improve its tracking and must do more to prevent clicks fraud ... a problem which is still very relevant
- Lot's of Facebook Ads traffic comes from mobile nowadays. This can be good or bad. If you're promoting a website and aiming at conversions on a non mobile-friendly website you MUST disable mobile targeting.
- Overall $50 budget is not enough to get to any relevant conclusion.
- On a product like this (budgeting, finance, etc.) it's critical to find a very good audience to target. I'd suggest using a lot custom audiences.
- Facebook Ads bounce rate & overall quality is very often lower than Google, Yahoo & Bing, this is implicit in the nature of the platform. On Google you're getting traffic from people who are actively searching for a keyword strictly related to your product. On Facebook you're targeting people based on demographic profile and a vague interest. However Facebook is very often much cheaper than Google.
- CPC & CTR are meaningless metrics. You should always have conversion tracking and measure the overall CPA to acquire a customer. Click frauds, wrong reportings etc. ... they exists. You cannot do anything about it. You should not give a crap about it. Just check your Cost to acquire a customer and see if it makes sense.
- Sometime for some markets Facebook Ads for direct conversions simply don't work. Create valuable content like eBooks, webinars etc. to get cheaper leads and then close the sales funnel with targeted emails.
My 2 cents, hope it's useful for someone :)
Here is a good presentation from the quantcast guys about the "natural born clicker" problem. The people clicking on your display ad are probably anything but actual potential customers.
Clicks is just an easy holdover metric from the paid search side of digital advertising. It doesn't make sense in the context of early funnel ads. You need to measure the effect your display ads are having on your purchasing endpoints. Which is what the whole cross channel attribution industry is about.
Its quite possible your are getting good value from facebook ads, you've just inadvertently focused in on the worst subpopulation, the clickers.
[1]http://www.slideshare.net/hardnoyz/display-ad-clickers-are-n...
I say this only because I had a habit of flagging ads with the reason of 'other' and entering 'wrong language' when FB showed me ads in the wrong language.
FB ignore browser language for ads, preferring to use IP address. Duh.
It might just be that x% of people flagged a number of your ads for similarly odd reasons and you got banned automatically.
Also I'm testing a theory that FB will at some point just tag me as an 'ad hater', because any ads that show in the timeline I mark as 'don't show me again', reason 'not interested', purely because I don't like the feature.
I created two FB mobile advertisements to direct traffic to the website, though the website is more eCommerce/service than any type of sign up. Budget $50 over 3 days reach was ~20,000+; the click through rate was .5% and .4% for the 2 ads; just under 100 clicks to the website with none resulting in conversion.
More disturbing was the fan page promotion through FB (paid "Likes" in my own words). $10 budget per day over 3 days; reach = 3,000+; total likes 34. What disturbed me though was when I would go to the profile page of the users who "liked" the fan page as a result of the promotion, many of the user profiles did not appear to be legit. Moreover, the majority of these users who liked the page had a single facebook post in their entire facebook timeline. As unlikely as it is that of ~30 paid likes nearly all were were inactive facebook users who were otherwise compelled to interact with my paid promotion, it is equally unlikely that facebook would be so brazen in committing fraud on advertisers by creating and managing fake accounts to click paid promotion/ads which could easily be proven. Nevertheless is begs the question what are these accounts (fake, bots, ect...) and who controls them and why?
Though I do agree with you that buying likes is useless and a waste of money.
However, it would be willful blindness to ignore what I can verify vis-a-vis the FB paid promotion. Moreover, when I can verify the majority of likes are from illegitimate users/profiles, based on not having any posts and otherwise being inactive, then I have no expectation the users clicking the ads are any more legit than users clicking the promotion. If FB had faith this was not the case I see no reason they would not disclose the users who clicked the ads so advertisers could confirm their legitimacy.
As for the second part probably because it's a huge privacy violation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag
But you're right the strategy is not to raise suspicion is to click the targeted ads and like buttons among other random ads and likes.
If I was to learn that facebook was paying those click farms to do the clicking I wouldn't be much surprised.
It was posted on HN a while back. The gist is that there's a high chance that your ad was clicked by click farms, even though you bought it legitimately from facebook (in an effort to fool clickfarm detection, apparently).
What's even more interesting is that not only are you wasting money buying the ads, you also end up with less legitimate "likers" seeing your content because of the way facebook propagates new posts. So you're actually paying to get negative results.
If you pay for 500 likes, and 500 different accounts are created to like your page its obvious your page is gaming the system. Likewise, if you have a voting ring of 500, its easy to see what pages those 500 accounts are liking. However, if you have a voting ring that votes randomly while ensuring anyone that pays gets 500 of the votes then its much harder to find out who is gaming the system.
Our example (country specific mobile app for doctors), spent 100 € on AdWords, end result was literally 0 app installs, 0 sign-ups, 0 everything. Medical keywords are expensive, no chance of sending them directly to the App Store/Play Store (that we saw at least), and no other useful targetting.
Here come Facebook mobile install ads. 40 € spent so far, 500+ app installs, 200+ sign-ups, great retention. We can roughly target medical professionals, take them directly to the app stores, and the clicks are cheap as hell.
I have no doubt that AdWords work much better in other cases, and that FB can be useless, but it's not black and white, you need to know which tool fits the purpose.
And as another handy tool, you can use the FB ads api without authentication to perform certain types of search: http://graph.facebook.com/search?type=adworkplace&q=hospital... and build your targeting criteria
Hope it helps :)
For workplace targetting, it looks like none of the hospitals in our current markets (Balkans) are in the system, so it's not as useful. We had a similar problem when trying to target people with "Medical School" as education and got something like 10 people total, seems education as an attribute is counted only for US-based users.
And yeah, I imagine some countries will be under-represented, sadly
If this is actually true you should be doing affiliate installs which routinely pay out $1 with no (or high) caps. You could literally make tens of thousands of dollars daily.
http://bigosaur.com/blog/28-facebook-ads-android-players
You need to use the targeting options, otherwise you're wasting money.
For example, with less than 50 €, the ad has already been seen by around 15 % of the total audience. No matter how much we throw in, it's going to be going slower and slower from now on. But it is enough for us to get seeded among a few hundred medical professionals, and then rely on word of mouth to carry us forward.
Edit: It's also a free app, just to make that clear.
This is just good marketing advice for smaller businesses. Find as specific a niche as possible and market to that. Maybe the parent's product serves a very general audience which may make it harder to market.
-Page owners have the ability to restrict access by country.
This means it's literally just a couple clicks, and you can completely disable the "click-farm" countries from seeing your page (+ advertisements).
http://sendgrowth.com/blog/simple-defense-facebook-click-far... (short post about it, shameless plug) http://i.imgur.com/snkv77Q.png (screenshot of facebook settings page)
Don't do business with scumbags.
Facebook is professional scumbaggery.
Just a taste
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook#Privacy_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook#Data_min...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook#Inabilit...
http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/06/03/facebook-ceo-mark-zuc...
http://www.socialmedianews.com.au/zuckerberg-in-trouble-over...
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/it-security/why-you-should-...
If FB's traffic is almost or even largely from mobile devices, paying to show ads for a non-mobile site to that traffic seems just silly. The site is downright hostile to mobile users; the text loads last, it starts with a video and a worthless image, and the actual text ping-pongs across the page to accommodate the clip art and screenshots.
Given this exact same data, the OP could spend a week making at least his landing page mobile, run another FB ad, and make a blog post about A/B testing your landing page for mobile users. But no, it's all Facebook's fault, because bashing Facebook will always, 100% get you upvotes on this site...
I find it hard to believe that Facebook is not capable of separating mobile (smartphones, wearables and tablets) and desktop traffic in a reliable fashion. I don't know if that's intentional, or why it takes so long to address this problem. But it's hard to deny that right now the only beneficiary of this foggy situation is Facebook.
(Sorry, this is a little off topic.)
Can the OP or someone else fill me in on how he was able to target people who like other pages (that he doesn't own)? Is it through lookalike audience or is there a more direct way to do it? I've been trying to do the same (target similar pages) but I'm clueless as to how to do it.
http://www.quicksprout.com/2014/02/19/how-to-steal-your-comp...
- Why fix something that's not broken? It's working exactly as Facebook intended it.
There are so many ways this post is wrong. First, a .4% CTR for a newsfeed ad sucks. That means either your demo targeting sucks, or your ad sucks, or both. Second, if android visits don't convert, change targeting to desktop visitors only. Third, traffic sources behave differently. You can't jump to the conclusion that they're scamming you just because one traffic source worked and another one didn't. Another possibility is that you haven't tried hard enough.