As a rough datapoint, I run a consumer targeted e-commerce site. We ran a campaign before Christmas were we were selling a new product that was only marketed on Facebook, we are certain that (almost) all customers found it though that Facebook campaign. Facebook was only able to attribute about 50% of the sales to the ads, it should have been close to 100%. This then meant that Facebooks estimated CPA was effectively double what it actually was.
Important to note about 60% of our customers are on an iOS device, which is a little higher than the global average but matches the market segment we are in in the UK.
The situation improved after about 4 weeks, I believe Facebook now uses some "AI" to help with attribution on iOS, but it's somewhat difficult to be sure as by then we had other campaigns running.
So, this will definitely be effecting marketers decision making process of where to allocate spend. It certainly made us more courteous about spending on Facebook.
Agreed. For advertisers with larger budgets, marketing mix models are still the only way to understand the relative performance of FB, Google, TV etc. - each of which is a "walled garden" that doesn't exchange data with others.
FB marketing is effective, question is at what price. If those prices drop, ad dollars will flow back. It will take a few quarterly modeling cycles to reflect this though.
The contra-contrarian view is this: FB, Google have an unusual mix of large, medium and small advertisers all bidding for the same inventory. That's what makes FB and Google somewhat immune to large advertiser pricing pressures (and issue of the day spend bans). However, only the larger advertisers have budgets for complicated cross-publisher modeling. If organic FB tools show higher CPAs, it will drive the smaller marketers to other platforms causing some interesting feedback loops.
I cant upvote you enough. This single comment contains many of the contrarian view against HN. It is nice we have these real world stories on HN to balance the ideological fight against ads, where All Ads are evil.
What is the shop? I partly live in the UK, don't run iOS, don't use Facebook and block ads about a billion different ways at once. There's a chance I might be interested in your products.
> I believe Facebook now uses some "AI" to help with attribution on iOS
Is that even legal? With AI, you can never concretely prove anything, so you then have Facebook literally making up numbers it pinky swears are legit and billing you accordingly (semi-directly because while you're not paying per click, the landing page analytics are also used to weed out robo clicks and other fraud that you shouldn't be billed for).
If you're so certain, it means you already have reliable data for attribution. Why do you need Facebook's tracking to confirm it to you?
I understand it's nice to have fancy reports etc but it sounds like you already know where your customers are coming from. And tracking is very invasive, in this case it doesn't really seem to add much value.
You could also ask your customers "where did you hear about us" for example. Perhaps you already do and that's the source of that 100%. If not you might even discover a way you didn't know of. Eg word of mouth, some obscure forum where your product was mentioned. As well as that it's a method where you respect your users' privacy.
You attribute 0% of purchases to repeat loyal customers who just check in on what you're selling every now and again without needing to be reminded by a marketing campaign?
I remember when Facebook Platform came out. The super early version where you could embed your app on Facebook and engage with the social graph.
I thought dang, this is smart. They’ll basically own the next level up the stack from the browser: they’ll own the “social chrome” of every application on the web.
Although it devolved into spam, Facebook was a hot spot of weird social games for a while there. And every web dev was learning how to build Facebook apps. We wondered if we’d even really need a domain for much more than a landing page, if 99% of our engagement was going to come through Facebooks.
And then they killed it because they wanted to own the entire experience inside Facebook. It became not a walled garden, but a walled flower pot.
It always seemed short sighted to me. Yes, they lost control allowing third party apps in their frame. But didn’t they want to be a Microsoft and not a WordPerfect?
Looking back, I wonder if it was a missed opportunity. They have to go try to be the metaverse because social never became a platform.
I kind of miss those awful games, honestly. There was one my girlfriend at the time was playing, and I thought it was interesting but kind of tedious, the UI reacted too slow, etc.
So I opened up my editor and wrote a Python client to automate the game; go to forest, attack until your inventory is full, go to town, sell inventory, repeat. I left it run overnight and completely blew past her in progression.
Now everything is an app, and every app uses HTTPS, and every HTTPS connection uses certificate pinning, and I just can't be bothered to do the work anymore to cheat at useless games I don't like.
"Social Chrome" is a base of moving sand, just like Google AMP, it works for a brief while via platform's power but will phase out; web game died out naturally with devices becomes cheaper, and consumers going mobile (and consoles).
Nice how Zuck said $10bn in the analysts call with nothing to back it up, but the whole press jumps on it. Apple is not Facebook's problem, all they did was giving users a choice, which should have happened ages ago. So Facebook just says Apple kills our business without ever thinking that maybe users don't like the way they do business. If they did, they wouldn't opt out…
What would be his motive for saying revenue would be $10B less than previous trends would predict? They posted record revenue again in 2021, so it doesn't look like he's trying to cast a scapegoat for stagnant revenue.
The problem isn't just Apple's action on IDFA. It's that Facebook seems to be so poorly managed on some fronts that its reactions, rather than mitigating problems, has caused further harm. For example - in a rushed effort to get their privacy issues in order, they are deactivating the live facebook integrations of customers based on cursory/mistaken/possibly machine-based readings of their privacy policies.
We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on facebook app ads per month. We can deal with IDFA giving way to more aggregated attribution (we don't want to track individuals - we just want to measure if the ads we paid for led to sales). But facebook breaking our app in production because they can't be bothered doing their job properly is very serious. It can't be solved by reducing ad spend, only by removing their SDK from our app.
If this is also happening to many other developers right now, that, more than the Q4 results or the IDFA issue itself, could be causing the drop in the share price.
In fact, if you look at the Q4 results, the earnings miss was more because of growth in G&A (which grew by 3 percentage-points of revenue if I'm not mistaken) than because of a top-line slowdown. And if you read the comments as to what made G&A grow, it's 'legal costs'.
> we don't want to track individuals - we just want to measure if the ads we paid for led to sales
well. if your goal isn't tracking individuals, then why are you attaching unique ID's (in cookies) to track individuals on your website?
And I'm not talking about third-party cookies disguised as first-party.
logglytrackingsession (lifetime: session)
notion_experiment_device_id (lifetime: 1 year)
Both are unique to a specific user and are used to identify a single individual. The first one is short-lived, but obviously meant for tracking and the second one can be used for tracking, identifies a single individual and is long-lived.
"we don't want to track individuals" --- right, but each ad FB places has a lower conversion rate if they don't know as much about the user, so while your goal may not be tracking per se, tracking does get you the same sales in fewer placements, and Facebook can sell those saved placements to other buyers
the fact that they're cracking down on partner privacy in a hamfisted way surely doesn't help matters but I can't see how angry devs are driving the share price down
I see this in the thread but I have to say that I disagree a bit. I'm certainly glad Apple gave users a choice, but you have to consider "the tyranny of the default" which is a great phrase I think. Most people will simply use the default option, so Apple's choice of default says something.
There's a whole ecosystem of businesses that rely on Facebook that are going to start hurting a lot over the next few years.
I used to work at a publisher where 80% of their website traffic came from Facebook. They haven't seen audience growth in years and their audience is skewing older and older, which is bad for their advertising business
Businesses like that are going to get steadily squeezed both by Facebook's declining audience share and Facebook's own efforts to change what people see.
Really what you're saying is that there's a whole ecosystem of businesses that depend on unavoidable surveillance.
All Apple have done is allow users to say no.
They haven't even stopped anyone opting into surveillance if they want to. It just turns out that, when given the choice, people don't like being snooped on.
Good riddance? People will keep finding & buying things they need.
If nobody’s buying anything from these businesses without invasive advertising & tracking then maybe whatever goods they were selling aren’t actually necessary?
Of course there is nuance and edge cases to this, but in general I wouldn’t be surprised if society and the planet was better off once we stop producing useless garbage.
> There's a whole ecosystem of businesses that rely on Facebook that are going to start hurting a lot over the next few years.
Starting? Did these publishers not learn anything from the whole Facebook Video debacle? [1] Also, who at these companies thinks tying their core business to a single, third party is a good idea?
> But last year, citing privacy concerns, Apple turned off IDFA by default and forced apps to ask people if they want to be tracked. It seems most do not: a study in December by AppsFlyer, an ad-tech company, suggested that 54% of Apple users who saw the prompt opted out.
Hard to believe that nearly half of all people is ok with being tracked...
Snap is still somehow up 50% today. Google is similarly doing great. The problem is more on Facebook's end than Apple's. TikTok did way more damage than Apple ever could.
Facebook's revenue up 35% year over year: -26% (P/E ~16)
Amazon's revenue up 15% year over year: +12% (P/E 60+)
I don't get the stock market. Facebook can simply turn on billions in revenue whenever they want still with WhatsApp, which has north of 2 billion MAU, and has not been monetized at all yet. Facebook is a reverse meme stock.
If I run a Facebook ad campaign for my app and given that Apple already provides the SKAdNetwork attribution mechanism, does enabling IDFA benefit my app, or it benefits only Facebook? Marketing people are trying to convince me IDFA is important for ad efficiency and thus should be enabled (with the spooky ATT popup in the beginning), but something is telling me it's not. I might be wrong and would really like to know.
> For years, Apple helped by offering an “identifier for advertisers” (IDFA), giving advertisers a way to track people’s behaviour on its devices. (...) But last year, citing privacy concerns, Apple turned off IDFA by default and forced apps to ask people if they want to be tracked.
And everyone praised Apple for it. But if Apple really care about privacy, they'd never allowed for IDFA in the first place…
> Google will soon offer most users of Android, its mobile operating system, the ability to opt out of ad tracking.
I'll believe it when they pass some independent audits from EU countries xD
Apple knows where the future of technology is going, and Meta is getting in the way. Meta, appropriately renamed to reflect the trend toward augmented and virtual reality, would eventually become a threat to Apple’s walled garden business model. Apple gives lip service to privacy so long as it attracts users to their platform. However the moment we’re in is when the their invasion of privacy is meant to benefit their vision for keeping a customer totally content from home, to work, to play; they have a service for everything, and the data with which they have determined hidden markets, pain points, and markets of desire is coming at a cost for Facebook/Meta.
In the future, whether that’s 5, 10, or 20 years, the biggest companies will produce their own platforms of walled garden experiences. Meta isn’t there yet and has suffered a setback, but the reports that Meta is trying to poach Apple devs is telling about where this is all headed. The “metaverse” is nascent and mockable, but my kid will probably grow up in it just like I grew up on AIM, chat rooms, and texting.
FB is one of the most developer hostile platforms that I've worked with. For example, their API tokens expire in 60 days, so users of automated reporting tools are constantly having to re-grant. Why? No good reason. And the documentation is garbage. FB can't blame Apple or anyone else for those failings. They should fix the things that are under their own control.
FB has been making their API increasingly useless for a decade now. They don't want you building integrations, they want you in their walled garden using their tools.
I haven't followed the whole apple privacy push and how it impacted advertising. However, isn't everyone always logged into Facebook? If so they already know who is using it and any interaction will tell them exactly who used it. How does the Apple's platform level change effect them? Am I missing something?
I think their Metaverse push was actually a great way for rats to escape a sinking ship ... by finding a new ship!
Facebook just could never really capture the whole "facilitating real world interactions" thing, and for most people it became simply a way to maintain an online avatar / identity, argue about politics, comment on cat memes, and otherwise waste time in cyberspace. That's what they're good at, and maybe with the metaverse they can at least make people more productive with that.
Now there are BENEFITS to MetaVerse. Less usage of fossil fuels. Facebook also facilitated conversations between people around the world, that would otherwise not meet. But its centralized nature and limited flexibility held back the whole space.
If you were to physically track someone and catalog everything they do in meatspace, we'd call that stalking. Why is that behavior acceptable when done by software? It should not be okay, its still stalking - no matter your intentions or end goals.
This "privacy push" is only a change with respect to IDFA -- something specifically built by Apple to compete with Google's advertising ID. Opting out system-wide was already possible, but unsurprisingly its existence is not something that's well-known since Apple has established themselves as Goddess of Privacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identifier_for_Advertisers.
To me, this is closer to "Apple spying technology becomes opt-in and no one uses it anymore".
[+] [-] samwillis|4 years ago|reply
Important to note about 60% of our customers are on an iOS device, which is a little higher than the global average but matches the market segment we are in in the UK.
The situation improved after about 4 weeks, I believe Facebook now uses some "AI" to help with attribution on iOS, but it's somewhat difficult to be sure as by then we had other campaigns running.
So, this will definitely be effecting marketers decision making process of where to allocate spend. It certainly made us more courteous about spending on Facebook.
[+] [-] prasadjoglekar|4 years ago|reply
FB marketing is effective, question is at what price. If those prices drop, ad dollars will flow back. It will take a few quarterly modeling cycles to reflect this though.
The contra-contrarian view is this: FB, Google have an unusual mix of large, medium and small advertisers all bidding for the same inventory. That's what makes FB and Google somewhat immune to large advertiser pricing pressures (and issue of the day spend bans). However, only the larger advertisers have budgets for complicated cross-publisher modeling. If organic FB tools show higher CPAs, it will drive the smaller marketers to other platforms causing some interesting feedback loops.
[+] [-] ksec|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wizzwizz4|4 years ago|reply
Word-of-mouth exists. It's possible Facebook wasn't making it up. Did you use a Facebook-specific link in the ads?
[+] [-] Nextgrid|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] azalemeth|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ComputerGuru|4 years ago|reply
Is that even legal? With AI, you can never concretely prove anything, so you then have Facebook literally making up numbers it pinky swears are legit and billing you accordingly (semi-directly because while you're not paying per click, the landing page analytics are also used to weed out robo clicks and other fraud that you shouldn't be billed for).
[+] [-] GekkePrutser|4 years ago|reply
I understand it's nice to have fancy reports etc but it sounds like you already know where your customers are coming from. And tracking is very invasive, in this case it doesn't really seem to add much value.
You could also ask your customers "where did you hear about us" for example. Perhaps you already do and that's the source of that 100%. If not you might even discover a way you didn't know of. Eg word of mouth, some obscure forum where your product was mentioned. As well as that it's a method where you respect your users' privacy.
[+] [-] nonameiguess|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DaveExeter|4 years ago|reply
Affecting, not effecting.
>It certainly made us more courteous about spending on Facebook.
We assume you meant "cautious" and not "courteous".
[+] [-] Irishsteve|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jbay808|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erikpukinskis|4 years ago|reply
I thought dang, this is smart. They’ll basically own the next level up the stack from the browser: they’ll own the “social chrome” of every application on the web.
Although it devolved into spam, Facebook was a hot spot of weird social games for a while there. And every web dev was learning how to build Facebook apps. We wondered if we’d even really need a domain for much more than a landing page, if 99% of our engagement was going to come through Facebooks.
And then they killed it because they wanted to own the entire experience inside Facebook. It became not a walled garden, but a walled flower pot.
It always seemed short sighted to me. Yes, they lost control allowing third party apps in their frame. But didn’t they want to be a Microsoft and not a WordPerfect?
Looking back, I wonder if it was a missed opportunity. They have to go try to be the metaverse because social never became a platform.
[+] [-] danudey|4 years ago|reply
So I opened up my editor and wrote a Python client to automate the game; go to forest, attack until your inventory is full, go to town, sell inventory, repeat. I left it run overnight and completely blew past her in progression.
Now everything is an app, and every app uses HTTPS, and every HTTPS connection uses certificate pinning, and I just can't be bothered to do the work anymore to cheat at useless games I don't like.
[+] [-] freewizard|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scarface74|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] d12bb|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw0101a|4 years ago|reply
If Zuck knowingly gave investors bad guidance, I don't think that would go over well with the SEC:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEC_Rule_10b-5#Forward-looking...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward-looking_statement
[+] [-] ineedasername|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alanlammiman|4 years ago|reply
They did that to us yesterday: https://shared-crater-f3a.notion.site/Facebook-is-Breaking-A...
We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on facebook app ads per month. We can deal with IDFA giving way to more aggregated attribution (we don't want to track individuals - we just want to measure if the ads we paid for led to sales). But facebook breaking our app in production because they can't be bothered doing their job properly is very serious. It can't be solved by reducing ad spend, only by removing their SDK from our app.
If this is also happening to many other developers right now, that, more than the Q4 results or the IDFA issue itself, could be causing the drop in the share price.
In fact, if you look at the Q4 results, the earnings miss was more because of growth in G&A (which grew by 3 percentage-points of revenue if I'm not mistaken) than because of a top-line slowdown. And if you read the comments as to what made G&A grow, it's 'legal costs'.
[+] [-] simpss|4 years ago|reply
well. if your goal isn't tracking individuals, then why are you attaching unique ID's (in cookies) to track individuals on your website?
And I'm not talking about third-party cookies disguised as first-party.
logglytrackingsession (lifetime: session)
notion_experiment_device_id (lifetime: 1 year)
Both are unique to a specific user and are used to identify a single individual. The first one is short-lived, but obviously meant for tracking and the second one can be used for tracking, identifies a single individual and is long-lived.
edit: turning off my adblocker, some more appear.
_ga, _ga_4GMCF7E1GC, intercom-id-gpfdrxfd, notion_browser_id, amp_af43d4
none of these are listed or explained in your privacy policy.[1]
[1] - https://shared-crater-f3a.notion.site/Sticky-Privacy-Policy-...
[+] [-] bagacrap|4 years ago|reply
the fact that they're cracking down on partner privacy in a hamfisted way surely doesn't help matters but I can't see how angry devs are driving the share price down
[+] [-] isodev|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hotpotamus|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] driverdan|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hollowdene|4 years ago|reply
I used to work at a publisher where 80% of their website traffic came from Facebook. They haven't seen audience growth in years and their audience is skewing older and older, which is bad for their advertising business
Businesses like that are going to get steadily squeezed both by Facebook's declining audience share and Facebook's own efforts to change what people see.
[+] [-] Lio|4 years ago|reply
All Apple have done is allow users to say no.
They haven't even stopped anyone opting into surveillance if they want to. It just turns out that, when given the choice, people don't like being snooped on.
[+] [-] Nextgrid|4 years ago|reply
If nobody’s buying anything from these businesses without invasive advertising & tracking then maybe whatever goods they were selling aren’t actually necessary?
Of course there is nuance and edge cases to this, but in general I wouldn’t be surprised if society and the planet was better off once we stop producing useless garbage.
[+] [-] mtberatwork|4 years ago|reply
Starting? Did these publishers not learn anything from the whole Facebook Video debacle? [1] Also, who at these companies thinks tying their core business to a single, third party is a good idea?
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/17/17989712/facebook-inaccu...
[+] [-] yokoprime|4 years ago|reply
Good riddance, what a bunch of bottom feeders.
[+] [-] nottorp|4 years ago|reply
Been reading that facebook is out of fashion for the young uns for several years, way before any privacy changes on part of anyone.
Also, question: how do they know their audience's average age? From invasive tracking?
[+] [-] iamacyborg|4 years ago|reply
Older people have more money to spend and are therefore worth more to advertisers.
[+] [-] altdataseller|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tromp|4 years ago|reply
Hard to believe that nearly half of all people is ok with being tracked...
[+] [-] paxys|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skizm|4 years ago|reply
Amazon's revenue up 15% year over year: +12% (P/E 60+)
I don't get the stock market. Facebook can simply turn on billions in revenue whenever they want still with WhatsApp, which has north of 2 billion MAU, and has not been monetized at all yet. Facebook is a reverse meme stock.
[+] [-] mojuba|4 years ago|reply
If I run a Facebook ad campaign for my app and given that Apple already provides the SKAdNetwork attribution mechanism, does enabling IDFA benefit my app, or it benefits only Facebook? Marketing people are trying to convince me IDFA is important for ad efficiency and thus should be enabled (with the spooky ATT popup in the beginning), but something is telling me it's not. I might be wrong and would really like to know.
[+] [-] mojuba|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sjs382|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scim-knox-twox|4 years ago|reply
And everyone praised Apple for it. But if Apple really care about privacy, they'd never allowed for IDFA in the first place…
> Google will soon offer most users of Android, its mobile operating system, the ability to opt out of ad tracking.
I'll believe it when they pass some independent audits from EU countries xD
[+] [-] zahma|4 years ago|reply
In the future, whether that’s 5, 10, or 20 years, the biggest companies will produce their own platforms of walled garden experiences. Meta isn’t there yet and has suffered a setback, but the reports that Meta is trying to poach Apple devs is telling about where this is all headed. The “metaverse” is nascent and mockable, but my kid will probably grow up in it just like I grew up on AIM, chat rooms, and texting.
[+] [-] intrasight|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ferdowsi|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] worik|4 years ago|reply
Have you done development on Apple platforms? That might push FB into second place....
[+] [-] 1024core|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yalogin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EGreg|4 years ago|reply
Facebook just could never really capture the whole "facilitating real world interactions" thing, and for most people it became simply a way to maintain an online avatar / identity, argue about politics, comment on cat memes, and otherwise waste time in cyberspace. That's what they're good at, and maybe with the metaverse they can at least make people more productive with that.
Now there are BENEFITS to MetaVerse. Less usage of fossil fuels. Facebook also facilitated conversations between people around the world, that would otherwise not meet. But its centralized nature and limited flexibility held back the whole space.
But when it comes to making plans in real life, forming relationships, deal flow etc. you need open source software like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI
[+] [-] annoyingnoob|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] btdmaster|4 years ago|reply
To me, this is closer to "Apple spying technology becomes opt-in and no one uses it anymore".