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.
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.
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
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).
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?
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.
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.
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."
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.
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".
The problem with the article is that the author draws a conclusion with far too little data, akin to signing up for NetFlix and saying it is a terrible service when the first movie doesn't buffer fast enough.
I've spent mid six-figures on Facebook CPC ads over the last several years and can definitively say that they work very, very well - depending on your use case. Mine is not the OP's use case (though I've sold a metric a-ton of SaaS on FB).
I advise everyone here thinking about FB ads to do the following:
- If you try it, dedicate a serious amount of money. Nothing less than $500 will suffice as you need to get statistically significant data across all your targeting sets.
- Focus very narrowly on your target market. Trying women age 22-29? Do that in your metro area only. Keep your targeting sets small so you have fewer variables to contend with.
- Don't lose your nerve. If you give up too quickly you'll know nothing.
Finally, I do understand the OP's frustration with click numbers from FB vs. GA. Don't let it get you down, as this is common on every platform. Optimize for your actual logged data and you'll profit.
You didn't read the article. The point of the article has little to do with the campaign performance and more to do with the forensics he/she did to show evidence most of the clicks are misclicks on android phones. If this is true it means even "successful" campaigns are paying this tax.
With every platform you're going to have some issues with click fraud. Ideally you figure out how to make your campaign work despite these problems. You focus on quality conversions that make a dent in your business. I agree that it sucks to have to pay for this bad traffic. If you spend enough or get an account rep, I'm sure they'd take a look at the report you put together. Its comprehensive enough that other sources I've worked with would probably credit you some traffic.
In the past, I've had some spend returned due to this issue from FB but its been quite awhile since i've even requested it.
For most Saas companies, retargeting and search will work best as they are solving a very specific problem/need. Its difficult to find the users with intent that drives them to convert to a paying customer.
This is OP, I'd admit there could be more data, what isn't shown here is the larger spend I did previously (but was not measured as "scientifically" which produced similar results). I'm doing a new campaign now, targeting only Desktop with a larger spend and will report back the results.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
The fraudulent clicks are a fact now, and they were in 2009 too, but if your earnings per click margin is high enough FB ads can definitely be worth it.
I did really well running dating ads in every English speaking market, and a lot of Spanish speaking markets as well.
FB ads were the second step in my post-college process of bootstrapping myself as a viable economic entity amidst the fallout and financial devastation of the sub-prime mortgage crisis.
So thank you Mark Zuckerberg, if it wasn't for your creation I might have had to get a real job.
YMMV, but as an anecdote my wife's FB CPC campaign for her new private psychotherapy practice saw a > 2% click-through rate to her PsychologyToday page, and the number smust have been close to real because they led directly to phone calls from prospective clients who confirmed they'd seen her ad, deliberately clicked it. It took her maybe 6 weeks to fill her schedule and she turned it off.
Note a photo of a smiling female is the best creative for CTR, and narrowing the demographic in her use case was simple: females within 15 miles of her office, aged 25-45, in certain income range. We think the average lead who actually called probably saw her ad 6 or 7 times before clicking.
OP may have valid criticisms of FB ads, but in our case it was a massive success. Spending a couple bucks to acquire a client w a LTV over $1000 is a no-brainer.
Again, YMMV but if you use it right FB can be a fantastic tool.
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.
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 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.
Not sure why all the hate towards Facebook lately in HN. I do FB ads exclusively ALL DAY and I can pretty much tell you it works.
FB Ads is a very stubborn creature. There's a lot to learn in order to make it work, their editorial team is trigger happy with account bans... but the volume is massive and the targeting options are amazing.
Running a 60$ is nothing on FB, you need to run volume and optimize.
I"m doing a lot of mobile right now and you can go anywhere from .10 to .50 per install and basically scale to infinity if you like.
Interesting post but it's hardly news, a few years back when facebook was struggling to make money I remember reading a detailed article about how facebook delving into advertisement could mean the end of the web as we know it and by that it meant the end of ad-supported websites.
First facebook ads would drive online ads pricing towards the bottom, then it would make obvious something almost all of us know: online advertisement is mostly an overpriced scam that doesn't work and most netizens despise.
Then the usual business model to support costs for running a website would crumble and disappear.
Sadly I can't find this article now (thanks to google tweaking its search engine, it's now hardly possible to find an old results or anythine relevant past the first half of the first results page), but I remember it pointed out that facebook users are much less receptive to ads than google search users. People using a search engine are actively looking for something and ads can be actually be useful to them, but for people looking for social interactions with people they know ads are quite useless and an annoyance.
Right now facebook lack of transparency and accuracy in their ad business means more profit and less trouble for them while hiding the elephant in the room, so don't expect the situation to change soon unless they're given incentive to do so.
[+] [-] napoleoncomplex|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jamiequint|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mpeg|12 years ago|reply
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 :)
[+] [-] acoyfellow|12 years ago|reply
-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)
[+] [-] pbreit|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] will_brown|12 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] simias|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lojack|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] y4mi|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lbotos|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sanswork|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tn13|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] austenallred|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cshenoy|12 years ago|reply
"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."
[+] [-] bigbugbag|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] netcan|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rubyn00bie|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unreal37|12 years ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] loceng|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] interstitial|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kposehn|12 years ago|reply
I've spent mid six-figures on Facebook CPC ads over the last several years and can definitively say that they work very, very well - depending on your use case. Mine is not the OP's use case (though I've sold a metric a-ton of SaaS on FB).
I advise everyone here thinking about FB ads to do the following:
- If you try it, dedicate a serious amount of money. Nothing less than $500 will suffice as you need to get statistically significant data across all your targeting sets.
- Focus very narrowly on your target market. Trying women age 22-29? Do that in your metro area only. Keep your targeting sets small so you have fewer variables to contend with.
- Don't lose your nerve. If you give up too quickly you'll know nothing.
Finally, I do understand the OP's frustration with click numbers from FB vs. GA. Don't let it get you down, as this is common on every platform. Optimize for your actual logged data and you'll profit.
[+] [-] gfodor|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chriogenix|12 years ago|reply
With every platform you're going to have some issues with click fraud. Ideally you figure out how to make your campaign work despite these problems. You focus on quality conversions that make a dent in your business. I agree that it sucks to have to pay for this bad traffic. If you spend enough or get an account rep, I'm sure they'd take a look at the report you put together. Its comprehensive enough that other sources I've worked with would probably credit you some traffic.
In the past, I've had some spend returned due to this issue from FB but its been quite awhile since i've even requested it.
For most Saas companies, retargeting and search will work best as they are solving a very specific problem/need. Its difficult to find the users with intent that drives them to convert to a paying customer.
[+] [-] ry0ohki|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] babs474|12 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] ShaneOG|12 years ago|reply
FB 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...
[+] [-] mpeg|12 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] ry0ohki|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lauraglu|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danieltillett|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paul_f|12 years ago|reply
I don't know what Facebook's long term business model is. IMO, this isn't it.
[+] [-] gdilla|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redler|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] netcan|12 years ago|reply
This campaign failed after a few days and now it will go away. That's as it should be.
[+] [-] mattmaroon|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DivByZero|12 years ago|reply
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 :)
[+] [-] NoodleIncident|12 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] willholloway|12 years ago|reply
I did really well running dating ads in every English speaking market, and a lot of Spanish speaking markets as well.
FB ads were the second step in my post-college process of bootstrapping myself as a viable economic entity amidst the fallout and financial devastation of the sub-prime mortgage crisis.
So thank you Mark Zuckerberg, if it wasn't for your creation I might have had to get a real job.
[+] [-] chrisweekly|12 years ago|reply
Note a photo of a smiling female is the best creative for CTR, and narrowing the demographic in her use case was simple: females within 15 miles of her office, aged 25-45, in certain income range. We think the average lead who actually called probably saw her ad 6 or 7 times before clicking.
OP may have valid criticisms of FB ads, but in our case it was a massive success. Spending a couple bucks to acquire a client w a LTV over $1000 is a no-brainer.
Again, YMMV but if you use it right FB can be a fantastic tool.
[+] [-] rfergie|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] paul_f|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonathanjaeger|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cmstoken|12 years ago|reply
(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.
[+] [-] j_s|12 years ago|reply
http://www.quicksprout.com/2014/02/19/how-to-steal-your-comp...
[+] [-] fabiandesimone|12 years ago|reply
FB Ads is a very stubborn creature. There's a lot to learn in order to make it work, their editorial team is trigger happy with account bans... but the volume is massive and the targeting options are amazing.
Running a 60$ is nothing on FB, you need to run volume and optimize.
I"m doing a lot of mobile right now and you can go anywhere from .10 to .50 per install and basically scale to infinity if you like.
[+] [-] bigbugbag|12 years ago|reply
First facebook ads would drive online ads pricing towards the bottom, then it would make obvious something almost all of us know: online advertisement is mostly an overpriced scam that doesn't work and most netizens despise.
Then the usual business model to support costs for running a website would crumble and disappear.
Sadly I can't find this article now (thanks to google tweaking its search engine, it's now hardly possible to find an old results or anythine relevant past the first half of the first results page), but I remember it pointed out that facebook users are much less receptive to ads than google search users. People using a search engine are actively looking for something and ads can be actually be useful to them, but for people looking for social interactions with people they know ads are quite useless and an annoyance.
Right now facebook lack of transparency and accuracy in their ad business means more profit and less trouble for them while hiding the elephant in the room, so don't expect the situation to change soon unless they're given incentive to do so.
[+] [-] acoyfellow|12 years ago|reply
Simply exclude the countries that are known to be click farms from seeing your page at all.
On your page settings, you'll see a "Country Restrictions" section. http://i.imgur.com/snkv77Q.png
When your page is not visible to a certain area, Facebook will not serve ads to people in that country.
Bam?
[+] [-] shadowmint|12 years ago|reply
...and therefore every single derived stat is completely nonsense. A percentage you say, on a sample size < 100?
Whats your confidence level on that?
(I also think that Facebook ads are a waste, and the conclusion is plausible; but the stats in the post are meaningless and probably deceptive)