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Comment by niftich | Hacker News Reader

Good for them. Lots of people spend lots of time on Facebook, so ads get a lot of eyeballs, making them valuable. But I wonder what their clickthrough-rate is. For some types of ads, that's obviously not the point, but I doubt it's very high.

At first, I was curious how their drive towards more video, both user- and professionally-produced, will mesh with their real name policy. But since they allow 'pages' for public figures, businesses, content creators, and other more abstract entities, they may be able to strike a happy medium where content creators can broadcast under a well-known pseudonym, while content consumers are all real people with real identities, targetable with ads. With this setup, they can mount a true challenge against established video places like Youtube and Twitch.

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Facebook (and Google) have the best ad products on the market without any question.

I have so many DR clients printing money via FB ads, CTRs are not the metric we even focus on, it is all about conversions or measurement studies to support even investing in the platform. All my clients (big and small) love the platform, ad formats and service level.

Great company, well deserved success.

> CTRs are not the metric we even focus on, it is all about conversions

If users don't even click on ads how do you measure conversions? Is it more a case of brand advertising where you're not looking for directly measurable sales?

They do click on the ad, and then they buy something. The parent is saying they don't care how many people click, they only care how many people buy (a subset of those that click).

All advertisers want to maximize ROI. Ad displayers want to maximize CPM. It's a mistake to focus on one specific metric, because they all multiply to form the actual metric you care about.

The point is that you're not looking at CTRs because FB surfaces conversion costs, which is a much more revenue-aligned metric. You can of course still look at CTRs to do micro-optimizations and copy tests with ads if you want, but the FB ad platform pushes you not to make that the focus. An ad for free money may have a high CTR but if the landing page is not actually delivering the value prop, the conversion cost will still be high. Likewise, an ad for, say, real estate services will have a much lower CTR (even if the service gives away "free money" :), but if the page is compelling and the clicks are real you can still have good cost per acquisition.

Ok I'm not familiar with the FB ad platform but how does FB surface conversion costs? Using your example of real estate services there's no way FB can tell whether someone becomes a client after clicking on the ad. And without that information FB cannot calculate conversion costs.

We fire a conversion event back to them when someone becomes a client.

Hmmm... what do you pass back to FB? Our FB cookie? That way they can correlate who saw the ad against the visit to your site?

Here's an official explanation of conversion tracking with FB: https://www.facebook.com/business/a/online-sales/conversion-...

Facebook uses their pixel [1] to determine what their visitors do on their advertisers' sites. The pixel can be set with various options, such as a "purchase" pixel with a revenue component. When you initiate campaigns in Facebook you have the option to define a goal of conversions (views of a specific Facebook pixel), and Facebook will report back the conversions from your campaign.

1: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/952192354843755

What is DR?

I'm guessing: Direct Response (Marketing)[0]

[0] http://successwise.com/what-is-direct-response-marketing

> But I wonder what their clickthrough-rate is. For some types of ads, that's obviously not the point, but I doubt it's very high.

I think you hit the nail on the head. I don't have a facebook account, so I feel like I have gotten a chance to see facebook develop in leaps and bounds (unlike their users who see it changes incrementally). The way I've experienced this is that I peruse my wife's account for family pictures once every few months. I've definitely noticed an increase in both quality and quantity of ads. Facebook ads strike me like TV ads do. While they often offer clickthroughs, I'm astonished by the number of ads that are simple positional or brand ads that don't necessarily want you to do anything, but are there to stick their brand in your mind.

>But I wonder what their clickthrough-rate is.

It's shockingly high, especially on Facebook Audience Network (FAN), Facebook's network of 3rd party publishers.

It was so high that I initially thought I was being defrauded. But upon closer inspection, it turns out that if you specify your industry/persona well in your ads, Facebook is incredibly efficient at matching demand with supply. I've never seen such good performance on any other mobile network, Google included.

FWIW, I've only done B2B marketing in my life. I have no idea for B2C folks.

How do you go about targeting B2B clients via Facebook? We have good success with consumer since that's a pretty broad audience and affordable for certain products but never managed to target busineses effectively within a reasonable cost.

Click through rate is going to vary dramatically by vertical, but just as a very rough comparison, it's not hard to get >1% CTR on mobile Newsfeed ads while years ago on a right-hand side small ad before Newsfeed ads I was always wishing for a consistent .1% CTR.

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