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Comment by adotjdotr | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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

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