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Comment by jaxn | Hacker News Reader

Brick and mortal local retailer here. I spend over $100,000 annually on advertising in my local market. That is all digital at this point. Facebook video is a significant chunk.

The lie is about the effectiveness of video on Facebook.

I directed a fair amount of additional ad spend to Facebook precisely because Facebook users on average seemed to be giving a lot of attention to videos on the platform, even if they were promoted. It actually seemed like there was finally something that could work to replace the kind of lift we would see from TV advertising 5-10 years ago.

This calls that into question (which may be putting it mildly). It also calls into question all of the other metrics Facebook provides advertisers.

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Does the additional ad spend convert to an acceptable lift in sales? If yes, why do you care about video engagement? If no, why maintain such spend even if the engagement numbers are genuinely high?

How could anyone possibly know? You maintain spend because Facebook claims it's providing value. There's no way to actually know this with any certainty, and Facebook manipulating their figures doesn't add clarity in the least. That's why this whole issue is important — these people are spending millions on ads because of the numbers Facebook reports. Then people are spending millions more on stocks because of the profit generated by aforementioned hand waving.

Statistical measurement of lift in sales.

Most small advertisers wouldn't be able to do this, and attribution is hairy as hell, but the options for measuring this are there.

This is a bias of online thinking. Brick and mortar retail doesn't really know the conversion rate on ad spend. The old adage is that you are wasting half of your advertising spend, but the problem is that you never know which half.

So, we make decisions based on imperfect information. When it was TV or Radio ads, there were 3rd parties that measured the market and reach of the station. With Facebook, Youtube, etc we have to take their word for it.

You don't measure the conversion in case of a brick and mortar vendor. But you can still measure proxy values for effectiveness: an uptick in sales volume or number of clients after after starting a campaign, for example.

But we aren't just running one form of advertising at a time, so what to we attribute the uptick?

Also, our marketing doesn't exist in a vacuum. Weather, competitors, a traffic jam down the street, variations in employee performance, etc all impact the performance as well.

It's not like we can just A/B test Facebook video ads vs Pandora Ads and pick the winner.

So, we shift our budget based on the available information.

And the average video view length is part of the information that we used to make decisions.

I'm confused. you seem very confident that facebooks video marketing is a lie, even while you admit being unable to attribute sales.

I know multi-touch is hard, but doesn't that mean you should be less confident in your statements because the data is fuzzy?

He said that he used the avg view length on FB as a reason to choose that channel. If he had know that they didn't factor in <3 sec views he would perhaps not used that channel.

If the ads boosts sales, use them. The speciffic number seconds they are shown is irrelevant. You will have to do your own analytics anyway.

> Duh, just solve the fundamental problem that has plagued advertising since the birth of the industry!

That's kind of why Facebook/Google was ever supposed to be valuable: they empower the analysis. How do you do good analysis with bad inputs?

You don't really.

But assuming the FB/Google reported numbers are accurate, would you pay for them and just convince yourself they are actually increasing your sales?

You should be able to at least plot sales numbers against ad spending per week over a year.

Facebook also "should" be able to report numbers in a way that isn't misleading to their customers.

Inputs are not good or bad, they are better or worse.

In the 1300s, feedback to the advertiser took years.

In the 1900s, months.

In the 1960s, you could now measure the effect of blanketing a MMR with ads, and see how sales there compared to nationally.

This century, you have still-imperfect, yet much better than before, attribution.

Good analysis in the 1930s was different than now. Good marketing was the same, but with cruder tools.

Ah, classic courtroom fraud defense. "Feel fortunate you even caught me; that would've been impossible a century ago!"

Having wiggle room on numbers isn't a bad thing. Lying about the amount of wiggle room on said numbers is.

You can do the analysis that you want, there's no proof that advertising increase something. They are bad and should be banned from our live.

See my reply to the comment above. With local retail, you can't just measure the conversion rate.

It is not about the specific number of seconds. It is about the implied engagement and focus of the audience. It is about a reported difference in the behavior of Facebook users vs other online properties.

You never can. But are you just going to blindly spend money on ads and just believe they work?

Yeah, that is basically the entire advertising industry. Precisely what "brand exposure" is.

What did they define the metric as prior to this 3 second revelation?

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