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Comment by suking | Hacker News Reader

Facebooks ads ARE NOT higher quality than google. First off, adwords gets an order of magnitude more clicks (CTR). These people are buyers, looking for something, not trying to post comments on their friend's photos. Second, the people who do click on facebook ads are much lower quality. From our data, google users convert ~2.7X more than facebook users and the price difference in CPA does not make up for that difference.

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You can't generalize your claim to every case. Facebook ads may not be higher quality than you, but for many it is. Its goal isn't necessarily to take a purchase intent and turn that into a sale. Its target advertisers are similar to those who currently advertise on TV. For example, does watching an ad about Kool Aid make you want to immediately want to purchase it? No, but it influences your subconscious in a meaningful way.

If you look at the other replier to you, his case is different. Facebook ads are specifically for those companies who would benefit from very fine targeting, who have a long term business horizon, and want to build an image before a purchase.

What do you use Facebook ads for?

(Disclaimer: I was an intern on the ads team)

I've found the opposite case when advertising my app on both networks. Conversions were about the same, but cost per click was about 4x on google. Its a $4.99 one off payment app, so its possible different revenue models find one or the other better for their use.

To be fair we are not an app and are targeting a demo 35+, so that could be an issue... We are also doing some decent volume (few K+/day on both), if we were doing a coule hundred $/day I'm sure we could get FB working as well, but finding it VERY hard on large volume. Not to mention banner blindness sets in after a few days on FB so we are constantly changing ads.

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