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Comment by at-fates-hands | Hacker News Reader

I can support what you're saying with the same experience.

I did some SEO for a local landscape company. They were already doing well, but asked me about doing ads on FB. I told them I thought it was a scam, but they persisted so I ran a few campaigns for irrigation in the Spring and then fall cleanup starting in August.

Same thing happened. They got a ton of impressions and clicks (no surprise) and a about a dozen leads. When they went through them, nearly all were for fake numbers (no answer and no VM) or email addresses that bounced. They ended up with one lead for a service they don't even make any money on.

In the end, they lost a few hundred dollars, but it was enough to convince them running FB ads to generate business was not only a good idea, but it convinced them it was rigged and a scam.

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How were the bids setup? When you underbid you'll get matched with people nobody wants. Also if real users aren't interested in whatever interaction you're soliciting you're bound to only get bots.

I've done some FB advertising for news type content (much easier to target properly) and was getting incredible value for the money. Usually it's pretty obvious real fast if you're getting real action or not and you can adjust accordingly.

Your description "people nobody wants" does not match parents "nearly all were for fake numbers" (bots).

I'm not the person you are responding to, but I am the parent comment. Anyways, my issue was that often the users that were "liking" my ads weren't even in the geographic region I selected. So if I say "spend $20 a day" and target people in X area, why are they showing my ad to people in Y area? I know they have options for lived in vs travelled through etc but these were clearly people that lived in Y area.

What could explain the mechanics of how this happens?

Surely FB employees aren't managing those bot accounts themselves. Do they generally determine accounts that engage with ads to be "human/real", thereby incentivizing bad actors who spin up fake FB accounts to click/"like" ads?

> Surely FB employees aren't managing those bot accounts themselves

Why not? It's not like Facebook employees have a track record as paragons of virtue.

If there are managers incentivized to meet click targets, it could even happen informally. Like the Wells Fargo account-opening scandal.

No business as successful as Facebook is going to do something as idiotic as introducing click targets.

Clearly you would want to optimise the rates ;)

They could also do it at arm's length. A lot of MTurk-style sites have loads of jobs along the lines of, "click this ad, fill out this form, get $0.02".

But who is paying those MTurk click farms to click ads on Facebook?

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