Facebook reported fake numbers to advertisers
news.yahoo.com
news.yahoo.com
Facebooks corporate incentive is to get you to FEEL like your getting good value out of advertising on Facebook and to get you addicted to doing it.
Not to actually deliver results.
So don't trust any metric they show you, because even if its not a total fabrication it's still presented in a way to deceive you to think its better than it is.
Always monitor your ROI and always calculate it using your truly end goal (sales, or in the case of civil society some sort engagement off Facebook that's tightly bound to you mission). Likes, shares, comments and reach should NEVER be the goal. Even if FBs interface is trying to convince you otherwise.
Even more reason for us to be doubtful about FB's claims that small businesses would be decimated without FB's invasive tracking.
/s
Retail is dying, malls are bankrupt.
COVID amplified this change and small business struggles. Even big corps are losing retail to online sales, GME is a meme example lol.
Facebook disagrees. It's even taken out full-page newspaper ads to tell people that if small businesses don't advertise (and permit invasive tracking) on Facebook, they'll go out of business and take the economy with them.
LOL. This is quite a comment on their own opinion of their ad platform's influence.
And nothing of value was lost.
I wonder what the ecological impact of all these dropshippers is.
There is value to the consumers purchasing products - many of which are innovative and to be copied later once successful. It's a giant AB test.
There is also value to the business owners, small, medium and large.
You could apply that opinion to any product whether on shopify or even bigger open marketplaces like amazon, walmart
They are being asked to get user consent to track, very different things.
Google is keyword only, and that's limited. Banner network display ads are useless.
The privacy debate is woefully lopsided by people who have never spent a dime marketing. I suggest all the startupy people on HN spend some time trying to get the word out and then they'll realize what the 'hard part' of the business is because it's not code.
Efficient advertising, which is to say getting in front of people who have a legit curiosity for your product with ads that are not distracting, is possible and ideal for everyone, but can only be done with at least some data.
The economy would grow literally by 1% more if we could get people connected with the things they need, when they need them and we'd all be better off.
@jariel can you share any resource for people looking to understand and dip their feet running their own FB ads?
Also, the pitfalls of FB ads are generally well known as well, we all know their numbers are a little ragged and we all know that 'likes' don't have much value in most scenarios.
Frankly, I would encourage anyone to stick $20 into FB ad platform and just run a few ads to drive some traffic to their own pages. It's a powerful and revelatory experience, advertising is a 'dark art' to too many people but it shouldn't be.
The moment you are in a position of having to market and sell a product, especially coming from another discipline, your world turns upside down and you see everything differently.
There is certainly a lot of information out there but much is generic, others are paid, and many are scams.
Offer something free, like an ebook, webinar, etc. and gather email addresses to access it.
This gives you a chance to follow up and grow your email lists. So even if they don’t buy, you at least get a lead. When you just buy a click, you always gotta hit a Homer. Figure out it a way to make base hits count.
I personally have worked as a data scientist trying to assess the value generated by various advertising campaigns, and I personally found that the field is rife with egregious statistical misuse, usually because it was necessary to prove significant ROI on advertising.
[0] https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-h...
Keywords can be useless while the whole field can be useful. Which is to say noting that I'm searching for C++ and so advertising your compiler or programing class is useless - I'm already a programmer (I just forgot the exact spelling or order of arguments to the thing I need) and my company has chosen my compiler. However if you know I my hobby you can target me with your new drill bit and be better yet.
Though the largest advertisers don't care. Coke doesn't care that I don't like soda, they still want to target me just in case I'm called to bring drinks to some event. Ford can safely assume all Americans own a car and be close enough to right. Likewise everyone uses toilet paper (bidet users can be ignored) and soap (if you don't use soap you should be the highest target, though the ads perhaps should be different from those who use soap)
If only 10% of those typing C++ would ever be interested in a course, then those are not bad numbers.
More nuanced: at the 'non-targeted' threshold the ad would not make sense at all, total inefficiency. At the targeted threshold of being able to target at least C++ devs, the ad probably starts to work.
That is the difference between a viable business and not
That means engagement, value creation, sales, C++ developers trained and ready for the market. This is extremely good for society. We definitely want aspiring C++ devs hooked up with quality courses.
This anecdote very tangibly demonstrates the effectiveness of targeting for individual companies ... but it also points to the market efficiency that comes along with good advertising.
If you have a startup, and you can't reach any of your audience, you're dead. This notion of 'word of mouth' is ridiculous as a business plan, it's exceedingly rare, and usually it's not that anyhow in reality - it's usually a form of effective social marketing by the early movers. Clubhouse for example is being helped by the 'celebrity' of the VCs behind it - they don't have mass market following, but a very avid following in a certain niche that will come onto the platform. I'm noticing a lot of Marc Andreseen on Clubhouse, too much for a busy VC, but not too much for someone who's hyping his own investment and bringing in a lot of viewers, helping out a lot of panels.
The essential nature of basic targeting is not controversial, it's quite obvious at least at the most crude level.
Targeted ads are unequivocally more effective than non targeted ads, on the aggregate - there is no dispute other than at the margins.
Do you think that advertising makeup to the general population has the same effectiveness than advertising it to women? Or women who have shown an interest in makeup?
Ads are complicated and nuanced, but everyone in the industry already knows this.
There will always be science at the margins as we discover the means by which people truly engage, but otherwise, there is no arguing with core demographic targeting. It would be like completely non-technical people saying "Javascript is completely ineffective because of null ambiguity" whereas it's universally used, and the limitations of JS are recognized to all but the most junior developers.
Literally just basic demographics, plus a few interest points ... that's all I think we need to do well of those could be reliable.
On the first point - they just don't know that much about us. That's what the whole post is about (!) They were lying advertisers ad to the probabilistic estimates of who we are.
Go here: https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated?hl=en
Google will show what they know about you if you have that on. It's not very accurate at all. It's very fuzzy. For me they have wrong age, a lot of wrong interests.
So they surprisingly don't know a lot, just because someone clicks on an add ... that is not a lot of information - there's so many reasons we click on ads. Google thinks I'm into cars and I don't even drive, I hate cars!
As for basic targeting - it's mostly what advertisers need. So age, education, income, zip code (or zip code classification), rough location would be great. Plus just a few, solid interests (real ones, not estimated) - and that would be a big step forward for ads.
So yes - our privacy is fairly aggressively invaded at the same time they can only glean so much from it. Seems like a Paradox.
Do you have any evidence to back this up? I can't find any published literature where Facebook has hinted this, including this paper [0] saying:
> As expected the most important thing is to have the right features: those capturing historical information about the user or ad dominate other types of features.
0. https://research.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/practical...
Most targeted advertising, sure.
Targeted ads based on interests? Diet? General age range? Of course those will be more effective.
Showing me targeted ads for fitness products has been very effective, I have a yoga and a workout app I use that are both 100% due to targeted ads. I also have tried out various food products (keto cereal!) due to targeted ads.
Interest based ads work, if done well. Now that said, ads for stuff I already bought, eh, less so. Even worse if I buy something from an ad, get it home, unbox it, then google for help. Now I get ads trying to sell me the same product again. Though I'm not sure how horribly invasive ads would have to be to avoid that scenario.
I've generally found FB ads to be, honestly, useful at times.
What I really don't trust are kickstarter campaigns running YT ads. Shouts 'scam!' to me almost instantly.
Also that YT ad that was playing a few months ago for the $20 adjustable dumbbell set that went to a super shady site. (Normally adjustable dumbbells go for $500+...) It appeared to be a fake storefront, but YT kept happily running the ad day after day.
It was well targeted though. :)
Why should marketers influence how much privacy I have? Their incentive is for me to have as little privacy as possible.
This is like saying anti-war campaigns are woefully lopsided by people who have never sold munitions.
Your privacy is not compromised by Facebook. Nobody is harmed. There are zero cases of people being hurt or their lives being denigrated due to targeted advertising.
FB is not perfect, I think there are better ways, I don't like them, but it's hyperbolic to suggest there is material systematic harm. Nobody is really losing that much.
Do you and I live in different universes? The one I live in blamed FB for allowing 3rd partner apps to download loads of personal information, and then use it to send targeted adds to influence an election. Also, adds spreading misinformation about Covid 19. At the early part of FB, kids could upload pictures with their EXIF data that included GPS coordinates- which were then used for kidnapping or serial molestation.
With location tracking for adds, no one even needs a legitimate reason to buy location data. Thus can be used for thugs to track down and kill people they don't like.
Nobody is harmed by virtue of invasion of their privacy.
Ads, which relate to misinformation about COVID and elections are completely separate issue, and basically have nothing to do with the detailed nature of targeting.
'Harmful Ads' can be on any platform in the world - Google, Television, Magazines, Billboards.
There is no harm to you due to the fact that FB has a 90% chance of knowing your gender, age, and a couple of your interests. None.
I don't buy from shopify or facebook anymore, and probably won't even if they clean up their act.
Most stores buy and hold inventory, taking on the risk of not selling that inventory. Dropshippers send the order to someone else to fulfil, and are essentially glorified lead generators.
There are certainly good small businesses, both on Shopify and elsewhere, and some would be hurt to some small degree by this change. I'm simply arguing that the majority of business which would go broke without the use of the FB ad system tracking panopticon are not the sort of small business which are societally useful or that we should mourn their loss.
"Small businesses going bankrupt" typically is thought of a negative thing, but there are flavors of small businesses where it is really a net societal good.
That's certainly selling drop-shippers short.
They provide products, at prices people are willing to pay for convenience, trustability, etc. They handle complaints, shoulder the risk of returns and/or damaged in shipment items, pay for their own advertising/marketing and more.
Many Tier-1 distributors enjoy their relationship with drop-shippers... and many customers enjoy that very same relationship too.
Facebook is repeatable shown to be lying, manipulating, failing to properly moderate their platform and having a general shady business practise, yet their stock price keeps climbing, they're not really punished in any meaningful way. It's disappointing that business are allowed to operate in this way, but I don't think anyone really care.
My observation has been that for many, it's both "don't" and "can't."
Facebook makes it easy for people to advertise. Auditing your Facebook buy is a different skill set that requires different thinking, and more time than most small business owners have. So they just trust Facebook isn't lying to them, the way that they trust the metrics that the local radio station salesman gives them. Except that the radio station salesman will lose his job if the numbers aren't right. There is no punishment for Facebook lying to its advertisers.
25k gets you more than 50k clicks, which would require less than a 0.002% conversion rate to produce no results.
So, so, so many people don't. Idea of ROI is foreign to them. Facebook is going this whole "be your own advertiser" thing and ... well, it's working.
They see the pretty graphs and big number ("You reached 50k people!") and they thing it's fantastic. The idea that the conversion from 50k impressions could be 0% ... does not compute, because they imagine 50k people spending cognitive energy on their ad ... not 50k people scrolling past the ad never even noticing it.
The difference in effectiveness between different visuals and ad copy ranged from "no one clicked this" to "10% conversion after hitting my landing page."
For the right audience, with the right campaign, FB ads do work.
But you have to play around, and what does work might not be intuitive.
Also I found out that the ad copy that worked on FB didn't work on Reddit, and vis versa.
I mean you can start experiments with statistically significant results branching from that, but when you are tight on budget, and just want to start out, it might be better to just randomly find something which can get the ball rolling?
Clearly, FB was reaching some relevant users, since I picked some up as customers, but this was ridiculously padded with users outside the demographic that I was paying for, and I had to again figure out whether people were potential customers (re-qualify them). This left a sour taste and, as a result, I will not use Facebook advertising again.
I'm not sure why it's in Facebook's interest to lie like this.
Ofent I feel marketing is some kind of scheme to keep money flowing to marketing departements.
Looks like you are doing your homework. Not everyone does though. Even if 60% of people who buy ads try to correlate the data, well there is a 40% that doesn't. That's easy money.
What surprises me is the coincidence that you ad drew the attentio of fake accounts. So, who preserves a network of fake accounts that will give you the false validation that you ad is working?
I see the benefit to FB that these fake accounts exist (and are NOT detected/eradicated).
But, I was extremely bothered about apparently real people contacting me who were well outside the demographic of people that I was paying for. I spent time dealing with them, and - as expected - they were unlikely to convert into customers.
I would have re-employed FB 10 times over if I didn't actively have to deal with so many contacts outside of what I was paying for.
What they're doing now is more like loot boxes.
Can you provide sources or evidence of this?
You build UIs in a way that improve your own metrics, which in this case is probably ad spend. They’ve likely run hundreds of A/B tests on the way ad data is displayed to try and optimize for that metric.
A company that has a value system as crooked as Facebook's can't be trusted.
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/embarrassing-and-damaging...
quoted ..
The technology site Silicon Alley Insider got hold of some of the messages and, this past spring, posted the transcript of a conversation between Zuckerberg and a friend, outlining how he was planning to deal with Harvard Connect:
FRIEND: so have you decided what you are going to do about the websites? ZUCK: yea i’m going to fuck them ZUCK: probably in the year ZUCK: *ear
In another exchange leaked to Silicon Alley Insider, Zuckerberg explained to a friend that his control of Facebook gave him access to any information he wanted on any Harvard student:
ZUCK: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard ZUCK: just ask ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns FRIEND: what!? how’d you manage that one? ZUCK: people just submitted it ZUCK: i don’t know why ZUCK: they “trust me” ZUCK: dumb fucks
In it's good form it's learning how to design interfaces that are intuitive (i.e. they lead you to what you need). In it's bad form it's used to lead you to what the owners want (i.e. conversion to sales in it's purest form, or, in the case of Facebook, something much much worse).
I've been debating publishing a blog calling on the EU to stop using the utterly incorrect term "social network" and start using something more appropriate like "advertising platform" or, even more appropriately something that includes a nod to their primary factor of success - induction of emotional liability and reactivity in humans.
Isn't this the entire raison d'être of marketing, in general?
But for most products it's rather easy to tell if you're getting the value you expect out of them, not so much here.
They remove OrderId's because they deem them "PII" (what!?) and just report number of conversions and conversion dollar amounts.
This, coupled with the complexity of referral tracking, lookback windows, browsers clearing cookies, etc... it becomes nearly (or completely!) impossible to validate any results from FB's ad platform.
Added to that, FB's ad platform's goal seems to be to spend your entire daily budget... every single day... regardless of ROAS. That's just absurd.
Trust Us - they say...
This has always been a pet peeve of mine, and is clearly intentional by Facebook to prevent businesses from confirming and digging into results.
No other major advertising partner does this. Not Google Ads or Bing, not even Outbrain or Criteo. If these services report a conversion, they return to me the ID I passed to them for the conversion (even if last-click doesn't match).
And ROAS is Google’s main measure of return, it’s a poor metric because it has nothing to do with profit.
It’s not as accessible but there are a few good integrations that make it easier.
A simple look enough of their profiles revealed that, like would he expected from any fly by night CPA network, FB was using bots, or at least straw man accounts run by low-cost staff, to like and view content which FB was paid to advertise.
Worse, I found that the clickthrough metrics reported by them to off-FB destinations I advertised NEVER was anywhere close to what was reported on the destination, including when tracked by Google Analytics.
In short: like-fraud, click-fraud, and more.
I cannot be the only person to notice these things. I assume it persists because most people, self included, simply complain and move on once we notice the “game” but don’t sue.
Ok, so, honest question, why not? If you're correct then it seems like a class action would be a slam dunk and wouldn't cost you anything personally because class action lawyers are happy to skim millions off the top of the settlement.
In practice FB's lawyers will produce a compelling bullshit excuse to explain the poor results, the fake clicks, the fake accounts, and the lack of sales.
Likely it will be the user's fault and FB can't be held responsible if the user keeps spending money etc etc.
This is really an antitrust issue, because it's a particularly nasty form of market monopolisation combined with cultivated mental and emotional manipulation to keep buyers locked in and spending.
I honestly don't know as I have never bought ads on FB. It would not surprise me if all but the biggest enterprise customers have horrible terms of service...
I spoke with Augustine Fou late last year for my podcast about digital fraud, it was pretty eye-opening to say the least.
https://www.mql.fm/002-60-million-60-billion-ad-fraud-questi...
Define a 'plausible' user? Facebook just wants your phone number and uses that as the only metric to determine it's a human behind the account. And as we know, there is no shortage of phone numbers to use from places like Twilio where you can mass-generate an army of Facebook users.
It's basically arbitrage to sell spammy clickbait ads for scammers at higher prices than FB would pay if they would even allow the ads on their network.
Advertising networks try to detect and filter click-bots but of course some percentage will slip through.
Switch to ad networks where you pay for conversions, not clicks/impressions.
If you tell Facebook's machine learning algorithm to optimize towards purchases on your website or visits to your stores or to users onboarding to your app, then you'll really see the power of their beast. Those are the ads that people are spending billions of dollars on, because the outcomes drive real business value and have too much friction to be faked at scale.
https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cub21ueWNvbnR...
Companies spend millions of dollars on these platforms because they know, directionally, that some amount of the advertising is effective. Sales go up when they advertise, sales go down when they stop.
They use the reported metrics from the platforms to see which of their ad campaigns is relatively more effective than the next. No experienced marketers rely on these metrics to be accurate when making budget decisions.
I agree with your point on the large companies that can spend millions of dollars.
The folks that really get hurt by this stuff are the smaller businesses. It can be an expensive lesson when you think you're getting value from these services because they're providing bogus metrics. It's even more difficult if you can't correlate it to online sales, things like restaurants/retail locations this is especially difficult.
Something that would help tie an ad click to an actual purchase or an app download.
That said, they're all part of an industry consortium that's working on differential privacy algorithms that will ideally allow businesses to check each other's attribution without actually sharing the personal data involved. https://developers.googleblog.com/2019/09/enabling-developer...
Of course when it comes to the GDPR both would be illegal unless proper, informed consent has been obtained beforehand.
Ok, now I understand what you meant. In this case it's because the strategy comes from high up and (putting plausible deniability of individuals like FB's CEO aside) the manager of the "fake accounts" team got some instructions from above to focus "here" not "there", and this just happens to be in the best interest of the "ads" team.
The employees themselves may be individuals but they're there working for the vision of the company and CEO (because it's usually the CEO who sets the course and is aware of all these directives). They're not doing it for the other team, they're doing it because whoever set the strategy decided it's in the best interest of the company.
What does this mean? Are they removing fake accounts or not?
Some departments are routinely instructed to turn a blind eye to the actions of some but not others. Sexual harassment is one topic that rubs me the wrong way since I worked (and quit from) companies who were pursuing these cases only if they were below a certain level in the hierarchy. Above that it was "blind eye" all around.
This is a tactic broadly used in AdWords in the past, and I assume that it's also used on FB too.
The above gets even worse when I tell my brother-in-law that he shouldn't bother with FB ads for his new pet food store, this other platform is a better value.
Thus it is long term to FB's advantage to make their numbers real. I can't say if they will or not, but it would be to their advantage.
As for click-fraud is pervasive in the online world. I don't think there's any major platform that doesn't have a fraud problem, and I can't realistically think of a solution that's not too much of a problem to work it out. Google is supposedly on top of it for more than a decade, but I haven't met a single person advertising on AdWords who doesn't think that they get fake traffic. I've even read reports that state that one third of global ad traffic is fraudulent.
Im a fb hater too. But it works for some small businesses.
We get it, you don't like FB. That's fine. As an advertiser who knows that FB is far and above every other attention based ad platform (in effectiveness, transparency, scale, etc.), its like listening to nails on a chalkboard to read 90% of the comments in threads like these.
For what it's worth, I have no real stake in ads one way or the other, but I would upvote a post if it was backed by solid data.
That's not what OP claimed. OP claimed:
> FB is far and above every other attention based ad platform (in effectiveness, transparency, scale, etc.)
So OP didn't say FB was good in absolute terms, but that it's better than anything else. That's quite different, especially in the context of HN, where we talk a lot about FB, but not so much about other ad platforms.
It's mostly a hate post about facebook, rather than an interesting post. When you pay for advertising, you are always in the dark about the value you're getting unless you actually actively try to measure it yourself. If you don't, then you're committing a newbie mistake.
Yes but you run an ad agency[1] so it's in your interest to talk it up. I think I'll take your comment with a pinch of salt.
When we see ads, it's like nails on a chalkboard (or in the eyes).
We understand you don't care what we say/think as long as you're making money just like the other 90% of advertisers who infest HN.
No digital marketing managers are fooled by this. I mean c'mon, given these companies' track records, you wouldn't blindly trust their performance reporting. Those who manage ad campaigns almost always correlate performance to metrics that are measurable on their end. The most common are ROAS (return on ad spend) and revenue. I think the only victims of this may be the individuals and super small-time marketers with small budgets who are inexperienced or lack measurable business outcomes.
TikTok, Clubhouse, Snap - nobody independently verifies their numbers.
It is even used to create virality. Those 1.5mil likes on a TikTok? Why wouldn't TikTok spike that number to get attention?
I also wonder what we could do to change it. Do you think someone independently verifying the numbers would help? Who do you think might do it and how?
Whether an Advertiser can _potentially_ reach 100M people or accounts is not their objective when setting up a campaign.
The invoice at the end of the month ultimately reveals the number of ad impressions.
This honestly doesn’t seem all that terrible, especially compared to their past of inflating actual performance metrics. Yeah they should’ve fixed it, but adtech platforms have hundreds of metrics with little opportunity to verify them so I’m sure it’s nowhere near the worst example.
Why wouldn't an advertiser invest less in a campaign if it reached less people? That's why companies are willing to pay so much more for a superbowl ad than a regular TV ad, because they have more reach.
The problem I think is that a lot of advertisers, especially smaller ones, wouldn't want to risk pissing Facebook off with a lawsuit. Plus even if Facebook misleads advertisers in a way that results in them spending more money than they otherwise would...the fact is, Facebook could likely double or triple their current prices and those same advertisers would still pay it because they have no choice.
If the ads don't work, or do not deliver enough results for the price, the advertiser will take their spend somewhere else.
Anyone moderately familiar with a concept like ROAS, even with its limitations, should be able to avoid making such wrongheaded arguments.
If FB would/could cut down on fraud the cost of sales would go down making their ads more valuable.
My initial wording is weird.
1. https://metro.co.uk/2019/04/29/50-years-therell-dead-people-...
The knowledge that someone is dead isn't very sensitive. I still control how much facebook knows about me, but some information is worth giving facebook because they will let my friends know.
They’re not even well connected politically, there is no reason not to curb stomp them
I'm asking because I'm having a hard time thinking of a person that would do things that Facebook does...
Paying other companies for advertising on their platforms meanwhile they are paying someone else, and that third party is paying us.
All three marketing departments probably get a net 0 value from it, all three marketing departments get to report their budget spends and not get defunded, meanwhile producing nothing concrete of value.
Not all advertising is educational.
But if you've heard of something like QVC, or have an approximate idea of the revenue generated by the advertising industry and the humility to think all of their customers can't be wrong, you should be able to dispose of the notion that you're pushing here.
Yeah, some people waste money on advertising. For some others, it's a money printing machine. Shrug
Are you saying advertising on FB/IG doesn't work in general?
You want proof that advertising works? Facebook's revenues last year were $85 Billion, mostly from advertising. And it's growing every year. Merchants wouldn't be spending that kind of money over a sustained period if they were seeing negative ROI on their ad spend.
that's the only time i was consciously effected by advertisement, but i also suspect the mind bending happens so much on a sub-conscious level.
Stop spending money on facebook and you will lose marketshare to those that do - even if much of it is fake.
Make a better website with no ads, no trackers, no popups and no distractions and people visit and leave quickly...
But.. if you do everything people hate, you seem to get enough conversions to still be viable.
I guess tl;dr - most consumers don't care and especially the ones who have money to spend. The ones that do care, don't spend money and certainly don't do so with any altruism to those places that respect their privacy/browser/sessions.