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Nice video. All true. I have performed tests with the same ad budget ($20k) and target audience for Google and FB. FB ROI was negative. Google ROI was 400% (travel space). The only thing that seemingly "works" has been buying likes by advertising. This video should help educate my clients of the utter uselessness of those too.

This brings up the interesting question of the general (non)value of a lot of mobile advertising. High impressions, super-low click rates, with many "falsies" because of tricks by the developer, eg where the advert is shown at random, quickly covering up parts of the user interface or extremely close to legitimate user interface elements.

Case in point, the app "Reddit in Pictures" bounces its adverts up and down at the bottom of the screen. If the advert were static, you wouldn't make the mistake of clicking on them, however, due to the bounce it has happened to me at least 20 times in the past month.

In short: for me the only valuable advert is a google advert... visible at the time when people have actually expressed interest in a topic/product, because they search for it. Note: google display network advertising is equally useless/fraudulent.

View on HN

Since it was my post, let me hijack the hijack and refocus the discussion.

FB advertising has major issues and not just fraud.

#1 - FB has a feedback loop issue

The main reason why (for us) Google works so much better, is that it spans the full sales funnel, from impression to click to registration and finally conversion (room bought).

Google optimizes ad serving for themselves AND for me, and I can see the results. As long as they generate more revenue for my client at an acceptable cost per conversion (sales, not likes) we will spend more on google. Google isn't just taking, it's giving (a lot). As long as the last segment, ie actual conversions affecting ad serving, is missing, google will remain our favorite marketing channel.

#2 - Facebook has a major intent issue.

Eyeballs are nice, but only if those eyeballs have the intent to convert/purchase, which is rarely the case for high price, non-luxury and non-lifestyle items on the FB site itself, unlike a lead generated by google's search engine.

I have read about the "tricks" to minimize useless clicks and learned about some more below, but it really shouldn't be that hard.

PS I do realize that my situation is quite specific - see comment above or below, hospitality industry, busy market, price-sensitive audience, not a big brand name, etc. It may work for you, it just doesn't work for us, and not just because of the fake likes.

Well, since you're "here"

Here's the question I'd want to ask: if the Facebook ad clicks are from click-farms but you don't pay for them, how did they get there?

One guess would be that click-farm people like stuff at random to "seem legitimate". Maybe Facebook itself incentivizes fake account to like stuff by not deleting fake accounts that behave "conveniently".

But that's just a guess, I've look for someone to do more research.

The parent comment author is not the original video author, given his appreciative comments for the video. (Not sure otherwise what you meant by 'Well, since you're "here"')

As to your question, that's exactly what the video covers. With a nice animation and everything. And really, I expect Facebook to post some useful numbers rather than forcing us to do the research.

Jesus, did you watch the video that's subject of the post, or are you just posting, since "you are here." This is exactly the information that the video covers, with animations, explanations, and even links to sources.

I wish we are sufficiently close to a time, when automated comment-comprehending and comment-curating software - like browser extensions and plugins - are widely available, thanks to advances made in the areas of (textual) Deep Learning and (textual) Artificial Intelligence.

Perhaps then, clumsy comments like the one made by joe_the_user:

  One guess would be that click-farm people like stuff at
  random to "seem legitimate".

could be neatly redacted by the extension, without affecting the rest of the comment.

I surely hope so.

Some of the comments that surface to the top of the heap, are head-achingly dreadful.

Including this one, ironically. x0054 called out the problem, no need to pile on with nothing more of any particular value to add.

My comment is less ironic than you might discern.

History is rife with far wilder inventions than the comment-curating 'contraption' that I describe, that have been conceived and crafted, drawing from a far smaller source of inspiration than the clumsy comment made by joe_the_user.

In all probability, the sort of thing, I describe, would never materialize in the foreseeable future. It could just be a figment of my imagination.

The leaps and bounds that are required for such comment-comprehension - especially the two step thing needed for the software to assimilate the contents of the video and then contextually-observe that joe_the_user has not viewed the video, just by reading his comment - are probably far too great for the current state of Deep Learning and AI (someone well versed in these areas could chime in).

Or perhaps such advents in content curation - unbeknownst to us - are already afoot.

Surely then your quick dismissing of my "value-less" comment could be the butt of jokes for posterity.

Time will decide.

You're writing a lot of words without actually saying anything. You can try and dress your original comment up all you want, but all you were doing was kicking someone while they were down to make yourself feel superior, while attempting to disguise it in the form of some highbrow but vague speculation of some future technology without providing anything of concrete value about it. This is HN, we're all aware of the possibilities of strong AI, but unless you've got a github account with a demo in it or some new algorithm, you're just spouting bs.

(Also, you really don't want to end the world just to get better hn comment threads. Strong AI is scary, man)

The idea floated in this earlier Next Web article cited in the video is that click-farmers make use of the Page Suggestion feature, i.e. each time they like a Page FB suggests a new page they might also like to "like". What was once a useful service for discovery for legit users may have turned into the click-farmers' best friend.

http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2014/01/23/likes-lies-perfect...

My understanding was that identifying fake accounts automatically was a pretty hard problem to solve. That's not making up for the likes being fake, but it does justify why they can't just delete all the fake accounts.

To me, it seems clear that if something's going on, it's not Facebook "conveniently" letting the fakes go. It's more the problem being hard to cope with.

Or somebody present me results that demonstrate how easy it is to identify fakes with low false positives.

As others pointed out I'm not the author of this wonderful video.

Regarding #1 - Facebook conversion pixel (a JS script that has to be loaded the HTML header) solves the feedback loop problem.

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/ads-api/offsi...

Is there a native mobile equivalent for this? Identifying our FB ad cohort is a major problem when trying to calculate the effectiveness of our ad spend on FB.

Yes, there are dozens of preferred marketing developers who provide this service.

In my experience, Facebook actually has the best performing ads with respect to measurable financial objectives.

I think facebook's official mobile SDK will let you do this.

Thanks. Quickly glanced over this page (I wasn't aware of this option, I admit) but can anyone tell me if the conversion pixel is just a tracker for conversion, or whether it actually affects ad serving? I know on google it does.

Anecdote: once had a Google advert that resulted in many more clicks, but another advert was served more. When I inquired about this, google staff explained that the other advert had fewer clicks, but resulted in more (or actual) revenue. I did not have to manually track the results of the campaign and adjust, it was adjusted for me.

You can optimize based on the expected rate of conversion.

Hey everyone -- sorry to hijack the top thread but I’m an ads engineer at Facebook so I feel qualified to respond. I posted this over on reddit too but it's still pending approval.

In the case of this ad — I think we actually delivered on what was asked for. The targeting specs were fairly broad (cat lovers in four countries). Getting 39 people who like cats to like a page with a cute cat picture in 20 minutes sounds pretty reasonable to me. If you want a specific kind of cat lover, you’d probably want to target even more specifically (like people in a zip code near you).

We're continually working on making it easier for advertisers to target the right people. Earlier this year I worked on a piece of UI called "Audience Definition" (in our ad create flow), which helps give advertisers guidance on how to target ads more specifically. If you set your advertising too broadly (or too narrowly) -- you get a warning.

Fake (and low quality) likes are bad for everyone. We don’t want advertisers to get fans that aren’t good for their business -- we want to help them drive real results, and we can’t do that with bad likes. We invest a lot in improving the systems to monitor and remove fake likes from the system, and also in helping advertisers set smart targeting to help them reach the people they care most about.

And to be honest, a lot of people like cats, and the picture on the page is pretty adorable. Lots of real people like lots of things. And LOTS of people like cats. :P -Peter

Watching the video, I don't think that the takeaway was that the advertising was fraudulently performed, but that due to the chaining of likes/engagement/content display, that fake profiles/click farms can have a negative impact on longer-term relationships with people who consume an advertisers content.

I mean, if you look at the page he was trying to drive traffic to, it seems as though 20 minutes would actually be problematic. He was attempting to stretch out the time it took, and failed. If I put up an ad with the basic premise of:"like this page, and it'll download malware" and got likes, the likes would be EXTREMELY suspect, which is what it appeared he was trying to do. I think that non-genuine eyeballs are a large problem for any CPM advertising company, but as this seems tied to how content is distributed after the fact, the problem may be exacerbated.

It's not just paid likes that people are worrying about--it's organic likes too...which brings me to my question. What is your response to the other problem the OP references: spammers liking thousands of unrelated pages to confuse your algorithms, which in turn diminishes audience reach across the entire network?

I guess I just don't understand why the responsibility is on the advertiser to "target the right people." And really, that's not the problem here. If I had a Page that I wanted to target in Bangladesh, how exactly could I go about doing that without having the majority of my likes be fake?

> If I had a Page that I wanted to target in Bangladesh, how exactly could I go about doing that without having the majority of my likes be fake?

Well obviously this means you can't use targeted advertising on people in Bangladesh.

Hm. We should roll out click farms everywhere.

Oh lord, "ads engineer".

I weep for humanity.

Humanity has had ad engineers as long as we've had civilization. There was even actual physical engineering going into the intricate stencils used to carve the names of kings promoting themselves into temples and other buildings in ancient Babylon -- over 4000 years ago.

I sincerely hope names like this become widespread if they accurately describe the job. Very helpful to have a bright red "KEEP OUT" sign.

I'm a soon-to-be graduated student and am job hunting, so identifying dead ends is presently very relevant to my life. What about a title like this smells fishy to you? I'm not being pedantic, I really want to know how to avoid crappy jobs.

The job might not be that bad. It just depends on what you find intellectually stimulating. The actual algorithm for selecting ads probably won't be what you get to work on. Ad engineer jobs are quite frequently focused on making tooling for the buyers to slice and dice data in lots of different ways to analyze the results of a campaign.

By all means, if it's a good company I would highly suggest taking the job. A job at Facebook or Google for a year working as an ad engineer is still going to be a much better experience than most 'enterprise java' positions at a non-tech company.

I work in natural language processing now, but I was working on ads for the last couple of years (right out of college).

There is nothing inherent to ads that makes it universally something to avoid. Different people have different priorities for their ideal engineering job (num of users reached, power within the team, liking the product, liking the actual technical work, etc). I know people who loved working in ads: some of them didn't care a ton about the product they worked on, but loved the challenge of their technical work, and some who truly found the world of ads itself to be interesting. This set of priorities isn't necessarily something you'll realize immediately out of school; I was happy for a while with the technical challenge of the work I was doing in ads, but after a while I realized that my personal preference prioritized the actual product I was shipping higher than I thought, so I switched to something I was more excited about.

Don't listen to anyone stupid enough to tell you that there's any universal rule about jobs in ads being crappy (much less a "dead end"; I couldn't be happier where I am at this point and spending a couple of years working in the area of ads didn't hurt me at all). Keep in mind what your priorities are for your job (they're different for everyone) and do research on what a given role would entail (something that even good CS programs don't really prepare you for: I had to discover my aversion to front-end work the hard way).

> Don't listen to anyone stupid enough to tell you that there's any universal rule about jobs in ads being crappy (much less a "dead end";

Also, be aware that this can change in a few years. Some people consider working for Monsanto a "dead end", because not many other companies would want to hire a person like that afterwards.

>Some people consider working for Monsanto a "dead end", because not many other companies would want to hire a person like that afterwards.

Is this even true? I know it's the kind of thing that's hard to explicitly source, but I have a hard time believing that many companies (let alone most) would blacklist someone for working for Monsanto. I feel like the actual reason to avoid Monsanto would be if it's incompatible with your personal morality, not for some imagined fear of widespread reprisal.

I can't say from direct personal experience, but I had a friend reject a Monsanto job offer, explaining that such a first job could become a negative influence on the rest of her career. I'm not in her field, so I don't know what different kinds of employers think.

Hm ok, I was thrown off by the fact that it sounded like you were saying "not many [desirable] companies would hire you after Monsanto". I honestly think your friend might have just been overreacting. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't work at Monsanto either, but I wouldn't have any illusions about it being a 100% personal decision as opposed to something that would affect my career negatively. My assumption is that most organizations aren't childish enough to turn away employees just because of negative views of their past employers; people take jobs for LOTS of reasons, not simple optimization in one direction (how "good" the company is).

For a facile example, I have a friend who got into environmental law and was very aware that she could either make peanuts defending the environment (at a non-profit) or make bank helping companies destroy it (she has chosen the former so far). If she suddenly had to deal with huge medical costs for a sick kid or something? One would have to be a complete asshole to judge her sight unseen for having a certain company on her resume.

I have graduated a long time ago, here is my piece of advice. Do not steer away from the jobs just because someone says so. Try them all. You are young, don't get stuck in one place/industry. This will give you a strong advantage later on.

I don't work in ad engineering, but I do work in marketing/advertising analytics for a major brand.

I get contacted by recruiters every week, so I find any talk about a shortage of jobs in this field to be laughable.

Identifying which ad to show to which user is basically mind reading. I can think of few things which are more intellectually stimulating.

My company spends about 100x more money with Google on ads than we do on Facebook ads. Why? Because every time I test advertising on Facebook (outside of retargeting), 90%+ of the engagement looks like garbage. I buy likes, I get likes from people that are clearly not target customers. I boost posts, it makes no sense who seems them and who comments. I could never figure out why people that are clearly not target customers would ever "like" my ad or engage with me. Beyond that, we get no conversions/ROI. It makes no sense; ergo I cannot trust the FB ad platform.

Defend the "reasonableness" of your ad platform all you want, but realize that your brand is completely tarnished and it will take serious changes before you ever see much of my money.

That said, I am not hating. I wish Facebook ads didn't suck, as I'd gladly pay you as much as I pay Google if I got similar ROI.

This is not a Facebook problem. It's a problem with how YOU are running Facebook ads.

This IS a Facebook problem. Whether they are not doing their job properly or customers have problems understanding their platform. But whatever it is, it still affects FB directly, so of course it's their problem.

No, it's not. This is as much of a Facebook problem as it is Google's problem that people send SPAM to people on the internet. This guy doesn't know how to market. People think that advertising is a magic button that you push and you get results. Hilarious.

And let me guess... you get great results with your Facebook campaigns? My marketing teams have spent a lot of time with a variety of advertising campaigns. The Facebook has always been by far the worst, an order of magnitude worse than everything else we tried even though it's supposed to have greater targeting ability. Snarky comments on HN aren't going to make me believe that Facebook advertising is anything but overpriced and overhyped. Please present your evidence instead of assuming everyone is an idiot.

I'm not here to make you believe anything. Do what's working for you. If Facebook ads are not working for you, stop using them, or seek the help of someone more qualified than you and your team.

> I'm not here to make you believe anything.

Then what are you here to do? Just write unsubstantiated snarky comments about how much of an idiot everyone but you is?

Just expressing my frustration about this whole thing.

Here is an accurate response: http://www.jonloomer.com/2014/02/11/facebook-fraud-response/

Yeah, a facebook employee complaining that he didn't use enough money to promote the fake pages. Also complaining that he is using facebook wrong and should know better. I was expecting facebook to know better than to leave old tools that does not work lying around just because they make good money out of them? No wait, I wasn't.

But SPAM is Google's problem and they are devoting a lot of resources to stopping it. Not to say it is exclusively Google's problem or Google's only/biggest problem.

That is correct. Facebook campaigns don't work for actual conversions. But it is in large part due to the casual way most users navigate the website; which is not going to change. Fake accounts or not you will get a large amount of users that have no relation to your product 'liking' it. This is not necessarily bad. I am not sure if this still applies to USA because of the people that have been leaving Facebook lately. But in my country (Mexico), Facebook is used to give 'presence'. We don't expect any actual ROI or new customers directly from Facebook campaigns, but a user looking at a high number of likes does make a difference in trust perception.

That said, this problem is not present in Google because of the way they present the ads and the way users are navigating when they find them. I believe for this reason Google will always have a great advantage over Facebook and although we won't stop spending a small amount of money to keep a higher amount of likes in Facebook it won't be near as much as we do for Google.

For the same reason, that Facebook's reaction to ads is based in the way users navigate the website, I don't think Facebook will never get a ROI similar to Google.

I do not think you addressed the actual point of the video: the clicks on his cat page came from click farms. They were not real people.

It's not like that would be the first "non-denial denial" Facebook has ever issued...

Sounds more to me as if, despite skirting the issue, this guy works there, is constantly trying to make Facebook a better ad serving platform, and him and his team are doing the best they can to achieve that, one fix or improvement at a time.

It's obviously not a company wide statement on the issue. It's one engineer saying "Hey, I work there. This is what I'm doing and this is what we're doing. And this is what happened when X did Y which is what he wanted."

I can't imagine that solving the entirety of this issue could ever be simple.

It sounds like something that would need to be fixed from a policy level. Better targeting won't help if the top brass avoids any approach that eliminates the fake accounts.

Not necessarily all of the fake likes are always from fake accounts. I have witnessed some of my facebook friends 'liking' a big number of pages without their consent, automatically. Most probably as a result of phishing they became a part of some big click farms.

blah blah blah

There's a brave (and perhaps naive) engineer. I think you'll find this audience a bit skeptical, but there's a bigger issue. If people are paying FB for relationships with people that want to be engaged with a product, they will quit paying as soon as the ROI is proven to be negative. And I think you'll only get one chance! If you honestly think the guy with the $20k ad spend is going to "try again just to make sure", then I think I'll go short some FB stock before it takes it's final dive.

This isn't a problem you face alone ... and I think it's telling that Google has had to put more ads on each page to grow revenue. In their case, the ads are targeted to the user AND often are related to a product search. I think FB has a bigger problem because people didn't go there to search for a product but rather to engage their network.

Good luck

You sound like somebody who hasn't done that much search engine marketing. You can lose $20k on google in the blink of an eye and have nothing to show for it but clicks and exit-pages. Some of this may truly be Facebook's problem, I don't know, I personally doubt it. But no, if one negative-ROI campaign led people to abandon Google, they'd have no advertisers left, either. So I think your premise is flawed.

FYI, as the $20k guy, the money wasn't spent all at once. We fiddled, we tried, we failed, several times, miserably. We've made mistakes on Google as well, but success was more easily achieved.

So, despite being certain that our target audience is on FB, we have concluded that we're better off advertising in a place where the intent to purchase a hotel room/travel is clearly present (ie google search).

It's a specific situation, certainly not true for all advertisers. I'm sure that FB advertising for other products might work quite well. It's just not for us.

> If you honestly think the guy with the $20k ad spend is going to "try again just to make sure", then I think I'll go short some FB stock before it takes it's final dive.

That person has already replied with more info on his case, but you should also note that for some people $20k is big enough to never risk that mistake again, while for others it really isn't. I spend around that much each month on Facebook and that's a "well we'll put a little into FB" amount in the scheme of things. Sure, I've had other clients for whom a badly spent $1k was a problem, too. My point is to not jump to assumptions that an adspend is big because it sounds big to you.

(He'll, just this morning I sent a mail to a video website saying that a $15k spend delivered shit results and that we should try again.)

You just completely ignored the point he was trying to make with the fake likes. You're going to have to come up with a better bullshit defense.

He didn't completely ignore the claims. As he mentioned, the targeting specs may have been too broad.

It's easy argue against the value of something so easily faked as a like, but we shouldn't forget that Facebook is also a large platform for promotional advertising, where "like-gated" promotions are designed primarily to collect users' email addresses.

I'm not convinced they were a FB employee, as I'd expect better spin. And commentary. Especially given the target audience of this site.

Just curious, what "flavor" is Facebook blue (#3B5998) kool-aid? I always imagined it to be like a Blue Razz Blow Pop.

I spent $46k on Facebook ads last year, with very healthy ROI.

First, I want to say THANK YOU for the many improvements to the ad system that have recently taken place.

Second, I want to say that you have a LOT of work left to do. Facebook marketing is hard. Too hard.

I have many suggestions, but here's one of them:

Allow the same targeting options when posting directly to the page, as when posting an ad.

For example, I can create a custom audience, and send an ad only to them.

I want to be able to target (or exclude) that custom audience when I post to my Facebook page. If I could do that it would make a huge difference.

Thank you for your time / consideration.

I would challenge the correctness of this post.

Any questions? Go ahead.

Jacob, that makes perfect sense. Yes, I suspect people are getting good ROI that know how to navigate the fakes. But the reality is that facebook could easily create "don't allow likes from someone with more than 5+ likes in their account" rule. Why not? You're probably not getting any mind share from them anyways.

I really like that:

"don't allow likes from someone with more than 5+ likes in their account""

The # of likes by the user is a good proxy for how diluted the quality of the "like" is.

Probability_to_show_ad = constant * num_other_likes

That said, as long as Facebook has a counter-incentive to cleaning it up, we shouldn't expect this change. We need advertisers to revolt in large #'s before the financial incentives make this a priority for FB.

This is actually a great idea for Facebook - don't sell Likes in absolute numbers, sell them normalized to the fraction of total Likes for the users Liking you.

So I could buy 10 "Fractional Likes" and get 20 users who each only have 2 total Likes (including this one) = 20 * 1/2 = 10

OR I get 10,000 users who each have 1,000 Likes each = 10K * 1/1000 = 10

...which seems a reasonable ballpark for resolving it in an automatable, economic way.

"Don't allow Likes over X" kind of sucks since what happens to legitimate Likers? I'm not a clickfarmer, but I've Liked way more than 5 things.

My News Feed has turned to crap (probably because of it), but that's a whole 'nother story.

Making it an option is not very intuitive. If those likes are useless, just stop them from liking or hellban them by never having their likes show up or cost anything.

Either solution would require Facebook to admit that there are tons of fake likes though. The assumption being that admitting this will have a negative impact on revenue.

Also, either solution would probably result in a lot of new click far accounts being created with the new goal of keeping likes to a minimum. It'll be a constant battle I'm sure.

I have limited experience with Facebook, but this sounds like a "fine print" to me. You assume that it is customer's responsibility to learn FB advertising model down to smallest details and navigate carefully around technicalities in order not to drain resources to click farms. While legal, such practices are dubious. It is FB responsibility to filter out garbage and provide clean service to paying customers.

I don't understand your comment. He complains that it is too hard. Isn't that also your point?

I do analytics for a major brand you have definitely heard of.

We spend way more than $46K/year.

I agree with Jacob here. If you are willing to work at it, facebook can give you a very healthy ROI. It is not nearly as easy as with Google though.

- Buying likes is basically a waste of time unless your goal is to stroke someones ego or are trying to generate some sort of "social proof"

- Re-targetting via Custom Audiences is awesome (you need a robust CRM program to take advantage of this, or at least an email list).

- Lookalike audiences are promising, but you have to work at them.

Edit: paragraphs

It's great to hear about what works for you.

Last year, we had great success with buying likes -- but for it to work you need to execute very well in terms of regularly publishing highly engaging content to your page. I'd love to compare notes some time. Send me an email if you are interested. (Google my name.)

I work in the field and have seen companies who spend several million a month, agree with your key points.

For companies of that size, data is everything, if an ad is underperforming it stops running, if an ad is bringing you low quality clicks (for example, like farms) it will stop running too.

It's really silly to look at someone saying they dumped $20k in FB ads and it didn't pan out without providing any kind of data at all, how many creatives/targeting permutations did they try? did they monitor their ads at all? did they try to negatively target those bad likes they were getting?

I've even seen "custom" lookalike audience implementations, to squeeze that extra cost/performance ratio out of it.

Peter, Derek did not get 39 people who like cats. He got 39 Likes from fake accounts. There is no option in the Facebook Ad UI to "exclude fake accounts." Don't blame him for broad targeting when the result is fake accounts.

> Fake (and low quality) likes are bad for everyone.

But they're endemic to the advertising product you sell. "It sucks for us, too!" is no comfort.

> He got 39 Likes from fake accounts.

>> Fake (and low quality) likes are bad for everyone.

> But they're endemic to the advertising product you sell. "It sucks for us, too!" is no comfort.

Not only is it endemic, it is well-known at Facebook. Thousands upon thousands of Facebook employees at all levels have known this deception has been taking place. We are not talking about a few days, weeks or months....

This multi-billion dollar company is knowingly generating revenue via this nonsense. It's not a mistake. This has nothing to do with cat lovers reflexively clicking like.

This was made clear in the video.

Peter, I think you need to watch the Video again. Watch around 6:40 where he goes through the likes his cat fans like - such as mouthwash amongst dozens of other conflicting pages. Also watch the part where Facebook can't admit to this because they'd have to give back all that ad revenue.

Facebook somehow allows a website to determine whether the user likes a page or not. I've seen websites asking users to click Like (basically liking a page that paid the money to the click farm) in order the view the content. This kind of Like bait is extremely popular, and Facebook basically allow content publishers to trick users in this manner easily.

Thank you for chiming in. Facebook should add a new filter limiting the audience to users who have fewer likes. So for example he could advertise to folks who are interested in cats but have fewer than 5 overall likes. Likes from more discerning users are certainly more valuable than likes from generous likers. How about another filter limiting the audience to users who have posted X number of entries to their timeline or the number of years they've been on Facebook?

> I’m an ads engineer at Facebook so I feel qualified to respond.

You'll be qualified to respond when you've actually watched the video so you won't have to write uninformed drivel like the following:

> In the case of this ad — I think we actually delivered on what was asked for. The targeting specs were fairly broad (cat lovers in four countries). Getting 39 people who like cats to like a page with a cute cat picture in 20 minutes sounds pretty reasonable to me.

Because that is exactly what did not happen in the video.

> Fake (and low quality) likes are bad for everyone.

Nobody was talking about "low quality" likes, the topic under discussion is fake ones, from fake accounts by fake people.

> We don’t want advertisers to get fans that aren’t good for their business -- we want to help them drive real results, and we can’t do that with bad likes. We invest a lot in improving the systems to monitor and remove fake likes from the system, and also in helping advertisers set smart targeting to help them reach the people they care most about.

Blablabla, said every advertiser, ever.

> And to be honest, a lot of people like cats, and the picture on the page is pretty adorable. Lots of real people like lots of things. And LOTS of people like cats.

Once again, did you not watch the video, or are you in fact arguing that those 39 people are actually real people and not fake accounts?

xxbondsxx is also a fake, just of a different variety. Convincing perhaps at first glance, if you only read the first sentence of his post and moved on, but lacking any apparent understanding of the issue at hand and moreover, I suspect, full autonomy. A marketing drone.

I've got to admit, I wasn't going to comment about it but I did wonder what serious engineer would register a name of xxsomethingxx, and then use it to speak in official capacity :)

>We don’t want advertisers to get fans that aren’t good for their business -- we want to help them drive real results, and we can’t do that with bad likes. We invest a lot in improving the systems to monitor and remove fake likes from the system, and also in helping advertisers set smart targeting to help them reach the people they care most about.

Has no one ever suggested being able to add targeting filters to target users with a total number of likes between x and y? It may seem counter intuitive, however it would allow people to stop targeting users who don't like anything and avoid those who like everything (and therefore can't possibly engage with all their likes).

To me this seems like the obvious solution (with a bit of tweaking to the upper bound), however as the video states this could be negative for Facebook to implement due to the (denied) benefit of fake likes to them. With this implemented however, it could possibly force the click farms to be maintaining simultaneous accounts to keep their total likes down?

Looking at my own Facebook account, I have 46 likes, so surely a company wishing to advertise, would want to advertise with; if they targeted adverts to users with above 2 likes and below ~500 whom are also within they're usual specific filters and regions they are more likely to reach their desired audience of active users. Yes it's quite possible they would miss a tiny percentage of outliers with thousands of likes or new accounts with 0 likes, but that's simply a cost of doing business efficiently.

And what about the 83,000 fake likes that his Science related page has? Can you explain that too?

The most interesting assertion in this video is that the facebook algorithm sends out user updates to a sample of their fans/subscribers and that the engagement performance within that sample is a key determining factor as to whether an update is shared more broadly in news feeds.

If that is in fact the case and purchasing facebook ads indirectly increases the amount of fake/automated likes included within that sample (thereby negatively impacting the overall engagement metrics on your posts) then the purchase of facebook advertising has the side effect of diminishing your ability to organically drive traffic and engagement.

To put it another way. This would be like if buying Google Adwords advertising not only got you fake/automated traffic, but also simultaneously decreased your organic, unpaid search rankings.

Characteristics of the Monied "Like" Button http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2013/12/characteristics...

One-Click Micropayment Capability for Volume Solicitations and Multiple Providers http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2013/12/one-click-micro...

Represented by Perkins Coie

Good questions raised about the UX issues that contribute to fraudulent clicks and installs but I take issue with the generalization that only bottom of the funnel, high purchase intent ads are valuable.

Startups generally have a bias towards doing things that they can measure accurately. This leads to heavy reliance on highly attributable channels like AdWords since you can target people who have expressed high purchase intent. What most companies don't do is look closely at multi-channel attribution models and look at how multiple exposures across different media types change purchase behavior. Perhaps someone who is exposed to two display ad driven messages prior to seeing your Google ad is 2x more likely to click and 4x more likely to purchase vs. just being exposed to your Google ad alone. I'm not saying that's what you will see, but you should be curious to understand those effects.

We tend to generalize based on our own experiences. I also don't think Facebook ads work well in many cases but I also can see brands that are doing a great job or run innovative campaigns that get their message across effectively so I know Facebook works if you get it right. Similarly, many folks give banner ads, mobile CPA ad networks, or TV a shot and see poor outcomes without knowing whether it was poor creative, bad media planning, loose targeting parameters that contributed to the poor outcomes.

True. I should have generalized less. It didn't work for us. Reasons include the product in question (hotel rooms) which in New York are plenty in supply, the price of the product (median stay ~$800), a client with a relatively limited advertising budget (branding exercise unlikely), a defined purchase cycle (typically 2-4 weeks in advance of a trip), and last but not least, something people actually search for (not a "cash register" or "impulse" purchase). In short: I think FB ads may work for companies and products that sell "small stuff" or big brands that go for the eyeballs/brand recognition/awareness.

It's my experience as well that Facebook pages work extremely well for small stuff, also geared towards women - I've seen shoes, bags, jewellry and arts & crafts in particular be extremely succesful, mostly thanks to viral campaigns. Facebook should try to monetize that (and it actually started doing so with promoted posts and such) instead of facebook ads which, as mentioned, are awful.

My own Facebook ad campaign got us zero conversions, as opposed to Google campaigns. BTW the Google campaign on mobiles was as awful as the Facebook campaign.

>Startups generally have a bias towards doing things that they can measure accurately.

As far as biases go, preferring to pay for things that have a demonstrable effect is a pretty good one, especially for startups that generally don't have the resources to waste on a large number of failed initiatives. Sure if you have some incite that gives you a better than normal chance of getting a very high ROI on a creative initiative, then go for it, that's what startups are for. But if you don't have any special incite, stick with what has been shown to be effective, and avoid things like Facebook advertising which appear to give low or negative ROI in the typical case.

I agree that investing on these may seem more profitable in the short term. But branding is a long term goal. Even for Startups branding is important, this can be crucial to close the next deals with VCs or acquiring users' hearts.

Digital Ocean is a good example, I've read good and bad stories, mostly good and they had an extensive Youtube and Display Campaigns. When it was finally time for me to close a deal with a VPS to replace my old Dreamhost shared server I didn't have to search. I went straight to Digital Ocean.

This is harder to measure, or even impossible when you add the fact that I was probably impacted at least 50 times by passive or active advertisement for them on at least 4 different devices.

Also keep in mind that I was aware of this the whole time, and I smiled every tie I saw a DO ad, because I knew I was probably gonna sign at some point. But most of the time these type of advertisements happen without you even noticing, even if you are in this business.

Companies spend millions in SuperBowl ads, and nobody can click on that, it's impossible to tell how many coca-cola bottles will be sold by that ad and post discussions that it sparked. But they will do it again next year.

Display advertisement is valuable but it's harder to put a price tag. Even if you don't click on the ad in a mobile app it's still valuable. I'd argue that if you make it annoying or if you try to steal a click it's less valuable.

There is a reason this type of publicity is sold by impressions, because that's where the value is, clicks can or cannot happen, that's just a plus you won't get on TV.

>Companies spend millions in SuperBowl ads, and nobody can click on that,

not that i dream about clicking it, i'm just surprised that they still hasn't implemented it yet as current TVs are really computers sold/packaged as TVs.

> Startups generally have a bias towards doing things that they can measure accurately.

My fear is that many of them don't understand a thing or two about statistics, so all that precise measurements are means for them to lie to themselves.

google display network advertising is equally useless/fraudulent

It is very good at giving me pictures of the more expensive things that I have recently bought, should I suddenly need two.

I meant it in the sense of "loads of impressions", very few clicks, lots of clicks from countries listed in the video, unless specifically excluded.

I think the difference is that Google really tries to kill the click farms as apposed to the social media companies.

It's kind of funny because Google really only controls the network of sites their ad spaces are on, the content of the ad you get is controlled by the advertiser or 3rd party ad tech provider.

The retargeting ads you speak of (Criteo runs a lot of them) is generated automatically via these 3rd party ad platforms cookie combined with an API into the advertiser's store feed (product photo, description, price, etc.) They get a stream of SKUs that you've looked at and try to get you to pull the trigger.

There's nothing to prevent the store from also associating items you've already bought so you don't get shown something that's irrelevant. My best guess is that it's just easier to not do that.

Ha...I think about this all the time. I start researching something, eventually buy it. Then a ton of targeted ads show up everywhere advertising to me the product I already purchased.

I'm the developer of Reddit In Pictures and I'm sorry about that issue, please go into 'Settings' and disable ads!

I just wanted to give as much space for images as possible, so when the ad loads it puts itself between the text showing the number of images and the ActionBar, if the ad doesn't load it doesn't take up any space. Is the bounce you're talking about when the ad initially loads (like on orientation change)?

I haven't had a chance to work on that app in a while, but when I have time to re-visit it I will test out making the ad area static so that it never seems to bounce.

I'd be a bit careful with that. Someone on /r/AndroidDev had his app removed from the store because Google thought it could get accidental ad clicks. He didn't have a space for the ads and the ad would just appear on top of the bottom content.

Not sure if they are cracking down on it or not but thought you'd like a heads up. Popping up onto an area not meant to be touched in the first place is probably fine though.

Thanks for the heads up, I will have to try out some other layouts for the ads.

Right now the ad shows above the bottom split action bar, and you can pinch to zoom on the images. http://imgur.com/DfecJar

If an ad isn't showing the image will fill up the rest of the space to the action bar.

I didn't expect many people to keep ads enabled, I released it as RateWare, asking that users rate the app if they choose to disable ads.

Hi Entropic, I did not mean to mark your app as the prime example, it's just one I use a lot (thanks!) and one where I've noticed hitting the advert unintentionally. There are many many many apps with this issue.

My point was that many mobile ad clicks are mistakes and thus useless. Didn't mean to cause you any trouble (and I wasn't aware of the turn off ads option, so double-thanks)

Another great example of the kind of mobile advertising you're talking about: Flappy Bird, where ads are shown every time you re-start the game. In a typical Flappy Bird session, that could be up to 5-6 ads per minute — only shown on screen for a second or two.

The major disconnect between Google ads, Facebook ads, and likes is that Facebook likes don't mean anything. Very rarely are people begging to engage with your company — in that case, they'd already be engaged. When you ask google "cheapest flights to SF" it will serve your ads to an eager audience on a silver platter; Whereas many Facebook users will like anything moderately interesting or cool, and the ads show up between "Girl from high school had a baby" and beach photos.

It's apples and oranges. Imgur/9GAG aren't advertising on Google, just as travel agencies won't see much ROI on Facebook.

Two questions: (1) What are practical, specific ways that Facebook could fix this problem? There's clearly a problem. (2) Also, how should digital advertising companies that integrate a Facebook share option in their offering avoid supporting shares from fake profiles?

Interestingly, the problem is caused by Facebook trying to fix the problem. The hypothesized reason the clickfarms "like" random pages is to seem real because Facebook will shut them down if they don't seem real. Perhaps Facebook could drop that specific ("has the user liked other pages?") signal from their bot detection and focus on other signals. Whatever they do will likely result in some type of side-effect as clickfarms continue to strive to "seem real".

I replied above (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7222232) but Facebook could basically sell Likes normalized against the users' total Likes. So a Like by someone with 10 Likes is worth 10x vs someone with 100 Likes, etc.

I can't find a thing called google advert. You meant google Adword right?

Advert is British for "ad".

Correct. Sorry if it caused confusion. I used it because I find 'ad' a confusingly short word, and advertisement too long. Showing my European roots I guess (but I live in NYC).

Alternative in short: You are only looking to do demand fulfillment.

See how that pans out in the long run (5+ years).

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