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Comment by apinstein | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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