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JacobJans

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.

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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

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.

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.)

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 would challenge the correctness of this post.

Any questions? Go ahead.

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?

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