Comment by Silhouette | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Silhouette | Hacker News Reader

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It amazes me that Facebook don't get sued more often, if our experience with their ad management is at all representative. The UI is terrible, and plenty of the statistics it shows appear to be broken in unfathomable ways.

Estimated audience sizes? Nonsense.

Suggested ranges for bids? Sometimes change by almost an order of magnitude between submitting the ad details and checking the dashboard a few minutes later.

Preview your ad as viewers will actually see it to make sure you've got the image size right? ::hilarious laughter::

Figures for click-through rates? I don't know why you'd only want to pay for actual clicks to your site and not other things like people clicking like on your ad or your page. After all, someone liking an ad that will be gone tomorrow is surely worth as much to you as someone actually visiting your site.

What times will your ad run? We'll assume you're in the US even though you explicitly told us you're in the UK. And then we'll also price everything in dollars, so you pay a conversion fee on every bill. And no, you can't change this once your account is set up.

Just set it up the same way as last time, we were satisfied with that? Sorry, the system has changed again and you have to start over.

Maybe we could use a third party ad manager to try to overcome some of these difficulties? Sure, but they're all going to work a bit differently, and the options they present won't match what you see on Facebook's own ad management pages.

All of this is based on various experiences as a small business advertiser, and in most of the cases I'm thinking of the real numbers still worked out favourable despite all the problems and the frustration of trying to get everything working so the campaigns went ahead. But if Facebook treats larger customers spending serious money the same way, it's not hard at all to see why we hear stories like this from time to time and why legal action can result.

Here is my company's Facebook Ads horror story:

18 months ago my company decided to run an ad campaign on various platforms: FB, Twitter, Google search and direct buys of banner ads.

On all platforms, the campaign was targeted to most EU countries + Switzerland. For business reasons we were not interested in promoting this outside these countries.

On Facebook, out of all options, we decided to promote a post, targeted to EU countries, this post included a custom bitly link to our campaign's website, etc. A few hours after launching the campaign, we checked on the post: likes/engagement, CTR, bitly link, etc. We were shock to see that almost 90% of all likes to the post and clicks where made from Brazil. Facebook had been promoting our post in Brazil and not (marginally) in the countries we specified – I clicked on a long list of Facebook profiles who had liked our promoted post and these were primarily from the Sao Paulo region. I double checked bitly's stats with the our analytics to check who landed on our site via the campaign link. Again, c. 90% from Brazil.

The first thing after that finding was to check that the campaign was correctly setup, and it was. We immediately stopped the campaign and reached out to FB via a form (they have no email nor telephone) telling them about the issue, we included screenshots and other relevant information. We never heard from Facebook. We spent around €2,000 on a useless campaign targeted to an audience which wasn't our target market. We have never used FB again.

> We immediately stopped the campaign and reached out to FB via a form (they have no email nor telephone) telling them about the issue, we included screenshots and other relevant information. We never heard from Facebook.

How is that even legal?

How is that even legal?

Whether it's legal doesn't matter very much in practice if you lack the means to enforce your theoretical legal rights. For small sums, it's not worth the time to go to court for most people. In the US legal system, it's probably not worth it even for quite large sums, if you're likely to get stuck with paying significant legal bills even if you win.

For serious money, it probably becomes worthwhile to take action in apparently black and white cases like this, but I suspect many advertisers using Facebook ads (and Google etc.) are small outfits that never really spend serious money. They can effectively be mistreated with impunity regardless of anything the law says, unless they have recourse to something like charging back the payment for the campaign and relying on repossession of the funds being 9/10 of the law.

If the loss is small enough, small claims court can be worth it for the plaintiff. IANAL.

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=honda+%22class+action%22+%22s...

That assumes Facebook exists in your jurisdiction so there is a legal entity you can actually take to court, though. A significant difficulty with small claims processes, at least where I am, is that because you typically don't involve lawyers on either side so you can keep the costs down, you can also have difficulty even figuring out who you actually have an actionable complaint against if you're the little guy and you're up against a business with a non-trivial structure.

Bad customer service is usually not illegal. However, credit card companies are legally bound to issue a chargeback and refund the money if you inform them that you did not get what you paid for and the company refused to work out a mutually acceptable compromise. In this case, he should have disputed the €2,000 charge.

On the other hand, I'm sure that FB has something in the terms or customer agreement saying that the locations are recommendations and that the ads may be shown anywhere, even if you only request a certain region.

"move fast and break things" seems to apply to customer service too. is it legal? surely not, but given that our overall ad spend was much larger we didn't have the time/couldn't be bothered to chase FB. As some colleagues see this: "the bright side is that in the long run we have saved money, as we are no longer going to advertise with FB"

We thought of creating a post about this experience on our company's blog, but given that we are not a "tech focused" company, and this post wouldn't fit with our clients/blog readers interest, we decided not write about it.

We thought of creating a post about this experience on our company's blog

It's worth doing it for you and for others who are buying advertising. If it doesn't become popular, no big deal. If it attracts attention, it might be more profitable than the €2000 spent on FB for very little time spent, maybe you'll even get a refund.

I'd personally like to be able to persuade clients not to spend so much on FB advertising - superficially they look like they are returning likes and hits, but if you look into it, they're pretty useless - our referrals have actually gone down while advertising. This sort of blog post would be enormously helpful in persuading them.

Anything that shows a big corp doing bad to small corp will attract interest. Go ahead and write a blog with evidence and all. I am sure it will raise eyebrows on atleast HN.

Of course, the post could have risen naturally to be more visible to a given audience through reshares.

If the post was a link to a news piece or something that could interest the audience that could have happened naturally.

Would it be possible to show the original post? (or the link to it if any?)

> Of course, the post could have risen naturally to be more visible to a given audience through reshares. If the post was a link to a news piece or something that could interest the audience that could have happened naturally. Would it be possible to show the original post? (or the link to it if any?)

Considering FB even charges you to get your post to your own fans, it seems odd that when you're paying for it they would choose exactly the people you said not to show it to. They very tightly control who sees what, it was not an accident that Brazil was shown the content.

You're attributing to malice that which is sufficiently explained by incompetence.

Whenever we place Facebook ads at one of my companies, we always have a second person check the details before confirming. On numerous occasions we have confirmed the order, and then immediately seen different details showing up on subsequent pages compared to what both people on our side saw or selected on the order page, sometimes dramatically different. This has happened so often that some of the people involved now advocate taking a screenshot as evidence before confirming anything.

We're talking about an embarrassingly bug-ridden system here, particularly so given that it's the point where the authorisation to do things that cost real money takes place. The kinds of anecdotes seen in this discussion really aren't all that surprising if you've had much experience working with Facebook ads, I'm sorry to say.

Likely the reason was what is described in this video (topped HN some two weeks ago): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag

TL;DW: there are tons of India/Bangladesh/Brazil-based spammers (those "buy 1000 likes on FB for $1" etc) who allegedly in order to prevent being caught by fraud detection algorithms, are liking whole array of random pages.

Edit: didn't see this was posted already later on this thread.

There's even the likes of these: www.fblikejacker.in (I just found about it)

I experienced the same, but majority of likes came from Mexico... Fake accounts too.

When we checked the accounts these didn't seem as fake, they appeared genuine to us. My impression is that something was "wrong" on FB geo targeting. But as we never heard from FB, I guess we will never know what happened.

€2,000 is a cheap lesson in the grand scheme of things. (The context of the original article is 600K) You did right by experimenting small.

Facebook does have a sales team, contrary to popular belief. They're easier to contact than Google is.

I have my own horror story (albeit with a much smaller budget, 20k) which I posted on the discussion of the video a few weeks ago [1]. FB ad campaign had negative ROI, google campaign manyfold positive ROI.

The problem with FB is intent. Lots of impressions, quite a few clicks, but nobody is there to actually buy something (except "check-out aisle stuff" of the gum and gossip magazine variety, eg games, sub $20 impulse-buy items, etc etc). For a more nuanced discussion see link below.

This guy is a fool though. Who spends this kind of cash without proper testing and a smaller budget? It doesn't take $100k to see something simply isn't working. Letting the campaign run for $100k/day after that is ridiculous.

The article brings up some interesting points (third party verification). FB not going after the money is quite interesting too. Are they too afraid to have to defend in court how the charge is valid?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7212715

Full discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7211514

The article brings up some interesting points (third party verification). FB not going after the money is quite interesting too. Are they too afraid to have to defend in court how the charge is valid?

If it gets to court, terms about not having third party audits are unlikely to be worth the paper they're not printed on to Facebook. The customer's lawyers are presumably going to use whatever discovery process applies before the case is heard to open up every can of worms they can find, and Facebook are presumably going to have no choice but to comply with requests for information even if they'd prefer to keep it to themselves.

If the customer's lawyers discover evidence of systematic failures (intentional or otherwise) and get that information into the public record, the resulting damage to Facebook could be astronomical. The risk doesn't necessarily come only from the original case. It could lead to things like class action suits, or even investigation for criminal fraud that could have FB executives personally facing jail time, depending on which legal system(s) applied. Conceivably, that could pose an existential threat to Facebook itself, though I'd be very surprised if anything that serious was going wrong and they hadn't discovered and dealt with it themselves.

Assuming the above is approximately correct in whatever jurisdiction applied to the original dispute/law suit, I imagine you'd have to be talking orders of magnitude more money before it was worth it for FB to fight a well funded, determined opponent who has real evidence on their side in court. With their war chest, I'd expect settling out of court if necessary and then dropping the matter as quickly and quietly as possible to be their preferred option under almost any realistic conditions.

It was somewhat of a rhetorical question, but yeah, this is what I assumed as well.

In trying to find Google's policy and handling, I came across this interesting (2006) analysis[1]. Apparently they do pursue this on a case by case basis.

[1] http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/...

The problem with FB is intent. Lots of impressions, quite a few clicks, but nobody is there to actually buy something (except "check-out aisle stuff" of the gum and gossip magazine variety, eg games, sub $20 impulse-buy items, etc etc). For a more nuanced discussion see link below.

This makes sense. I go to Facebook to catch up on friends. Google is more when I'm actually searching for something. I would think that Google could charge a higher premium as a result.

It amazes me that Facebook don't get sued more often

For what? Here Facebooks was in the position to sue but they chose not to. If you can just not pay for the campaign you find suspicious then there's little reason to go to court.

FTA

Brar declined to pay the bill. He told Business Insider that his magazine titles did not generate enough revenue to cover $600,000. His credit with Facebook was ruined. He offered to pay cash in advance for future campaigns but Facebook demurred. Facebook did not sue Brar or pursue him further for the money, however.

For what?

Whatever your jurisdiction calls false representation or misleading advertising, where someone takes your money after offering one thing but in fact giving you something else instead.

In this case, it appears that no harm has been done if they didn't actually take that money in the end.

However, there seem to be plenty of stories around without such happy endings. IME Facebook's ad management system is so bug-ridden that it's hard to believe this doesn't happen all the time.

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