Comment by will_brown | Hacker News Reader

Comment by will_brown | Hacker News Reader

Within the last week I performed a similar "experiment" for newly created facebook.com/AmeriStartup.

I created two FB mobile advertisements to direct traffic to the website, though the website is more eCommerce/service than any type of sign up. Budget $50 over 3 days reach was ~20,000+; the click through rate was .5% and .4% for the 2 ads; just under 100 clicks to the website with none resulting in conversion.

More disturbing was the fan page promotion through FB (paid "Likes" in my own words). $10 budget per day over 3 days; reach = 3,000+; total likes 34. What disturbed me though was when I would go to the profile page of the users who "liked" the fan page as a result of the promotion, many of the user profiles did not appear to be legit. Moreover, the majority of these users who liked the page had a single facebook post in their entire facebook timeline. As unlikely as it is that of ~30 paid likes nearly all were were inactive facebook users who were otherwise compelled to interact with my paid promotion, it is equally unlikely that facebook would be so brazen in committing fraud on advertisers by creating and managing fake accounts to click paid promotion/ads which could easily be proven. Nevertheless is begs the question what are these accounts (fake, bots, ect...) and who controls them and why?

There's a good analysis for this phenomenon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag

It was posted on HN a while back. The gist is that there's a high chance that your ad was clicked by click farms, even though you bought it legitimately from facebook (in an effort to fool clickfarm detection, apparently).

What's even more interesting is that not only are you wasting money buying the ads, you also end up with less legitimate "likers" seeing your content because of the way facebook propagates new posts. So you're actually paying to get negative results.

Plus, you won't be able to remove that negative as you can't remove likes and your page will be seen less forever. What does this show? Don't ever, ever pay for likes.

...Unless you are targeting your custom audience (past buyers/users) etc.

But isn't it that no matter who you target and where, the click farms always steal the clicks?

Only if they have accounts inside those verticals. The more specific you are the less likely this is to be the case.

But aren't the click farms in every verticla, in every location?

No, there isn't any need for that. There will of course be some spread but it isn't intentional or planned. They don't need a solid distribution of verticals and locations for what they offer to clients since they don't need to see their clients ads just click like on their pages.

Those likes are coming from black hat marketing.

If you pay for 500 likes, and 500 different accounts are created to like your page its obvious your page is gaming the system. Likewise, if you have a voting ring of 500, its easy to see what pages those 500 accounts are liking. However, if you have a voting ring that votes randomly while ensuring anyone that pays gets 500 of the votes then its much harder to find out who is gaming the system.

i believe the current theory is that the illegal bots hide their paid likes by liking innocent pages as well...

Yes. Here's a video (by youtube user Veritasium) that walks through an experiment and explanation, for those who are interested.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag

This is what is happening.

From what I've gathered it was humans doing the clicking, of the like of wow gold farmers and captcha resolvers.

But you're right the strategy is not to raise suspicion is to click the targeted ads and like buttons among other random ads and likes.

If I was to learn that facebook was paying those click farms to do the clicking I wouldn't be much surprised.

Can I ask how you saw who liked your page? Was this a feature of the Ad campaign? As a page manager, there is no way I can see who liked my page who isn't a friend. This makes me sad as I believe I'm getting spam likes which lower your "engagement quotient" and make it harder for me to get content to actual people.

When on the page as an admin at the top it tells you the most recent activity for the page. Example: John Doe and 10 others liked your page and you can click John Doe or the 10 others and it will show you a page of those people.

I get email alerts for every like we get. You might want to check your notification settings.

What were your conversion rates like through other sources?

Facebook was the only paid advertising/promotion campaign to date.

Then it's equally likely that the poor conversion rate has to do with the destination instead of the traffic source.

Though I do agree with you that buying likes is useless and a waste of money.

You could be correct that only legit users clicked the FB ads and upon review of my site they had no interest in using my service or my pricing scared them away (or any other legit number of reasons).

However, it would be willful blindness to ignore what I can verify vis-a-vis the FB paid promotion. Moreover, when I can verify the majority of likes are from illegitimate users/profiles, based on not having any posts and otherwise being inactive, then I have no expectation the users clicking the ads are any more legit than users clicking the promotion. If FB had faith this was not the case I see no reason they would not disclose the users who clicked the ads so advertisers could confirm their legitimacy.

There was a video released recently talking about fake accounts and clicking on paid like ads. It explained pretty well why they do it. That doesn't really carry over to other paid ads though.

As for the second part probably because it's a huge privacy violation.

This is the important question. I've seen copy for largely untargeted convert at wildly different rates dependent on the copy quality and the quality of what's being offered.

Yup copy on the destination, copy on the ad itself can change the conversion rate quite a bit too if you're attracting the wrong sorts of people for your product. Too many variables left unexplored with 1 or 2 ads on one traffic source to one landing page.

This is my experience too.

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