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Comment by sanswork | Hacker News Reader

What were your conversion rates like through other sources?

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.

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.

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