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As someone who has occasionally runs experiments with FB adverts for various types of business. I feel it's boiling point will be when people and organisations

As someone who has occasionally runs experiments with FB adverts for various types of business. I feel it's boiling point will be when people and organisations advertising on the platform really start to look deeply into the value for money they are getting on it. I can't tell you the amount of times I've seen organisations throw money at it in return for dubious clicks from markets they never targeted, bot like users and poor really ROI after advertising with it.

gcb0 8y ago
from that egoistically lawless point of view, they will do better on each privacy violation that gets reported as it signal better return for the investment of advertisers.
NiekvdMaas 8y ago
Are you hinting that FB advertisers are throwing 50 billion (expected 2018 revenue) at ads that are poorly performing? Obviously that is not correct, the result of all this detailed targeting is campaigns that are performing very well for experienced marketeers.
- Eric_WVGG 8y ago
  okay so… - not all people buying FB ads are experienced marketers - companies throw tons of money at ineffective ads, that should be obvious… - we have no idea what the ratio of "successful" to unsuccessful campaigns is - even if that ratio is negative, Facebook is still one of the only remaining "games" in town, so people _will_ continue throwing money at it. “Least worst” is a fine and lucrative place to be in. - can we just get over this idea of rational economies, by the way - marketing is less of a science than a craft, and all the implications thereof
  - Zhyl 8y ago
    > can we just get over this idea of rational economies, by the way This is key and undermines a lot of rational arguments. People buying ads aren't reading HN and then making a buying decision based on the general vibe they get there. They'll buy based on budget. Budget is based on decisions made in a meeting a year or two before. Those decisions will be based on a strategy. For many that strategy is to the tune of 'I keep hearing about this social media thing that's supposed to be the future. I notice we aren't spending anything in digital. We need to buy more digital'. If public opinion sours on Facebook it may be a while before we see a significant drop in revenues.
  - NiekvdMaas 8y ago
    I'm in ad tech, and believe me: FB advertising works. The vast majority of their ad revenue is coming from experienced ad buyers that are spending immense amounts on direct response campaigns, not branding. If you want to see how things work, start a small ad campaign yourself of FB. It's all about ROI, attribution, cost per action, super detailed targeting, etc. It's the opposite of "throwing money at it hoping that it'll work", unlike offline advertising or even traditional display ads.
    - njarboe 8y ago
      Exactly like this article states. You can give Facebook a list of phone numbers or email addresses and it will put your ad in front of only those people. Does anyone know how small a list you can target? List of one? List of one plus N number of dead email addresses? Therefore a list of one, but more expensive?
      - snaky 8y ago
        > The smallest audience you can upload is an audience size of 30 people. Also, this audience size needs to be 30 people which Facebook can identify and find. So, if you upload an email list of 30 and Facebook can match only 20 of those email addresses to Facebook profiles then it will reject your list, so in most cases you need to upload a list of about 60 people. You then need ensure you upload a list of only females or males which includes the one email address of the person you are targeting (the opposite to the one person that you are targeting). Lastly you need to choose the gender in the demographic filtering which matches the intended target. Here’s a step by step example below "Sniper Targeting on Facebook: How to Target ONE specific person with super targeted ads" https://medium.com/@MichaelH_3009/sniper-targeting-on-facebook-how-to-target-one-specific-person-with-super-targeted-ads-515ba6e068f6 https://medium.com/@MichaelH_3009/sniper-targeting-on-facebo...
        njarboe 8y ago
        Informative article, mostly about how amoral this salesman is. I wonder if most people in sales think this way. Maybe the article was created solely as an ad for the author's company and the content is all lies. I'd have no way to know with out trying the myself and a fake article would be in complete alignment with the author's value system.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Also: - marketing companies they ask to run Facebook campaigns for you may be as clueless as they are Source: I used to work for one (we had separate development and social media marketing departments). People doing marketing had no clue about statistics, they just shoved random whale graphs from Facebook's fanpage panel into a word document and wrote narratives that suggested everything is peachy. Customers read those reports, and since they had no way or skill of reevaluating the results on their end, they were happy and willing to pay. I'm not even assuming malicious intent on the part of the provider - just general cluelessness. I'm increasingly convinced a lot of marketing on the Internet looks that way. Neither party understands the real meaning of the results, but as long as the buyer is happy, money keeps flowing.
- y04nn 8y ago
  FB is making sure you can't calculate the ROI of a campaign. Marketers are putting money in FB because they think this is where they can the most accurately target people. https://adage.com/article/digital/p-g-decided-facebook-ad-targeting-worth-money/305390/ https://adage.com/article/digital/p-g-decided-facebook-ad-ta... https://www.forbes.com/sites/joannmuller/2012/05/15/gm-says-facebook-ads-dont-work-pulls-10-million-account/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/joannmuller/2012/05/15/gm-says-...
  - wolco 8y ago
    By spending x amount per week and by measuring signups/purchases/leads marketers are tracking roi.
  - dillondoyle 8y ago
    This is demonstrably not true. FB provides better tools than pretty much anyone else to tie sales to advertising (online or off) and to track app instal lifetime advertising revenue generated over time. The human data and walled garden of tracking they have are hugely valuable in proving ROI.
close04 8y ago
So... not anytime soon? As long as FB has real and active users advertisers will advertise and throw money at them.
loceng 8y ago
I mean, Facebook tricked advertisers initially into spending 100s of millions into the platform (if not billions?) with their bait and switch of telling advertisers they'd "own" the users that liked their pages - and people still trust them even with that starting pointing to keep advertising? It's strange to me.
mbesto 8y ago
People have been doing this for years on Google's platform and the behaviors still haven't changed (I have a lot of hands-on experience with $100k+ annual ad spend budgets that are atrocious), so I disagree. People set it and forget it (mainly to ad ops agencies who charge 10%), because they don't know any different as long as sales keep coming in.
mjevans 8y ago
This is how I feel about ads in general. The only type of ad that makes sense to me at all is one that educates someone about a class of problem and that there's at least one product (X) that can be used to solve this problem. In many cases it would make more sense to focus these efforts on making stores more effective at presenting solutions and grouping related solutions in expected areas to improve the search effectiveness of independent agents that have black box algorithms and are outside of the store's control. Attempting to modify said black boxes by an inundation of annoyances is ethnically wrong to me. (As implied above, when it ceases being educational it's increasingly likely to cross that line, particularly if the campaign is based on gimmicks or repetition to be effective in vulnerable population segments.)
mmatear 8y ago
My problem is how easy it is to "fake" advertising. As in I go to website browse and buy then I get ads after about said product. Is that counted as evidence of a successful add sale?
- badwolf 8y ago
  That's most likely poor retargeting setup
dillondoyle 8y ago
Buying digital advertising is big part of my job. I find the exact opposite to be true. FB provides high quality, low fraud. Especially compared to anything that's not Google/FB. When we advertise to raise money (for politicians) that provides a direct provable ROI and I can tell you nothing else has come close. Seems that is true for many corporations as well just look at FBs growing revenue. FB provides the tools to measure either a sale or the value of an app install over time the increased spend is proof of quality/value so clearly many others have also found success. I wonder who/what/how your campaigns didn't provide value?

gcb0 8y ago

from that egoistically lawless point of view, they will do better on each privacy violation that gets reported as it signal better return for the investment of advertisers.

NiekvdMaas 8y ago

Are you hinting that FB advertisers are throwing 50 billion (expected 2018 revenue) at ads that are poorly performing? Obviously that is not correct, the result of all this detailed targeting is campaigns that are performing very well for experienced marketeers.

Eric_WVGG 8y ago
okay so… - not all people buying FB ads are experienced marketers - companies throw tons of money at ineffective ads, that should be obvious… - we have no idea what the ratio of "successful" to unsuccessful campaigns is - even if that ratio is negative, Facebook is still one of the only remaining "games" in town, so people _will_ continue throwing money at it. “Least worst” is a fine and lucrative place to be in. - can we just get over this idea of rational economies, by the way - marketing is less of a science than a craft, and all the implications thereof
- Zhyl 8y ago
  > can we just get over this idea of rational economies, by the way This is key and undermines a lot of rational arguments. People buying ads aren't reading HN and then making a buying decision based on the general vibe they get there. They'll buy based on budget. Budget is based on decisions made in a meeting a year or two before. Those decisions will be based on a strategy. For many that strategy is to the tune of 'I keep hearing about this social media thing that's supposed to be the future. I notice we aren't spending anything in digital. We need to buy more digital'. If public opinion sours on Facebook it may be a while before we see a significant drop in revenues.
- NiekvdMaas 8y ago
  I'm in ad tech, and believe me: FB advertising works. The vast majority of their ad revenue is coming from experienced ad buyers that are spending immense amounts on direct response campaigns, not branding. If you want to see how things work, start a small ad campaign yourself of FB. It's all about ROI, attribution, cost per action, super detailed targeting, etc. It's the opposite of "throwing money at it hoping that it'll work", unlike offline advertising or even traditional display ads.
  - njarboe 8y ago
    Exactly like this article states. You can give Facebook a list of phone numbers or email addresses and it will put your ad in front of only those people. Does anyone know how small a list you can target? List of one? List of one plus N number of dead email addresses? Therefore a list of one, but more expensive?
    - snaky 8y ago
      > The smallest audience you can upload is an audience size of 30 people. Also, this audience size needs to be 30 people which Facebook can identify and find. So, if you upload an email list of 30 and Facebook can match only 20 of those email addresses to Facebook profiles then it will reject your list, so in most cases you need to upload a list of about 60 people. You then need ensure you upload a list of only females or males which includes the one email address of the person you are targeting (the opposite to the one person that you are targeting). Lastly you need to choose the gender in the demographic filtering which matches the intended target. Here’s a step by step example below "Sniper Targeting on Facebook: How to Target ONE specific person with super targeted ads" https://medium.com/@MichaelH_3009/sniper-targeting-on-facebook-how-to-target-one-specific-person-with-super-targeted-ads-515ba6e068f6 https://medium.com/@MichaelH_3009/sniper-targeting-on-facebo...
      - njarboe 8y ago
        Informative article, mostly about how amoral this salesman is. I wonder if most people in sales think this way. Maybe the article was created solely as an ad for the author's company and the content is all lies. I'd have no way to know with out trying the myself and a fake article would be in complete alignment with the author's value system.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Also: - marketing companies they ask to run Facebook campaigns for you may be as clueless as they are Source: I used to work for one (we had separate development and social media marketing departments). People doing marketing had no clue about statistics, they just shoved random whale graphs from Facebook's fanpage panel into a word document and wrote narratives that suggested everything is peachy. Customers read those reports, and since they had no way or skill of reevaluating the results on their end, they were happy and willing to pay. I'm not even assuming malicious intent on the part of the provider - just general cluelessness. I'm increasingly convinced a lot of marketing on the Internet looks that way. Neither party understands the real meaning of the results, but as long as the buyer is happy, money keeps flowing.
y04nn 8y ago
FB is making sure you can't calculate the ROI of a campaign. Marketers are putting money in FB because they think this is where they can the most accurately target people. https://adage.com/article/digital/p-g-decided-facebook-ad-targeting-worth-money/305390/ https://adage.com/article/digital/p-g-decided-facebook-ad-ta... https://www.forbes.com/sites/joannmuller/2012/05/15/gm-says-facebook-ads-dont-work-pulls-10-million-account/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/joannmuller/2012/05/15/gm-says-...
- wolco 8y ago
  By spending x amount per week and by measuring signups/purchases/leads marketers are tracking roi.
- dillondoyle 8y ago
  This is demonstrably not true. FB provides better tools than pretty much anyone else to tie sales to advertising (online or off) and to track app instal lifetime advertising revenue generated over time. The human data and walled garden of tracking they have are hugely valuable in proving ROI.

close04 8y ago

So... not anytime soon? As long as FB has real and active users advertisers will advertise and throw money at them.

loceng 8y ago

I mean, Facebook tricked advertisers initially into spending 100s of millions into the platform (if not billions?) with their bait and switch of telling advertisers they'd "own" the users that liked their pages - and people still trust them even with that starting pointing to keep advertising? It's strange to me.

mbesto 8y ago

People have been doing this for years on Google's platform and the behaviors still haven't changed (I have a lot of hands-on experience with $100k+ annual ad spend budgets that are atrocious), so I disagree. People set it and forget it (mainly to ad ops agencies who charge 10%), because they don't know any different as long as sales keep coming in.

mjevans 8y ago

This is how I feel about ads in general. The only type of ad that makes sense to me at all is one that educates someone about a class of problem and that there's at least one product (X) that can be used to solve this problem. In many cases it would make more sense to focus these efforts on making stores more effective at presenting solutions and grouping related solutions in expected areas to improve the search effectiveness of independent agents that have black box algorithms and are outside of the store's control. Attempting to modify said black boxes by an inundation of annoyances is ethnically wrong to me. (As implied above, when it ceases being educational it's increasingly likely to cross that line, particularly if the campaign is based on gimmicks or repetition to be effective in vulnerable population segments.)

mmatear 8y ago

My problem is how easy it is to "fake" advertising. As in I go to website browse and buy then I get ads after about said product. Is that counted as evidence of a successful add sale?

badwolf 8y ago
That's most likely poor retargeting setup

dillondoyle 8y ago

Buying digital advertising is big part of my job. I find the exact opposite to be true. FB provides high quality, low fraud. Especially compared to anything that's not Google/FB. When we advertise to raise money (for politicians) that provides a direct provable ROI and I can tell you nothing else has come close. Seems that is true for many corporations as well just look at FBs growing revenue. FB provides the tools to measure either a sale or the value of an app install over time the increased spend is proof of quality/value so clearly many others have also found success. I wonder who/what/how your campaigns didn't provide value?