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Facebook managers trash their own ad targeting in unsealed remarks

217 points by jbegley 6y ago

giarc 6y ago
This doesn't surprise me at all. I've run a few, albeit very small, campaigns on FB. I set up targetting (occupation and geography) and I would get people outside of my target 'liking' my ad. I'd reach out anyways to ask if they are interested in my product and they would never respond. I oftened wondered if they were just fake/bot accounts to make it look like my ads were getting attention. I'm glad some company has taken them to court to determine what is really going on.
- at-fates-hands 6y ago
  I can support what you're saying with the same experience. I did some SEO for a local landscape company. They were already doing well, but asked me about doing ads on FB. I told them I thought it was a scam, but they persisted so I ran a few campaigns for irrigation in the Spring and then fall cleanup starting in August. Same thing happened. They got a ton of impressions and clicks (no surprise) and a about a dozen leads. When they went through them, nearly all were for fake numbers (no answer and no VM) or email addresses that bounced. They ended up with one lead for a service they don't even make any money on. In the end, they lost a few hundred dollars, but it was enough to convince them running FB ads to generate business was not only a good idea, but it convinced them it was rigged and a scam.
  - rattray 6y ago
    What could explain the mechanics of how this happens? Surely FB employees aren't managing those bot accounts themselves. Do they generally determine accounts that engage with ads to be "human/real", thereby incentivizing bad actors who spin up fake FB accounts to click/"like" ads?
    - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
      > Surely FB employees aren't managing those bot accounts themselves Why not? It's not like Facebook employees have a track record as paragons of virtue. If there are managers incentivized to meet click targets, it could even happen informally. Like the Wells Fargo account-opening scandal.
      - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
        No business as successful as Facebook is going to do something as idiotic as introducing click targets. Clearly you would want to optimise the rates ;)
    - meekrohprocess 6y ago
      They could also do it at arm's length. A lot of MTurk-style sites have loads of jobs along the lines of, "click this ad, fill out this form, get $0.02".
      - cpeterso 6y ago
        But who is paying those MTurk click farms to click ads on Facebook?
  - auganov 6y ago
    How were the bids setup? When you underbid you'll get matched with people nobody wants. Also if real users aren't interested in whatever interaction you're soliciting you're bound to only get bots. I've done some FB advertising for news type content (much easier to target properly) and was getting incredible value for the money. Usually it's pretty obvious real fast if you're getting real action or not and you can adjust accordingly.
    - stainforth 6y ago
      Your description "people nobody wants" does not match parents "nearly all were for fake numbers" (bots).
    - giarc 6y ago
      I'm not the person you are responding to, but I am the parent comment. Anyways, my issue was that often the users that were "liking" my ads weren't even in the geographic region I selected. So if I say "spend $20 a day" and target people in X area, why are they showing my ad to people in Y area? I know they have options for lived in vs travelled through etc but these were clearly people that lived in Y area.
- hertzrat 6y ago
  If Facebook ads are as ineffective as people say, what have people done that did work? The only thing I know for sure is that word of mouth can make an outstanding product spread quickly, but you still need to get your first 100 users somewhere
- breakfastduck 6y ago
  Anecdotally, facebook adverts are effective. They may not be able to be tracked from facebook, but I've had plenty of people recommend a product in person that they 'saw on facebook' but never liked or interacted with. They're probably no more effective than billboards, or something though. That may be different with everyone stuck at home!
was_boring 6y ago
Let’s be real, ad tech is a shady business with Facebook leading the charge. This shouldn’t be surprising to any ad executive whose performance isn’t measured by actual dollars generated, but by impressions, money spent, cost per click, and various other dubious metrics which are conveniently provided by the ad network. Not to saying the ad network isn’t valueable (it is and the largest tech companies are ad networks), but that the numbers are juiced shouldn’t be surprising. It’s in every decision makers interest that it is.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  You should probably be talking about ad tech apart from Facebook, as very few ad-tech companies have large teams dedicated to help advertisers run experiments on Facebook. Up till very recently, said teams had a separate reporting line from sales to ensure that they were telling advertisers the truth.
yhoneycomb 6y ago
As a med student, my ads are 90% ads for Caribbean med schools, nursing schools, and online nurse practitioner degrees that can be completed part time in under a year or two (these are the most worrying). They target me about as well as a celebrity pitch.
mjburgess 6y ago
This shows the limitations of ML: facebook has incredible amounts of preference & behaviour data on its users; and can't even meet incredibly generic categories such as "high-earner, college educated, etc.". The reason we think we're in an "AI" boom is 90% these ad. companies hyping their own abilities (an identical strategy to that of the initial boom in the 50s). What we call "AI" today is just an associative house of cards which gives the illusion of depth when seen from a very narrow viewing angle.
- sorokod 6y ago
  Well, a combination of objective limitations and FB's ability to execute.
  - sidlls 6y ago
    But mostly objective limitations. The most advanced minds executing the most robust, cutting edge ML aren't likely to do very much better. And most of the metrics by which they might suggest otherwise end up being flawed themselves due to the bias introduced by the feedback loops involved. When your predicate influences the next version's antecedent, it's easy to show a big ROI, lift, or whatever other jargon you might care to use.
- yarcob 6y ago
  I think the problem is deeper than that. Every company wants to advertise to high earning college educated people, and nobody wants to advertise to unemployed anti-vaxers. But presumably Facebook has a lot more of the latter. So they have to get a bit "creative" with their targeting if they want to sell their inventory...
- emcq 6y ago
  This article is quoting employees conversations from 2016. It wasn't until late 2016 that Google published research on wide and deep recommender systems. I'd be interested to see if people still think behavioral data is poor and ML has not provided advances. That said some demographics are broadly correct from behavioral tracking (e.g. a child who watches baby shark on repeat), but good luck telling the difference between a rich child and a less rich child.
underseacables 6y ago
I seem to recall some thing about when major companies pulled their advertising from YouTube over affiliation with hate speech, some notice that their sales did not decline. Does anyone know how advertising impact is measured online? It seems like a leap of faith every time.
kthxbye123 6y ago
I don't understand how they could miss on 'interest'. Isn't this literally just based on what you 'like'? That shouldn't require advanced ML, just a simple JOIN!
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
I know everyone loves to hate Facebook and articles that confirm that bias are very popular right now, but this lawsuit doesn't seem to have smoking gun evidence like the headline suggests. Have you ever written an e-mail or Slack message to a peer complaining that something at your company might not be working well? Or that something is totally broken and you think it should be prioritized in the ticket queue? Imagine those statements being cherry-picked and used to argue that your entire company is a fraud. That's essentially what's happening here. The quoted e-mail is from 2016, and includes questions like this: > That manager proceeded to suggest further examination of top targeting criteria to “see if we are giving advertiser [sic] false hope.” You'd think that if they concluded that they were giving advertisers false hope, the lawyers would have simply quoted that discussion, rather than an earlier discussion where a manager was asking for further investigation to make sure they weren't giving advertisers false hope. That is, doing their job to check that the ad targeting was proper. The originators of the lawsuit are angry that their ads were shown to people who didn't have college degrees and did not make over $250,000 per year: > Investor Village said in court filings that it decided to buy narrowly targeted Facebook ads because it hoped to reach “highly compensated and educated investors” but “had limited resources to spend on advertising.” But nearly 40 percent of the people who saw Investor Village’s ad either lacked a college degree, did not make $250,000 per year, or both, the company claims. In fact, not a single Facebook user it surveyed met all the targeting criteria it had set for Facebook ads, it says. It's not clear if Facebook explicitly knew at the time that the ad targets didn't meet the criteria, or if Facebook's targeting data was simply incorrect for those who were targeted. Again, if they had evidence that Facebook was deliberately showing ads to people who they knew didn't meet the criteria, you'd think the lawyers would have led with that evidence instead of digging deep into old e-mails where managers proposed investigating the ad performance. I know Facebook is the quintessential evil tech company in the 2020 zeitgeist, but it looks to me that these lawyers are trying to use that to their advantage to win a court case, not that they've stumbled upon some smoking gun.
- na85 6y ago
  You're citing an absence of evidence as evidence of absence. Consider the following: if Facebook knows its targeting is ineffective and doesn't meet the criteria, why would they put that in writing, knowing that anything on writing can be subpoenaed?
qeternity 6y ago
So I’ve heard (and believe) this for years: the targeting of ad networks borders on useless. But as the old adage goes: I know 50% of my advertising is worthless, I just don’t know which 50%. So why haven’t we run out of suckers yet if this stuff is really that bad? If businesses weren’t seeing the ROI, you’d think they’d see that. So either, as bad as it is, it’s still worth it, or they aren’t able to measure ROI properly (a distant third: they are able to, and still do it?) I’d love to hear from someone with first hand experience.
- edoceo 6y ago
  "why haven’t we run out of suckers yet" New suckers are created at a rate of approximately 1/minute.
  - tomcam 6y ago
    Fact check: True
- dahdum 6y ago
  If you're running high volume campaigns with fast sales cycles you'll see huge gains from using advanced targeting options. All of them are best guesses and far from certain. Income targeting may be inferred by their (inferred) zip code and (inferred) age for example. Identifying what to optimize is trivial at scale, simply look at your campaign performance by targeting options and it usually screams out at you. Doing better in the female, 18-25, urban demo? Raise bids for them and lower bids in the non-performing groups. It hardly matters to me how often Facebook or Google got it wrong if pulling the lever still works. Most of the sour grapes I've seen are brand or lead gen campaigns run by the inexperienced griping about individual clicks. If you can't start broad and prune, you need to start hyper targeted and closely monitor.
awinter-py 6y ago
guessing that if anyone understands bullshit it's ad buyers; if they're on fb it's because it has higher ROI than other platforms for their specific campaigns, not because they believe the hype (of course if actual fraud took place fb should give back the money they collected)
danielrhodes 6y ago
I’m assuming Facebook is not so incompetent they can’t show an ad to its intended audience. I think the main issue is to do any sort of ML or user based targeting, you need to have a minimum amount of data to make good judgements in an auction. But then you realize you have multiple ads that are competing against each other and another ad might convert better or most important of all: pay more. Thus even if you have an ad which is targeted to that specific user, it might not get shown. Sometimes it is better to not show an ad at all. With all these trade offs, the result can sometimes look quite bizarre.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  I think that if you consider it deeply, you might realise that revenue would be a poor metric with which to optimise an internet advertising system.
neya 6y ago
My theory is - it's probably on purpose. If you spent $100 to reach your audience, your ROI would be pretty good for the $100. What if you spent $200 for the same audience reach? You still get results, albeit it's a bit more expensive now. But still better than other competitors out there because they don't have as much granular data about a user as Facebook does. Not even Google has this level of detail (Who are your friends, what you like to eat, What topics you like to chat about, etc.)
- quickthrower2 6y ago
  Google has your intent though and possibly that’s a lot more powerful. “Pharmacy my town” is pretty clear.
- mNovak 6y ago
  If you're on android, Google very much has your contacts and who you communicate with, where you go to eat and where you call for pickup, and your interests via search and gmail...
fairity 6y ago
Facebook's ad inventory is sold by auction. Inaccurate targeting isn't a big deal as long as all advertisers are treated the same. Furthermore, granular targeting is no longer the way to scale on Facebook. Therefore, inaccurate targeting will have little to no effect on most campaigns' efficacies (at least the ones designed by those who are knowledgable of the ecosystem). Any FB marketer worth their salt knows this. Many people are claiming FB ads are a scam due to their personal inability to make ads work for themselves. As someone who's spent 8 figures on FB with no special connections, I can tell you this assertion is complete hogwash. In fact, the opposite assertion than the one in the article is true: Facebook is LEAGUES ahead of its competition as far as its ability to accurately predict user conversion rate given a specific ad and user.
- stonecraftwolf 6y ago
  > Furthermore, granular targeting is no longer the way to scale on Facebook. Can you elaborate on this? I’m not sure I understand what the alternative is.
  - fairity 6y ago
    3-5 years ago, the most effective way to design campaigns was by micro-targeting audiences. That is, you would have thousands of adsets, and each adset would target a small slice of your target audience. The theory behind micro-targeting was that your audience's conversion rate varies considerably by certain key targeting attributes. And, if your audience has varying conversion rates, your CPC bids ought to reflect this. For example, let's assume your LTV is $100. And, let's assume your average conversion rate is 1%, but actually, males convert at 0.5% and females convert at 1.5%. If you do NOT split your audience by gender, you will be forced to bid $1 per click for every user. However, if you split your audience by gender, you can bid $0.5 for men and $1.5 for females. By splicing your audience, you gain considerable efficiency. The theory behind micro-targeting was to find the permutations of targeting attributes that split your audience into segments with the most variance in conversion rates. However, what's happened over the past few years is that Facebook's AI has become vastly better at doing micro-targeting than even the best individual marketers. This is partly because they have more data than platform participants, but also because they have much smarter engineers. As a result, it's now become better to hand over targeting responsibilities to Facebook's AI. For the most part, you just tell them what you want the average CPA to be, and they do the targeting for you behind the scenes.
the__alchemist 6y ago
Anecdotally, FB shows me the same ads on repeat: Few are relevant, and the same ones repeat past a threshold I'd assume would indicate I'm not interested. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbKdKcGJ4tM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbKdKcGJ4tM
- mistersys 6y ago
  As someone who runs facebook ads for ecomm, repeated targeting are a core part of making facebook ads profitable. You'll almost never make money by running a simple, one-step ad with a link to your website. What we do is to target a group of people with a simple ad, then people who engage with or leave impressions on that ad will be run into a second ad, and so on and so forth until you finally funnel them into a conversion ad (for example, a discount) to try to convert those "warmed up" leads. All the campaigns leading up to the conversion ad aren't profitable, then you make all your money on the conversion ad. So advertisers actually intentionally target you repeatedly, most people it just annoys but for the subset of people that are actually interested in your product, it can work. Familiarity and repeated visibility seems to lead to a sort of trust for certain people.
  - ummonk 6y ago
    Yeah, I've frequently experienced seeing an ad for X service for the 10th time and finally finding myself curious to find out what it's actually about.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - djohnston 6y ago
    This is really interesting to someone with no background in marketing, thanks for sharing :)
  - stainforth 6y ago
    Sounds like you wear them down.
throwaway2231 6y ago
Most clicks are simply fraud. Unspoken truth in adtech.
Ozzie_osman 6y ago
I'm no fan of Facebook, but honestly, this doesn't seem like a big deal. Actually, online ad networks like FB or Google are way more transparent than the alternatives. Sure, when you say you want to target X it's not going to be 100% X, the data is noisy. Ultimately, the data speaks for itself. You can see impressions, clicks, and conversions, and it's almost instant. If you don't like the results, you stop/change your campaign.
netik 6y ago
It’s hard to say Facebook’s targeting is completely garbage while at the same time understanding that Cambridge analytica, Trump, and others were able to use their micro targeting to sway elections. Obviously the targeting works. But,like most software, I’m sure it is buggy. Probably both sides of this are true.
tomaszs 6y ago
It is a know fact among marketing agencies detailed targeting on Facebook is almost fake. You can safely target for age / country / region / sex and that's it. There is also similar audience setting, however it is a black box solution that takes away control over the campaign. Moreover even when setting the campaign right, almost 80% of I got in some, were bots.
1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
More background: https://cases.justia.com/federal/district-courts/california/candce/4:2018cv05286/331306/147/0.pdf https://cases.justia.com/federal/district-courts/california/... "At the outset, the court notes the unusual nature of these requests: defendant is asking the court to seal an opposing party's pleadings. In ordinary course, such a request is improper. The FAC is plaintiff's pleading and, within the bounds of Rule 11, it is free to allege what it wants independent of any stricture defendant wishes to impose. The court understands, however, that plaintiff has taken discovery and that the FAC is more detailed than an ordinary verified pleading. Given that difference, the court will consider these requests." The declaration filed by one of Faceook's legal staff to support this absurd request gets absolutely skewered. Regulatory officials never seem to get much truth from Facebook, but I have always thought litigation, namely its "side effects", have the potential to expose truths about Facebook.
cm2012 6y ago
In the article and this thread: a bunch of people who have never spent serious sums on Facebook trashing FBs targeting. I have spent large amounts of money targeting niche audiences on Facebook. The targeting is unparalelled by anything else on the web.
- ccortes 6y ago
  I think that's kinda part of the article. They are not small business friendly as they claim.
reissbaker 6y ago
"Crap" is a relative term; 41% (many years ago) was still a lot better than putting out an ad in the New York Times. FB ads aren't perfect, but IME they're a lot better than anything else — the only purchases I've made off ads in the last few years have been from targeted IG/FB ads, and quite a few friends have mentioned the same. Sort of ironic how the Intercept is apparently capable of believing both that: * FB is completely incompetent at targeting "to the point of being fraudulent," and can't hit the broad side of a barn with a targeted ad buy, and * FB is filled with malicious targeting geniuses, whose ability to pinpoint target ads to anyone with incredible precision has made a mockery of democracy. (Disclaimer: I recently left IG, although I didn't work on anything ads-related.)
- JKCalhoun 6y ago
  > the only purchases I've made off ads in the last few years have been from targeted IG/FB ads Likely most of the ads in the last few years have been targeted ones.
  - reissbaker 6y ago
    What I mean is: I haven't bought anything off of non-FB/IG ads, despite seeing many of them e.g. in the New York Times app (among others). It is indeed true that these are generally also "targeted," they're just not targeted well.
- nopriorarrests 6y ago
  How true. "Those evil Trump campaign staffers turned election in his favor using amazing evil micro-targeting FB techniques which are complete scam and do not work at all". Pretty coherent point of view.
forgotmypw17 6y ago
I once briefly worked at a startup which would scrape and NLP-analyze public Facebook posts for indicators of given conditions, like descriptions of symptoms and general affect, collect their information, and then sell it to pharmaceutical marketing companies...
1MachineElf 6y ago
Except for Wish, the ads I get on Facebook and Instagram tend to be highly relevant to my interests. For all their flaws, it's one thing these platforms got right - for me, anyway. It seems to me that a lot of interesting ads from randommbusinesses ads come up on my feed, although I cannot say how many of those are from the small businesses that FB managers believe are being taken for a ride here.
- Talanes 6y ago
  I get some annoyingly perfect ads for Amazon and Mercari, but neither of them will actually direct you to that product when you click, so it never quite works out for them.

217 points by jbegley 6y ago

This doesn't surprise me at all. I've run a few, albeit very small, campaigns on FB. I set up targetting (occupation and geography) and I would get people outside of my target 'liking' my ad. I'd reach out anyways to ask if they are interested in my product and they would never respond. I oftened wondered if they were just fake/bot accounts to make it look like my ads were getting attention. I'm glad some company has taken them to court to determine what is really going on.

at-fates-hands 6y ago
I can support what you're saying with the same experience. I did some SEO for a local landscape company. They were already doing well, but asked me about doing ads on FB. I told them I thought it was a scam, but they persisted so I ran a few campaigns for irrigation in the Spring and then fall cleanup starting in August. Same thing happened. They got a ton of impressions and clicks (no surprise) and a about a dozen leads. When they went through them, nearly all were for fake numbers (no answer and no VM) or email addresses that bounced. They ended up with one lead for a service they don't even make any money on. In the end, they lost a few hundred dollars, but it was enough to convince them running FB ads to generate business was not only a good idea, but it convinced them it was rigged and a scam.
- rattray 6y ago
  What could explain the mechanics of how this happens? Surely FB employees aren't managing those bot accounts themselves. Do they generally determine accounts that engage with ads to be "human/real", thereby incentivizing bad actors who spin up fake FB accounts to click/"like" ads?
  - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > Surely FB employees aren't managing those bot accounts themselves Why not? It's not like Facebook employees have a track record as paragons of virtue. If there are managers incentivized to meet click targets, it could even happen informally. Like the Wells Fargo account-opening scandal.
    - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      No business as successful as Facebook is going to do something as idiotic as introducing click targets. Clearly you would want to optimise the rates ;)
  - meekrohprocess 6y ago
    They could also do it at arm's length. A lot of MTurk-style sites have loads of jobs along the lines of, "click this ad, fill out this form, get $0.02".
    - cpeterso 6y ago
      But who is paying those MTurk click farms to click ads on Facebook?
- auganov 6y ago
  How were the bids setup? When you underbid you'll get matched with people nobody wants. Also if real users aren't interested in whatever interaction you're soliciting you're bound to only get bots. I've done some FB advertising for news type content (much easier to target properly) and was getting incredible value for the money. Usually it's pretty obvious real fast if you're getting real action or not and you can adjust accordingly.
  - stainforth 6y ago
    Your description "people nobody wants" does not match parents "nearly all were for fake numbers" (bots).
  - giarc 6y ago
    I'm not the person you are responding to, but I am the parent comment. Anyways, my issue was that often the users that were "liking" my ads weren't even in the geographic region I selected. So if I say "spend $20 a day" and target people in X area, why are they showing my ad to people in Y area? I know they have options for lived in vs travelled through etc but these were clearly people that lived in Y area.
hertzrat 6y ago
If Facebook ads are as ineffective as people say, what have people done that did work? The only thing I know for sure is that word of mouth can make an outstanding product spread quickly, but you still need to get your first 100 users somewhere
breakfastduck 6y ago
Anecdotally, facebook adverts are effective. They may not be able to be tracked from facebook, but I've had plenty of people recommend a product in person that they 'saw on facebook' but never liked or interacted with. They're probably no more effective than billboards, or something though. That may be different with everyone stuck at home!

was_boring 6y ago

Let’s be real, ad tech is a shady business with Facebook leading the charge. This shouldn’t be surprising to any ad executive whose performance isn’t measured by actual dollars generated, but by impressions, money spent, cost per click, and various other dubious metrics which are conveniently provided by the ad network. Not to saying the ad network isn’t valueable (it is and the largest tech companies are ad networks), but that the numbers are juiced shouldn’t be surprising. It’s in every decision makers interest that it is.

disgruntledphd2 6y ago
You should probably be talking about ad tech apart from Facebook, as very few ad-tech companies have large teams dedicated to help advertisers run experiments on Facebook. Up till very recently, said teams had a separate reporting line from sales to ensure that they were telling advertisers the truth.

yhoneycomb 6y ago

As a med student, my ads are 90% ads for Caribbean med schools, nursing schools, and online nurse practitioner degrees that can be completed part time in under a year or two (these are the most worrying). They target me about as well as a celebrity pitch.

mjburgess 6y ago

This shows the limitations of ML: facebook has incredible amounts of preference & behaviour data on its users; and can't even meet incredibly generic categories such as "high-earner, college educated, etc.". The reason we think we're in an "AI" boom is 90% these ad. companies hyping their own abilities (an identical strategy to that of the initial boom in the 50s). What we call "AI" today is just an associative house of cards which gives the illusion of depth when seen from a very narrow viewing angle.

sorokod 6y ago
Well, a combination of objective limitations and FB's ability to execute.
- sidlls 6y ago
  But mostly objective limitations. The most advanced minds executing the most robust, cutting edge ML aren't likely to do very much better. And most of the metrics by which they might suggest otherwise end up being flawed themselves due to the bias introduced by the feedback loops involved. When your predicate influences the next version's antecedent, it's easy to show a big ROI, lift, or whatever other jargon you might care to use.
yarcob 6y ago
I think the problem is deeper than that. Every company wants to advertise to high earning college educated people, and nobody wants to advertise to unemployed anti-vaxers. But presumably Facebook has a lot more of the latter. So they have to get a bit "creative" with their targeting if they want to sell their inventory...
emcq 6y ago
This article is quoting employees conversations from 2016. It wasn't until late 2016 that Google published research on wide and deep recommender systems. I'd be interested to see if people still think behavioral data is poor and ML has not provided advances. That said some demographics are broadly correct from behavioral tracking (e.g. a child who watches baby shark on repeat), but good luck telling the difference between a rich child and a less rich child.

underseacables 6y ago

I seem to recall some thing about when major companies pulled their advertising from YouTube over affiliation with hate speech, some notice that their sales did not decline. Does anyone know how advertising impact is measured online? It seems like a leap of faith every time.

kthxbye123 6y ago

I don't understand how they could miss on 'interest'. Isn't this literally just based on what you 'like'? That shouldn't require advanced ML, just a simple JOIN!

PragmaticPulp 6y ago

I know everyone loves to hate Facebook and articles that confirm that bias are very popular right now, but this lawsuit doesn't seem to have smoking gun evidence like the headline suggests. Have you ever written an e-mail or Slack message to a peer complaining that something at your company might not be working well? Or that something is totally broken and you think it should be prioritized in the ticket queue? Imagine those statements being cherry-picked and used to argue that your entire company is a fraud. That's essentially what's happening here. The quoted e-mail is from 2016, and includes questions like this: > That manager proceeded to suggest further examination of top targeting criteria to “see if we are giving advertiser [sic] false hope.” You'd think that if they concluded that they were giving advertisers false hope, the lawyers would have simply quoted that discussion, rather than an earlier discussion where a manager was asking for further investigation to make sure they weren't giving advertisers false hope. That is, doing their job to check that the ad targeting was proper. The originators of the lawsuit are angry that their ads were shown to people who didn't have college degrees and did not make over $250,000 per year: > Investor Village said in court filings that it decided to buy narrowly targeted Facebook ads because it hoped to reach “highly compensated and educated investors” but “had limited resources to spend on advertising.” But nearly 40 percent of the people who saw Investor Village’s ad either lacked a college degree, did not make $250,000 per year, or both, the company claims. In fact, not a single Facebook user it surveyed met all the targeting criteria it had set for Facebook ads, it says. It's not clear if Facebook explicitly knew at the time that the ad targets didn't meet the criteria, or if Facebook's targeting data was simply incorrect for those who were targeted. Again, if they had evidence that Facebook was deliberately showing ads to people who they knew didn't meet the criteria, you'd think the lawyers would have led with that evidence instead of digging deep into old e-mails where managers proposed investigating the ad performance. I know Facebook is the quintessential evil tech company in the 2020 zeitgeist, but it looks to me that these lawyers are trying to use that to their advantage to win a court case, not that they've stumbled upon some smoking gun.

na85 6y ago
You're citing an absence of evidence as evidence of absence. Consider the following: if Facebook knows its targeting is ineffective and doesn't meet the criteria, why would they put that in writing, knowing that anything on writing can be subpoenaed?

qeternity 6y ago

So I’ve heard (and believe) this for years: the targeting of ad networks borders on useless. But as the old adage goes: I know 50% of my advertising is worthless, I just don’t know which 50%. So why haven’t we run out of suckers yet if this stuff is really that bad? If businesses weren’t seeing the ROI, you’d think they’d see that. So either, as bad as it is, it’s still worth it, or they aren’t able to measure ROI properly (a distant third: they are able to, and still do it?) I’d love to hear from someone with first hand experience.

edoceo 6y ago
"why haven’t we run out of suckers yet" New suckers are created at a rate of approximately 1/minute.
- tomcam 6y ago
  Fact check: True
dahdum 6y ago
If you're running high volume campaigns with fast sales cycles you'll see huge gains from using advanced targeting options. All of them are best guesses and far from certain. Income targeting may be inferred by their (inferred) zip code and (inferred) age for example. Identifying what to optimize is trivial at scale, simply look at your campaign performance by targeting options and it usually screams out at you. Doing better in the female, 18-25, urban demo? Raise bids for them and lower bids in the non-performing groups. It hardly matters to me how often Facebook or Google got it wrong if pulling the lever still works. Most of the sour grapes I've seen are brand or lead gen campaigns run by the inexperienced griping about individual clicks. If you can't start broad and prune, you need to start hyper targeted and closely monitor.

awinter-py 6y ago

guessing that if anyone understands bullshit it's ad buyers; if they're on fb it's because it has higher ROI than other platforms for their specific campaigns, not because they believe the hype (of course if actual fraud took place fb should give back the money they collected)

danielrhodes 6y ago

I’m assuming Facebook is not so incompetent they can’t show an ad to its intended audience. I think the main issue is to do any sort of ML or user based targeting, you need to have a minimum amount of data to make good judgements in an auction. But then you realize you have multiple ads that are competing against each other and another ad might convert better or most important of all: pay more. Thus even if you have an ad which is targeted to that specific user, it might not get shown. Sometimes it is better to not show an ad at all. With all these trade offs, the result can sometimes look quite bizarre.

disgruntledphd2 6y ago
I think that if you consider it deeply, you might realise that revenue would be a poor metric with which to optimise an internet advertising system.

neya 6y ago

My theory is - it's probably on purpose. If you spent $100 to reach your audience, your ROI would be pretty good for the $100. What if you spent $200 for the same audience reach? You still get results, albeit it's a bit more expensive now. But still better than other competitors out there because they don't have as much granular data about a user as Facebook does. Not even Google has this level of detail (Who are your friends, what you like to eat, What topics you like to chat about, etc.)

quickthrower2 6y ago
Google has your intent though and possibly that’s a lot more powerful. “Pharmacy my town” is pretty clear.
mNovak 6y ago
If you're on android, Google very much has your contacts and who you communicate with, where you go to eat and where you call for pickup, and your interests via search and gmail...

fairity 6y ago

Facebook's ad inventory is sold by auction. Inaccurate targeting isn't a big deal as long as all advertisers are treated the same. Furthermore, granular targeting is no longer the way to scale on Facebook. Therefore, inaccurate targeting will have little to no effect on most campaigns' efficacies (at least the ones designed by those who are knowledgable of the ecosystem). Any FB marketer worth their salt knows this. Many people are claiming FB ads are a scam due to their personal inability to make ads work for themselves. As someone who's spent 8 figures on FB with no special connections, I can tell you this assertion is complete hogwash. In fact, the opposite assertion than the one in the article is true: Facebook is LEAGUES ahead of its competition as far as its ability to accurately predict user conversion rate given a specific ad and user.

stonecraftwolf 6y ago
> Furthermore, granular targeting is no longer the way to scale on Facebook. Can you elaborate on this? I’m not sure I understand what the alternative is.
- fairity 6y ago
  3-5 years ago, the most effective way to design campaigns was by micro-targeting audiences. That is, you would have thousands of adsets, and each adset would target a small slice of your target audience. The theory behind micro-targeting was that your audience's conversion rate varies considerably by certain key targeting attributes. And, if your audience has varying conversion rates, your CPC bids ought to reflect this. For example, let's assume your LTV is $100. And, let's assume your average conversion rate is 1%, but actually, males convert at 0.5% and females convert at 1.5%. If you do NOT split your audience by gender, you will be forced to bid $1 per click for every user. However, if you split your audience by gender, you can bid $0.5 for men and $1.5 for females. By splicing your audience, you gain considerable efficiency. The theory behind micro-targeting was to find the permutations of targeting attributes that split your audience into segments with the most variance in conversion rates. However, what's happened over the past few years is that Facebook's AI has become vastly better at doing micro-targeting than even the best individual marketers. This is partly because they have more data than platform participants, but also because they have much smarter engineers. As a result, it's now become better to hand over targeting responsibilities to Facebook's AI. For the most part, you just tell them what you want the average CPA to be, and they do the targeting for you behind the scenes.

the__alchemist 6y ago

Anecdotally, FB shows me the same ads on repeat: Few are relevant, and the same ones repeat past a threshold I'd assume would indicate I'm not interested. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbKdKcGJ4tM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbKdKcGJ4tM

mistersys 6y ago
As someone who runs facebook ads for ecomm, repeated targeting are a core part of making facebook ads profitable. You'll almost never make money by running a simple, one-step ad with a link to your website. What we do is to target a group of people with a simple ad, then people who engage with or leave impressions on that ad will be run into a second ad, and so on and so forth until you finally funnel them into a conversion ad (for example, a discount) to try to convert those "warmed up" leads. All the campaigns leading up to the conversion ad aren't profitable, then you make all your money on the conversion ad. So advertisers actually intentionally target you repeatedly, most people it just annoys but for the subset of people that are actually interested in your product, it can work. Familiarity and repeated visibility seems to lead to a sort of trust for certain people.
- ummonk 6y ago
  Yeah, I've frequently experienced seeing an ad for X service for the 10th time and finally finding myself curious to find out what it's actually about.
- deleted 6y ago
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- djohnston 6y ago
  This is really interesting to someone with no background in marketing, thanks for sharing :)
- stainforth 6y ago
  Sounds like you wear them down.

throwaway2231 6y ago

Most clicks are simply fraud. Unspoken truth in adtech.

Ozzie_osman 6y ago

I'm no fan of Facebook, but honestly, this doesn't seem like a big deal. Actually, online ad networks like FB or Google are way more transparent than the alternatives. Sure, when you say you want to target X it's not going to be 100% X, the data is noisy. Ultimately, the data speaks for itself. You can see impressions, clicks, and conversions, and it's almost instant. If you don't like the results, you stop/change your campaign.

netik 6y ago

It’s hard to say Facebook’s targeting is completely garbage while at the same time understanding that Cambridge analytica, Trump, and others were able to use their micro targeting to sway elections. Obviously the targeting works. But,like most software, I’m sure it is buggy. Probably both sides of this are true.

tomaszs 6y ago

It is a know fact among marketing agencies detailed targeting on Facebook is almost fake. You can safely target for age / country / region / sex and that's it. There is also similar audience setting, however it is a black box solution that takes away control over the campaign. Moreover even when setting the campaign right, almost 80% of I got in some, were bots.

1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago

More background: https://cases.justia.com/federal/district-courts/california/candce/4:2018cv05286/331306/147/0.pdf https://cases.justia.com/federal/district-courts/california/... "At the outset, the court notes the unusual nature of these requests: defendant is asking the court to seal an opposing party's pleadings. In ordinary course, such a request is improper. The FAC is plaintiff's pleading and, within the bounds of Rule 11, it is free to allege what it wants independent of any stricture defendant wishes to impose. The court understands, however, that plaintiff has taken discovery and that the FAC is more detailed than an ordinary verified pleading. Given that difference, the court will consider these requests." The declaration filed by one of Faceook's legal staff to support this absurd request gets absolutely skewered. Regulatory officials never seem to get much truth from Facebook, but I have always thought litigation, namely its "side effects", have the potential to expose truths about Facebook.

cm2012 6y ago

In the article and this thread: a bunch of people who have never spent serious sums on Facebook trashing FBs targeting. I have spent large amounts of money targeting niche audiences on Facebook. The targeting is unparalelled by anything else on the web.

ccortes 6y ago
I think that's kinda part of the article. They are not small business friendly as they claim.

reissbaker 6y ago

"Crap" is a relative term; 41% (many years ago) was still a lot better than putting out an ad in the New York Times. FB ads aren't perfect, but IME they're a lot better than anything else — the only purchases I've made off ads in the last few years have been from targeted IG/FB ads, and quite a few friends have mentioned the same. Sort of ironic how the Intercept is apparently capable of believing both that: * FB is completely incompetent at targeting "to the point of being fraudulent," and can't hit the broad side of a barn with a targeted ad buy, and * FB is filled with malicious targeting geniuses, whose ability to pinpoint target ads to anyone with incredible precision has made a mockery of democracy. (Disclaimer: I recently left IG, although I didn't work on anything ads-related.)

JKCalhoun 6y ago
> the only purchases I've made off ads in the last few years have been from targeted IG/FB ads Likely most of the ads in the last few years have been targeted ones.
- reissbaker 6y ago
  What I mean is: I haven't bought anything off of non-FB/IG ads, despite seeing many of them e.g. in the New York Times app (among others). It is indeed true that these are generally also "targeted," they're just not targeted well.
nopriorarrests 6y ago
How true. "Those evil Trump campaign staffers turned election in his favor using amazing evil micro-targeting FB techniques which are complete scam and do not work at all". Pretty coherent point of view.

forgotmypw17 6y ago

I once briefly worked at a startup which would scrape and NLP-analyze public Facebook posts for indicators of given conditions, like descriptions of symptoms and general affect, collect their information, and then sell it to pharmaceutical marketing companies...

1MachineElf 6y ago

Except for Wish, the ads I get on Facebook and Instagram tend to be highly relevant to my interests. For all their flaws, it's one thing these platforms got right - for me, anyway. It seems to me that a lot of interesting ads from randommbusinesses ads come up on my feed, although I cannot say how many of those are from the small businesses that FB managers believe are being taken for a ride here.

Talanes 6y ago
I get some annoyingly perfect ads for Amazon and Mercari, but neither of them will actually direct you to that product when you click, so it never quite works out for them.