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Facebook reported fake numbers to advertisers
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- soared 6y agoId be curious to see how potential reach is affecting revenue. Like the article says the only way it has an impact on revenue is through media planning. But it seems like very few large advertisers would move some budget off Facebook if potential reach was 10% lower. Very few advertiser’s budgets are constrained by audience size. This honestly doesn’t seem all that terrible, especially compared to their past of inflating actual performance metrics. Yeah they should’ve fixed it, but adtech platforms have hundreds of metrics with little opportunity to verify them so I’m sure it’s nowhere near the worst example.
- bogwog 6y ago> But it seems like very few large advertisers would move some budget off Facebook if potential reach was 10% lower. Very few advertiser’s budgets are constrained by audience size. Why wouldn't an advertiser invest less in a campaign if it reached less people? That's why companies are willing to pay so much more for a superbowl ad than a regular TV ad, because they have more reach. The problem I think is that a lot of advertisers, especially smaller ones, wouldn't want to risk pissing Facebook off with a lawsuit. Plus even if Facebook misleads advertisers in a way that results in them spending more money than they otherwise would...the fact is, Facebook could likely double or triple their current prices and those same advertisers would still pay it because they have no choice.
- indymike 6y ago"The problem I think is that a lot of advertisers, especially smaller ones, wouldn't want to risk pissing Facebook off with a lawsuit. Plus even if Facebook misleads advertisers in a way that results in them spending more money than they otherwise would...the fact is, Facebook could likely double or triple their current prices and those same advertisers would still pay it because they have no choice." If the ads don't work, or do not deliver enough results for the price, the advertiser will take their spend somewhere else.
- davidivadavid 6y agoThis simple mechanism seems to escape a lot of people, it seems. Anyone moderately familiar with a concept like ROAS, even with its limitations, should be able to avoid making such wrongheaded arguments.
- bluGill 6y agoThe big advertisers are doing this. They know their real numbers because they track results. They don't care what facebook reports, they care about results vs costs. If between fraud and ads that don't work only 1% of the ads result in a customer, then the cost to get a customer is 100 times the cost to get an impression: from there is is easy math to decide if that is a worthwhile cost of sale to buy all 100 ads to reach 1 customer. If FB would/could cut down on fraud the cost of sales would go down making their ads more valuable.
- soared 6y agoAgencies/big brands look at each digital channel and how much they could potentially spend reaching their target market and then assign budgets months in advance. So if the potential spend on Facebook is lower, it may get less budget in the plan because the agency knows they won’t be able to spend more budget there. My initial wording is weird.
- hobs 6y agoSo your last sentence seems to let them off even more than they are already being let off; given their take of billions of dollars why should we give them extra leeway to keep fucking up?
- soared 6y agoI just don’t think this is as major as many news outlets will make it seem.
- FatalLogic 6y agoIn addition to the obvious conflict of interest in relations with advertisers which is the focus of this story, this also implies it would be in Facebook's interests to go easy on fake accounts and tolerate their existence. That's troubling, and just in itself it appears contrary to their public facing policy
- mountainb 6y agoInflating user metrics is positive for manipulating advertisers and for manipulating investors both. So far, the regulatory agencies have been willing to look the other way despite the potentially lucrative penalties it could extract from Facebook by policing this practice.
- nindalf 6y agoWhy? Wouldn't the people working on fake accounts only care about their own metrics? How would it affect them if some other team's metrics are affected?
- buran77 6y agoThere may be clickfarms that have their interests (accidentally) aligned with FB's in specific cases, which would mean FB has no interest in cracking down on them. And I wouldn't put it past FB to even indirectly operate such clickfarms if this means they can offer some support for the overinflated promises they make to advertisers.
- nindalf 6y agoYou misunderstand me. You speak of Facebook as a large amorphous blob. But think of it in terms of people working on these problems. Why should the fake accounts team care about the metrics of the ads team? They will be rewarded based number of fake accounts caught, presumably. Not ad spend. So why would they not do their jobs?
- buran77 6y ago
- dd36 6y agoAn aside, I still receive Inc. magazine despite not renewing my subscription 7 years ago... Is that to inflate the reach? I’m not arguing it’s illegal or anything. It makes me wonder how widespread misleading audience numbers are in ad-based businesses. Do I count? Do I count as reach for all the other ad mailers I get but immediately toss in the recycle bin?
- ezekg 6y agoThis seems like a common practice for startups, at least in my experience. I've worked at companies that boast they have hundreds of thousands of users to their investors and on their sign up pages, but in actuality, they have less than a thousand active users. It's deceptive. Most users were never active to begin with, yet outwardly they stretch the truth. Yes, you may have a high user row count in the database, and you may also have a high spam user count, but that means nothing and they hide it.
- johnchristopher 6y agoYou say it's common so I suppose investors are used to it and find out quickly?
- jm20 6y agoYes any semi-experienced investor will immediately screen for active users vs signups, and if they find out you’re trying to game the numbers it’s usually a dealbreaker.
- ezekg 6y agoYou would think so. I've seen the presentation slides, and I've seen the real production analytics. Totally different. But alas, I've since exited the life of startup employee and won't return.
- colejohnson66 6y agoProbably. If you toss them out, they don’t know. With digital ads, they supposedly have a way to know if you clicked (or even bought something after clicking).
- sputr 6y agoI keep warning small time (ie most) FB page owners who advertise on FB to be very very careful as they are being subjected to a beefed up version of the psychological manipulation that regular users face as they, not the regular users, are the main customers. Facebooks corporate incentive is to get you to FEEL like your getting good value out of advertising on Facebook and to get you addicted to doing it. Not to actually deliver results. So don't trust any metric they show you, because even if its not a total fabrication it's still presented in a way to deceive you to think its better than it is. Always monitor your ROI and always calculate it using your truly end goal (sales, or in the case of civil society some sort engagement off Facebook that's tightly bound to you mission). Likes, shares, comments and reach should NEVER be the goal. Even if FBs interface is trying to convince you otherwise.
- soheil 6y ago> subjected to a beefed up version of the psychological manipulation Can you provide sources or evidence of this?
- jjj123 6y agoThere is no need for sources on this. This is how design works in modern tech. You build UIs in a way that improve your own metrics, which in this case is probably ad spend. They’ve likely run hundreds of A/B tests on the way ad data is displayed to try and optimize for that metric.
- dna_polymerase 6y agoFacebook is the company that admitted to fueling the Myanmar genocide. If anyone has to produce receipts it's them.
- soheil 6y agoAs it relates to the ad UI.
- dna_polymerase 6y ago
- Razengan 6y agoTo me the whole advertising racket has always seemed like a case of an emperor with no clothes. Has anyone here ever made a purchase that was influenced solely by an ad, or known any common folk who did?
- bluefirebrand 6y agoI've worked places where marketing seems like just a big shell game. Paying other companies for advertising on their platforms meanwhile they are paying someone else, and that third party is paying us. All three marketing departments probably get a net 0 value from it, all three marketing departments get to report their budget spends and not get defunded, meanwhile producing nothing concrete of value.
- ttt0 6y agoI hate ads so much, that the only influence they have on me is that I will be less likely to make a purchase.
- lovecg 6y agoMay I ask what brand of toothpaste do you happen to use?
- bordercases 6y agoFor me - one based on its expected functional properties over brand recognition. Not all advertising is educational.
- bkirkby 6y agoi usually go with the cheapest.
- Razengan 6y agoThe cheapest/nearest. In most categories sometimes I can't even recall the name of what I last bought.
- davidivadavid 6y ago
- zupreme 6y agoIt took time, and many thousands of dollars, before I realized that the vast majority of “likes” my pages received as a result of paid campaigns on FB were from accounts which were clearly not real people. A simple look enough of their profiles revealed that, like would he expected from any fly by night CPA network, FB was using bots, or at least straw man accounts run by low-cost staff, to like and view content which FB was paid to advertise. Worse, I found that the clickthrough metrics reported by them to off-FB destinations I advertised NEVER was anywhere close to what was reported on the destination, including when tracked by Google Analytics. In short: like-fraud, click-fraud, and more. I cannot be the only person to notice these things. I assume it persists because most people, self included, simply complain and move on once we notice the “game” but don’t sue.
- sillysaurusx 6y agoYou're not the only person. Here's Veritasium reporting on it in 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag&ab_channel=Veritasium https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag&ab_channel=Verit...
- f430 6y agoWhen I ran a campaign I experienced similar problems. Received likes from very dubious looking Facebook profiles who likes all sorts of random stuff.
- BugsJustFindMe 6y ago> but don’t sue Ok, so, honest question, why not? If you're correct then it seems like a class action would be a slam dunk and wouldn't cost you anything personally because class action lawyers are happy to skim millions off the top of the settlement.
- TLightful 6y ago100%
- 6y ago
- agilob 6y agoWhen Uber discovered that 80% of their ads where (allegedly fake, please don't sue me), it was a big issue, everyone was talking about it and case is in court. When Facebook is doing the same thing again and again and again, there's not massive backslash against them? Do we even expect them to change a bit? https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cub21ueWNvbnRlbnQuY29tL2QvcGxheWxpc3QvZDVjYjViOGQtMzBiYi00Y2NkLTlmMzgtYWEwNzAwMzE5OTM4Lzk2MmQ0YzY1LWZlZTgtNGEzNS05ZjliLWFhMDcwMGRhNmU3MC9mYjI1NDJhMy1lZjkwLTQ2ZjUtYmI2Yy1hYTA3MDBkYTZlNzAvcG9kY2FzdC5yc3M/episode/MTU4OTRhOTAtZmQzZC00MjVhLWIyYzQtYWI1YjAxMTQ4Y2Mx?sa=X&ved=0CAIQuIEEahcKEwiAtuTmqfbuAhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQBQ https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cub21ueWNvbnR...
- chillacy 6y agoUber’s issues were with shadier ad networks afaik. Despite the noise, fb is actually one of the better sources of digital ad data, which speaks a lot about the dysfunction of the space overall.
- cm2012 6y agoThe genre of people who don't work in advertising complaining about how Facebook is bad for advertising is a true HN favorite. We get it, you don't like FB. That's fine. As an advertiser who knows that FB is far and above every other attention based ad platform (in effectiveness, transparency, scale, etc.), its like listening to nails on a chalkboard to read 90% of the comments in threads like these.
- HonestOp001 6y agoWhat have been your strategies on Facebook that you have found to work?
- cm2012 6y agoDepends what you're trying to do. This is a good place to start: https://adespresso.com/guides/facebook-ads-beginner/ https://adespresso.com/guides/facebook-ads-beginner/. I am not associated with Ad Espresso in any way.
- whatshisface 6y agoYou should write a counter blog post explaining the case, and evidence, for Facebook being a good platform. Then we could have a real debate instead of flowing along with the counterzeitgeist.
- abarringer 6y agoA contrary perspective... It could be they are using fake numbers but also are effective for some small businesses. I used it for a business and it drove tremendous sales. Everyone in the town that we inquired of had seen at least one ad on their facebook feed in a very short amount of time. All of this for a couple hundred $$. Im a fb hater too. But it works for some small businesses.
- worker767424 6y agoThe mid-size players I have friends in marketing at all have decent success with running ads on Facebook, and they're all tracking ROI. I've heard the platform isn't as mature as Google, and I suspect a lot of issues are rooted in "move fast."
- wwv25 6y agoThis has been well known for many years now amongst those in the digital advertising business. And it's not just Facebook, but Google, Pinterest, Bing, Amazon, etc. They use vague definitions and slightly polished data to embellish the effect on marketing. For example, by Pinterest's definition, they consider a "conversion" to be an impression for an ad that converts to a sale sometime within the next 30 days, regardless if a user interacted with the ad (click, double click, etc) or had been exposed by an ad for the same product on a different site. It's an absurd metric definition. No digital marketing managers are fooled by this. I mean c'mon, given these companies' track records, you wouldn't blindly trust their performance reporting. Those who manage ad campaigns almost always correlate performance to metrics that are measurable on their end. The most common are ROAS (return on ad spend) and revenue. I think the only victims of this may be the individuals and super small-time marketers with small budgets who are inexperienced or lack measurable business outcomes.
- sjg007 6y agoThere is some adage that 50% of advertising is effective, we just don't know which 50% it is.
- dazc 6y agoDidgital advertising is touted as an answer to this with targeted ads and tracking of conversions but, in truth, there is still a lot of wastage and cannabilisation of sales you'd have got anyhow.
- annadane 6y agoAnd with the money they get they buy up Whatsapp and constantly lied about it to regulators. Good to see where that money is going :/
- shadowtree 6y agoAnd why would the numbers of any other platform be any better? TikTok, Clubhouse, Snap - nobody independently verifies their numbers. It is even used to create virality. Those 1.5mil likes on a TikTok? Why wouldn't TikTok spike that number to get attention?
- blueblisters 6y agoAdd LinkedIn too - I think they were reporting wrong numbers for years. I think reddit is likely the worst with click fraud. Reddit is not gated by user login so bots can click on ads without having a user account. Being new to the ad space, they likely don't have the sophisticated bot detection tools that Google has to invalidate fraudulent clicks.
- jimkleiber 6y agoExactly this. Companies can use these numbers to appear bigger, richer, more popular, more successful, etc., than other platforms and we just trust they're reporting accurate numbers. I also wonder what we could do to change it. Do you think someone independently verifying the numbers would help? Who do you think might do it and how?
- vmception 6y agoPlease, regulators, hit FB with a gigantic securities fraud lawsuit They’re not even well connected politically, there is no reason not to curb stomp them
- rubyist5eva 6y agoTwitter has the absolute worst ROI on ads I've ever seen, it doesn't surprise me that Facebook inflates/fakes their numbers at all.
- marketingtech 6y agoNo major advertisers rely on Facebook or any other ad platform's reported numbers. The platforms are grading their own homework, and even their abilities to do that are increasingly limited. Companies spend millions of dollars on these platforms because they know, directionally, that some amount of the advertising is effective. Sales go up when they advertise, sales go down when they stop. They use the reported metrics from the platforms to see which of their ad campaigns is relatively more effective than the next. No experienced marketers rely on these metrics to be accurate when making budget decisions.
- ishjoh 6y ago> Companies spend millions of dollars on these platforms I agree with your point on the large companies that can spend millions of dollars. The folks that really get hurt by this stuff are the smaller businesses. It can be an expensive lesson when you think you're getting value from these services because they're providing bogus metrics. It's even more difficult if you can't correlate it to online sales, things like restaurants/retail locations this is especially difficult.
- bquest2 6y agoOne thing that would help these small businesses would be SDK of sorts that would help them do proper attribution themselves. Something that would help tie an ad click to an actual purchase or an app download.
- marketingtech 6y agoRight now, that's extremely difficult to do without leaking private data. Google and Facebook experimented with it for a while, but both killed the test products because it would require them to trust advertisers with data that could easily be de-anonymized. It's kind of a funny twist that Google and Facebook are able to avoid offering this in the name of user privacy, while the advertising industry is begging them to share more user data. That said, they're all part of an industry consortium that's working on differential privacy algorithms that will ideally allow businesses to check each other's attribution without actually sharing the personal data involved. https://developers.googleblog.com/2019/09/enabling-developers-and-organizations.html https://developers.googleblog.com/2019/09/enabling-developer...
- Havoc 6y agoOuch. Not a good look when your business is essentially based on trust that you'll show ads to as many real people as you say
- matchagaucho 6y agoI'm unsure how the label "Potential Reach" can be improved upon. Whether an Advertiser can _potentially_ reach 100M people or accounts is not their objective when setting up a campaign. The invoice at the end of the month ultimately reveals the number of ad impressions.
- burmer 6y agoThe article mentions fake or duplicate accounts but not those that exist for dead people either [1] which would seem to become more and more important over time. 1. https://metro.co.uk/2019/04/29/50-years-therell-dead-people-facebook-living-ones-9333490/ https://metro.co.uk/2019/04/29/50-years-therell-dead-people-...
- Bukhmanizer 6y agoThis is one of those things that I’ve seen HN complain about numerous times, but would you really want FB trawling through the obituaries trying to find out if you’re dead?
- bluGill 6y agoYes I would. There are a lot of people on my friends list (ie those I went to school with years ago) who I wouldn't get any notice they are dead without facebook telling me. I think of one person who died in a motercycle accident, if it wasn't for facebook I wouldn't know the difference between dead and just quit showing up in my feed. It doesn't matter in the long run as we never were more than classmates, but I'm still glad I know. The knowledge that someone is dead isn't very sensitive. I still control how much facebook knows about me, but some information is worth giving facebook because they will let my friends know.
- TechnoTimeStop 6y agoWould anyone else be surprised if FACEBOOK IS COMMITING SECURITIES FRAUD?
- biffstallion 6y agoWhat!?? A Left-leaning hi-tech company ... LYING ?? Come on now. Don't forget they do all this "fact checking"... apparently NOT on their own company.
- supernovae 6y agoI totally believe most of facebook advertising is fake... but man you're damned if you do and damned if you don't when it comes to consumers. Stop spending money on facebook and you will lose marketshare to those that do - even if much of it is fake. Make a better website with no ads, no trackers, no popups and no distractions and people visit and leave quickly... But.. if you do everything people hate, you seem to get enough conversions to still be viable. I guess tl;dr - most consumers don't care and especially the ones who have money to spend. The ones that do care, don't spend money and certainly don't do so with any altruism to those places that respect their privacy/browser/sessions.
- jandrese 6y agoI've heard a claim that Facebook used to lie extravagantly about the numbers on video pieces, which is why so many outlets "pivoted to video" abruptly a few years ago. Many people think abandoning or cutting back on written content was a mistake and those outlets are in worse shape today.
- suref 6y agoI had an ad on facebook for a website and I saw a lot of attention on the post in form of likes and even comments but almost zero clicks to the actual website. I'm never buying another ad there, that's for sure.
- spunker540 6y agoThe issue here is the “potential reach” calculation when setting up an audience/targeting for a campaign. It has nothing to do with the billing for actual impressions. If you say you want to target “English speakers in the US” the potential reach may say 200M. However your ad spend limits and frequency and bid options and ad creative ultimately determine who sees the ad at what price, and generally prevent you from ever hitting that max reach anyways. Apparently that potential reach calculation was known to be off by some percentage (maybe overestimating potential reach). It has no bearing on what you get charged as an advertiser and I doubt this disrupted any campaigns.
- tylermenezes 6y agoThe issue here is actually that the "potential reach" was inflated by a large number of accounts which Facebook knew were fake, but didn't care to remove. Those accounts were not distributed evenly across all targeting parameters, which means advertisers were setting up their audiences differently than they may have otherwise.
- paulie_a 6y agoThat's called fraud. People should be arrested
- LoveMortuus 6y agoAnyone has experience working at Facebook? I'm asking because I'm having a hard time thinking of a person that would do things that Facebook does...