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This doesn't seem _that_ strange. In online advertising, there are the concepts of pacing (to ensure the ad campaign delivers somewhat evenly over the lifespan

by Macha 5y ago

This doesn't seem _that_ strange. In online advertising, there are the concepts of pacing (to ensure the ad campaign delivers somewhat evenly over the lifespan - not because there's any evidence that it improves performance, but because the advertiser would feel miffed if you spent all the budget in the first day of their month long campaign), and frequency capping (attempting not to show the same ad to the same person too many times - clearer benefits to performance here). Both of these will limit the rate at which an ad spends money. If it doesn't get shown for a long period of time, both of these factors get reduced, and the ad can get selected more aggressively, particularly if you are a higher bidder than the ads that would have got chosen in your absence.

deleted 5y ago
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ineedasername 5y ago
pacing... not because there's any evidence that it improves In the limited experience I have in this arena, it does improve performance. Hitting someone a second time about t+2weeks had the biggest bump, and then the next biggest another month later at t+6weeks. I don't know if it's universally true, and the optimization may vary depending on the context and content, but pacing can definitely make a difference for some.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  I don’t think they were talking about the same person seeing the ad, but if you show 1000 people the ad a day for 10 days or show 10,000 people the ad in one day.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    That would be different, but I think still have a negative impact. You can't show 10,000 people the same number of ads in the same period of time as usual while also delivering ads faster. So it means you're showing people more ads than usual. But attention is a limited resource. If you throw more ads at me, I'm not necessarily going to respond to more of them. The more ads there are, the more it becomes background noise.
    - Gigachad 5y ago
      Facebook can show 1 ad campaign per day to the user base instead of 30 ads getting 1/30th of the target market each day over a month. To the individual user, they can’t tell anything different between these two types of campaigns. It just makes the advertiser feel better that their money is lasting longer.
      - ineedasername 5y ago
        You can't speed that up en masse without showing more adds to the people than you normally would. If facebook is taking the backlog of all the ads from all the advertisers and pushing that out faster to the same group of users over a short period of time, there is no avoiding the fact that users will see more adds per unit of time during this time period.
  - Jenk 5y ago
    Unless there is a guarantee there is 1,000 new people per day then it certainly does apply. I think the usual pattern for pacing is to cover multiple bases from repeat visits to trying to cast a wider net to catch people at the right time(s) both personally and in perhaps wider campaign with other sites/mediums.
- Macha 5y ago
  Many of the platforms have dedicated features for retargeting if that's your goal, rather than using pacing and hoping it happens organically
mountainb 5y ago
Sometimes pacing makes a huge difference, actually, and you can smurf your performance metrics to a better place by cutting out times, day ranges, demographics, and so on.
shadowgovt 5y ago
Yeah, this news belongs in the pile "Things advertisers will probably care about," but it doesn't have a universal moral / ethical category. It's more a side-effect of existing rules being applied to an unusual circumstance (I doubt the rules were written with an eye towards "What if Facebook is down a whole day?" because that isn't supposed to ever happen). Some advertisers won't like the outcome, some will be ambivalent to it.

by Macha 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ineedasername 5y ago

pacing... not because there's any evidence that it improves In the limited experience I have in this arena, it does improve performance. Hitting someone a second time about t+2weeks had the biggest bump, and then the next biggest another month later at t+6weeks. I don't know if it's universally true, and the optimization may vary depending on the context and content, but pacing can definitely make a difference for some.

Gigachad 5y ago
I don’t think they were talking about the same person seeing the ad, but if you show 1000 people the ad a day for 10 days or show 10,000 people the ad in one day.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  That would be different, but I think still have a negative impact. You can't show 10,000 people the same number of ads in the same period of time as usual while also delivering ads faster. So it means you're showing people more ads than usual. But attention is a limited resource. If you throw more ads at me, I'm not necessarily going to respond to more of them. The more ads there are, the more it becomes background noise.
  - Gigachad 5y ago
    Facebook can show 1 ad campaign per day to the user base instead of 30 ads getting 1/30th of the target market each day over a month. To the individual user, they can’t tell anything different between these two types of campaigns. It just makes the advertiser feel better that their money is lasting longer.
    - ineedasername 5y ago
      You can't speed that up en masse without showing more adds to the people than you normally would. If facebook is taking the backlog of all the ads from all the advertisers and pushing that out faster to the same group of users over a short period of time, there is no avoiding the fact that users will see more adds per unit of time during this time period.
- Jenk 5y ago
  Unless there is a guarantee there is 1,000 new people per day then it certainly does apply. I think the usual pattern for pacing is to cover multiple bases from repeat visits to trying to cast a wider net to catch people at the right time(s) both personally and in perhaps wider campaign with other sites/mediums.
Macha 5y ago
Many of the platforms have dedicated features for retargeting if that's your goal, rather than using pacing and hoping it happens organically

mountainb 5y ago

Sometimes pacing makes a huge difference, actually, and you can smurf your performance metrics to a better place by cutting out times, day ranges, demographics, and so on.

shadowgovt 5y ago

Yeah, this news belongs in the pile "Things advertisers will probably care about," but it doesn't have a universal moral / ethical category. It's more a side-effect of existing rules being applied to an unusual circumstance (I doubt the rules were written with an eye towards "What if Facebook is down a whole day?" because that isn't supposed to ever happen). Some advertisers won't like the outcome, some will be ambivalent to it.