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Reader beware. Don't take unsubstantiated claims (such as this article) as fact. As someone who spends five figures daily on FB, I saw no such drop in performa

Reader beware. Don't take unsubstantiated claims (such as this article) as fact. As someone who spends five figures daily on FB, I saw no such drop in performance -- nor have other advertisers I've been in touch with. Performance on FB (especially at low volumes) is highly volatile on a day-over-day basis. So, at any time, there will always be a subset of advertisers who think "CPA's are skyrocketing". And, it's easy to draw the conclusion that the pattern is platform-wide. The "accelerated delivery" that Facebook quoted in its response only applied to the remainder of the day that the outage took place -- not future days as the article suggests.

EastOfTruth 5y ago
Are you getting a discount for this comment?
colpabar 5y ago
please stop giving them so much money :)
mrRandomGuy 5y ago
You spend 5 figures daily on Facebook and didn't notice any drop in performance when the site was gone for half the day? Do you actually need to spend that much..?
- fairity 5y ago
  > You didn't notice any drop in performance when the site was gone for half the day? Delivery for the day dropped, but performance as measured through CPA (or ROAS) remained stable. > Do you actually need to spend that much..? Ultimately, we're trying to maximize profit. So, we advertise until the cost per incremental conversion is greater than a customer's ltv.
  - Reubachi 5y ago
    I'm a layman in availability and how your service relies upon it, But how can your engagement from clients be "the same", despite half the availability? Does this imply that all else perfect andavailable,every day, you could have a volatile swing of up to 50 percent engagement? If so, that seems really really silly to drop 10k+ on daily, if on half of all days you don't NEED the platform for half the day...what am I missing?
    - jefftk 5y ago
      > how can your engagement from clients be "the same", despite half the availability? Essentially, it's 'engagement per dollar', not 'total engagement'
    - redis_mlc 5y ago
      FYI: You're being autistic and pedantic. Seek an experienced mentor.
  - ffhhj 5y ago
    > performance as measured through CPA (or ROAS) remained stable CPA should be affected, seems like FB is giving an artificial measurement. Reminds me of the Big Short.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- killingtime74 5y ago
  “Half of my advertising is wasted – but no one can tell me which half!”
cosmie 5y ago
This. Facebook makes available a lot of configurable parameters around bidding and budgeting[1]. If you've set a campaign-level budget, Facebook's system paces delivery to spread that budget from the start date to the end date. It automatically adjusts pacing to fluctuations in delivery, this 6 hour outage is just a drastic version of that, where there was zero delivery across the board vs. more localized fluctuations in consumer behavior that usually impact pacing for individual advertisers. So it has to accelerate delivery for the remainder of the campaign to compensate, and since it's doing that for all ads with this type of budgeting configuration it's resulting in an auction grab for available impressions and temporarily bumping up CPMs as a result. Which isn't necessarily a positive for advertisers, but sounds like their system doing what it normally does, and just having some unanticipated second order impacts when faced with an extreme event (compensating for global lack of delivery for 25% of an entire day). If your budgeting/bidding/optimization configuration doesn't require a specific spend within a specific timeframe, you're not going to see this sort of acceleration. But you will see higher CPMs due to the increased auction activity from others having their pacing accelerated. And they weren't collecting FB pixel data for 6 hours either, so conversion activity will also be underreported and show higher CPAs. But CPA-based optimization configurations are still in place and doing what they normally do, and frequency caps if you use them are still limiting how many times your ad will show to the same person. So even those seeing accelerated delivery and not wanting to could adjust their ads' settings to avoid it. > The "accelerated delivery" that Facebook quoted in its response only applied to the remainder of the day that the outage took place -- not future days as the article suggests. It does actually impact future days, just to a far lesser extent than day-of. Pacing jacked up the day of to attempt to compensate for expected pacing that day, but for those that didn't achieve it they'll continued seeing accelerated delivery beyond that to hit the spend target by end of campaign. Plus second order effects as their optimization see-saws around until things settle back down. [1] https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1619591734742116 https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1619591734742116
malshe 5y ago
I hope you realize that your claim is as unsubstantiated as the one in the article.
- EastOfTruth 5y ago
  he is a Facebook sock puppet that sends FB $50K a day... at least he discloses it
- shukantpal 5y ago
  Do elaborate.
  - jonwest 5y ago
    I think they’re just saying that just like you shouldn’t take one person’s opinion/experience (in the article) as gospel, you shouldn’t take another single person’s opinion/experience (in the comment) as gospel.
lithos 5y ago
Facebook is not a benefit of the doubt kind of company, so much so that random blogs on the internet will seem more reliable.

EastOfTruth 5y ago

Are you getting a discount for this comment?

colpabar 5y ago

please stop giving them so much money :)

mrRandomGuy 5y ago

You spend 5 figures daily on Facebook and didn't notice any drop in performance when the site was gone for half the day? Do you actually need to spend that much..?

fairity 5y ago
> You didn't notice any drop in performance when the site was gone for half the day? Delivery for the day dropped, but performance as measured through CPA (or ROAS) remained stable. > Do you actually need to spend that much..? Ultimately, we're trying to maximize profit. So, we advertise until the cost per incremental conversion is greater than a customer's ltv.
- Reubachi 5y ago
  I'm a layman in availability and how your service relies upon it, But how can your engagement from clients be "the same", despite half the availability? Does this imply that all else perfect andavailable,every day, you could have a volatile swing of up to 50 percent engagement? If so, that seems really really silly to drop 10k+ on daily, if on half of all days you don't NEED the platform for half the day...what am I missing?
  - jefftk 5y ago
    > how can your engagement from clients be "the same", despite half the availability? Essentially, it's 'engagement per dollar', not 'total engagement'
  - redis_mlc 5y ago
    FYI: You're being autistic and pedantic. Seek an experienced mentor.
- ffhhj 5y ago
  > performance as measured through CPA (or ROAS) remained stable CPA should be affected, seems like FB is giving an artificial measurement. Reminds me of the Big Short.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
killingtime74 5y ago
“Half of my advertising is wasted – but no one can tell me which half!”

cosmie 5y ago

This. Facebook makes available a lot of configurable parameters around bidding and budgeting[1]. If you've set a campaign-level budget, Facebook's system paces delivery to spread that budget from the start date to the end date. It automatically adjusts pacing to fluctuations in delivery, this 6 hour outage is just a drastic version of that, where there was zero delivery across the board vs. more localized fluctuations in consumer behavior that usually impact pacing for individual advertisers. So it has to accelerate delivery for the remainder of the campaign to compensate, and since it's doing that for all ads with this type of budgeting configuration it's resulting in an auction grab for available impressions and temporarily bumping up CPMs as a result. Which isn't necessarily a positive for advertisers, but sounds like their system doing what it normally does, and just having some unanticipated second order impacts when faced with an extreme event (compensating for global lack of delivery for 25% of an entire day). If your budgeting/bidding/optimization configuration doesn't require a specific spend within a specific timeframe, you're not going to see this sort of acceleration. But you will see higher CPMs due to the increased auction activity from others having their pacing accelerated. And they weren't collecting FB pixel data for 6 hours either, so conversion activity will also be underreported and show higher CPAs. But CPA-based optimization configurations are still in place and doing what they normally do, and frequency caps if you use them are still limiting how many times your ad will show to the same person. So even those seeing accelerated delivery and not wanting to could adjust their ads' settings to avoid it. > The "accelerated delivery" that Facebook quoted in its response only applied to the remainder of the day that the outage took place -- not future days as the article suggests. It does actually impact future days, just to a far lesser extent than day-of. Pacing jacked up the day of to attempt to compensate for expected pacing that day, but for those that didn't achieve it they'll continued seeing accelerated delivery beyond that to hit the spend target by end of campaign. Plus second order effects as their optimization see-saws around until things settle back down. [1] https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1619591734742116 https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1619591734742116

malshe 5y ago

I hope you realize that your claim is as unsubstantiated as the one in the article.

EastOfTruth 5y ago
he is a Facebook sock puppet that sends FB $50K a day... at least he discloses it
shukantpal 5y ago
Do elaborate.
- jonwest 5y ago
  I think they’re just saying that just like you shouldn’t take one person’s opinion/experience (in the article) as gospel, you shouldn’t take another single person’s opinion/experience (in the comment) as gospel.

lithos 5y ago

Facebook is not a benefit of the doubt kind of company, so much so that random blogs on the internet will seem more reliable.