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Have you considered the possibility that facebook might just not be that good at targeting?

• reilly3000 5y ago
  Yes Facebook is more loose with targeting then it represents to its ad buyers, but also as buyers are notoriously bad at selecting clever targeting. There is a case of misaligned incentives. The more highly-targeted ad, the more likely it leads to a sale, yet for Facebook or really any ad seller they want to maximize the revenue of every impression, and broadly targeted (irrelevant) ads fill that demand quite nicely. Less filters = more potential revenue, even at the expense of their advertiser’s ROI. It’s a balance. It’s also why if you are buying ads you never try the platform-provided tools, which claim to optimize for ROI but generally tend toward yield. Google’s liberal suggestions of broad-match keywords are not to be trusted.
• winternett 5y ago
  Facebook is probably hiring more human psychologists and marketing specialists than developers now. It explains why they aren't really innovating anything particularly new and useful in anything but their profit funnel. Many companies get stuck on pleasing investors more than users once they reach that stage of monopoly after they've gone public, and that's why regulation kills them once opportunistic manipulation is exposed. Unfortunately it takes a really bad/unfortunate consequence of their manipulation to occur before regulation properly steps in.