4 ms·

Here is my company's Facebook Ads horror story: 18 months ago my company decided to run an ad campaign on various platforms: FB, Twitter, Google search and dir

by antr 13y ago

Here is my company's Facebook Ads horror story: 18 months ago my company decided to run an ad campaign on various platforms: FB, Twitter, Google search and direct buys of banner ads. On all platforms, the campaign was targeted to most EU countries + Switzerland. For business reasons we were not interested in promoting this outside these countries. On Facebook, out of all options, we decided to promote a post, targeted to EU countries, this post included a custom bitly link to our campaign's website, etc. A few hours after launching the campaign, we checked on the post: likes/engagement, CTR, bitly link, etc. We were shock to see that almost 90% of all likes to the post and clicks where made from Brazil. Facebook had been promoting our post in Brazil and not (marginally) in the countries we specified – I clicked on a long list of Facebook profiles who had liked our promoted post and these were primarily from the Sao Paulo region. I double checked bitly's stats with the our analytics to check who landed on our site via the campaign link. Again, c. 90% from Brazil. The first thing after that finding was to check that the campaign was correctly setup, and it was. We immediately stopped the campaign and reached out to FB via a form (they have no email nor telephone) telling them about the issue, we included screenshots and other relevant information. We never heard from Facebook. We spent around €2,000 on a useless campaign targeted to an audience which wasn't our target market. We have never used FB again.

oscardelben 13y ago
> We immediately stopped the campaign and reached out to FB via a form (they have no email nor telephone) telling them about the issue, we included screenshots and other relevant information. We never heard from Facebook. How is that even legal?
- Silhouette 13y ago
  How is that even legal? Whether it's legal doesn't matter very much in practice if you lack the means to enforce your theoretical legal rights. For small sums, it's not worth the time to go to court for most people. In the US legal system, it's probably not worth it even for quite large sums, if you're likely to get stuck with paying significant legal bills even if you win. For serious money, it probably becomes worthwhile to take action in apparently black and white cases like this, but I suspect many advertisers using Facebook ads (and Google etc.) are small outfits that never really spend serious money. They can effectively be mistreated with impunity regardless of anything the law says, unless they have recourse to something like charging back the payment for the campaign and relying on repossession of the funds being 9/10 of the law.
  - a3n 13y ago
    If the loss is small enough, small claims court can be worth it for the plaintiff. IANAL. https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=honda+%22class+action%22+%22small+claims%22+battery https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=honda+%22class+action%22+%22s...
    - Silhouette 13y ago
      That assumes Facebook exists in your jurisdiction so there is a legal entity you can actually take to court, though. A significant difficulty with small claims processes, at least where I am, is that because you typically don't involve lawyers on either side so you can keep the costs down, you can also have difficulty even figuring out who you actually have an actionable complaint against if you're the little guy and you're up against a business with a non-trivial structure.
- antr 13y ago
  "move fast and break things" seems to apply to customer service too. is it legal? surely not, but given that our overall ad spend was much larger we didn't have the time/couldn't be bothered to chase FB. As some colleagues see this: "the bright side is that in the long run we have saved money, as we are no longer going to advertise with FB" We thought of creating a post about this experience on our company's blog, but given that we are not a "tech focused" company, and this post wouldn't fit with our clients/blog readers interest, we decided not write about it.
  - trendoid 13y ago
    Anything that shows a big corp doing bad to small corp will attract interest. Go ahead and write a blog with evidence and all. I am sure it will raise eyebrows on atleast HN.
  - grey-area 13y ago
    We thought of creating a post about this experience on our company's blog It's worth doing it for you and for others who are buying advertising. If it doesn't become popular, no big deal. If it attracts attention, it might be more profitable than the €2000 spent on FB for very little time spent, maybe you'll even get a refund. I'd personally like to be able to persuade clients not to spend so much on FB advertising - superficially they look like they are returning likes and hits, but if you look into it, they're pretty useless - our referrals have actually gone down while advertising. This sort of blog post would be enormously helpful in persuading them.
- downandout 13y ago
  Bad customer service is usually not illegal. However, credit card companies are legally bound to issue a chargeback and refund the money if you inform them that you did not get what you paid for and the company refused to work out a mutually acceptable compromise. In this case, he should have disputed the €2,000 charge.
  - Chronic26 13y ago
    You should try Bing.
  - sheetjs 13y ago
    On the other hand, I'm sure that FB has something in the terms or customer agreement saying that the locations are recommendations and that the ads may be shown anywhere, even if you only request a certain region.
raverbashing 13y ago
Of course, the post could have risen naturally to be more visible to a given audience through reshares. If the post was a link to a news piece or something that could interest the audience that could have happened naturally. Would it be possible to show the original post? (or the link to it if any?)
- jonknee 13y ago
  > Of course, the post could have risen naturally to be more visible to a given audience through reshares. If the post was a link to a news piece or something that could interest the audience that could have happened naturally. Would it be possible to show the original post? (or the link to it if any?) Considering FB even charges you to get your post to your own fans, it seems odd that when you're paying for it they would choose exactly the people you said not to show it to. They very tightly control who sees what, it was not an accident that Brazil was shown the content.
  - jakub_g 13y ago
    Likely the reason was what is described in this video (topped HN some two weeks ago): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag TL;DW: there are tons of India/Bangladesh/Brazil-based spammers (those "buy 1000 likes on FB for $1" etc) who allegedly in order to prevent being caught by fraud detection algorithms, are liking whole array of random pages. Edit: didn't see this was posted already later on this thread.
    - raverbashing 13y ago
      There's even the likes of these: www.fblikejacker.in (I just found about it)
  - Silhouette 13y ago
    You're attributing to malice that which is sufficiently explained by incompetence. Whenever we place Facebook ads at one of my companies, we always have a second person check the details before confirming. On numerous occasions we have confirmed the order, and then immediately seen different details showing up on subsequent pages compared to what both people on our side saw or selected on the order page, sometimes dramatically different. This has happened so often that some of the people involved now advocate taking a screenshot as evidence before confirming anything. We're talking about an embarrassingly bug-ridden system here, particularly so given that it's the point where the authorisation to do things that cost real money takes place. The kinds of anecdotes seen in this discussion really aren't all that surprising if you've had much experience working with Facebook ads, I'm sorry to say.
dutchbrit 13y ago
I experienced the same, but majority of likes came from Mexico... Fake accounts too.
- antr 13y ago
  When we checked the accounts these didn't seem as fake, they appeared genuine to us. My impression is that something was "wrong" on FB geo targeting. But as we never heard from FB, I guess we will never know what happened.
unreal37 13y ago
Facebook does have a sales team, contrary to popular belief. They're easier to contact than Google is.
mathattack 13y ago
€2,000 is a cheap lesson in the grand scheme of things. (The context of the original article is 600K) You did right by experimenting small.

by antr 13y ago

oscardelben 13y ago

> We immediately stopped the campaign and reached out to FB via a form (they have no email nor telephone) telling them about the issue, we included screenshots and other relevant information. We never heard from Facebook. How is that even legal?

Silhouette 13y ago
How is that even legal? Whether it's legal doesn't matter very much in practice if you lack the means to enforce your theoretical legal rights. For small sums, it's not worth the time to go to court for most people. In the US legal system, it's probably not worth it even for quite large sums, if you're likely to get stuck with paying significant legal bills even if you win. For serious money, it probably becomes worthwhile to take action in apparently black and white cases like this, but I suspect many advertisers using Facebook ads (and Google etc.) are small outfits that never really spend serious money. They can effectively be mistreated with impunity regardless of anything the law says, unless they have recourse to something like charging back the payment for the campaign and relying on repossession of the funds being 9/10 of the law.
- a3n 13y ago
  If the loss is small enough, small claims court can be worth it for the plaintiff. IANAL. https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=honda+%22class+action%22+%22small+claims%22+battery https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=honda+%22class+action%22+%22s...
  - Silhouette 13y ago
    That assumes Facebook exists in your jurisdiction so there is a legal entity you can actually take to court, though. A significant difficulty with small claims processes, at least where I am, is that because you typically don't involve lawyers on either side so you can keep the costs down, you can also have difficulty even figuring out who you actually have an actionable complaint against if you're the little guy and you're up against a business with a non-trivial structure.
antr 13y ago
"move fast and break things" seems to apply to customer service too. is it legal? surely not, but given that our overall ad spend was much larger we didn't have the time/couldn't be bothered to chase FB. As some colleagues see this: "the bright side is that in the long run we have saved money, as we are no longer going to advertise with FB" We thought of creating a post about this experience on our company's blog, but given that we are not a "tech focused" company, and this post wouldn't fit with our clients/blog readers interest, we decided not write about it.
- trendoid 13y ago
  Anything that shows a big corp doing bad to small corp will attract interest. Go ahead and write a blog with evidence and all. I am sure it will raise eyebrows on atleast HN.
- grey-area 13y ago
  We thought of creating a post about this experience on our company's blog It's worth doing it for you and for others who are buying advertising. If it doesn't become popular, no big deal. If it attracts attention, it might be more profitable than the €2000 spent on FB for very little time spent, maybe you'll even get a refund. I'd personally like to be able to persuade clients not to spend so much on FB advertising - superficially they look like they are returning likes and hits, but if you look into it, they're pretty useless - our referrals have actually gone down while advertising. This sort of blog post would be enormously helpful in persuading them.
downandout 13y ago
Bad customer service is usually not illegal. However, credit card companies are legally bound to issue a chargeback and refund the money if you inform them that you did not get what you paid for and the company refused to work out a mutually acceptable compromise. In this case, he should have disputed the €2,000 charge.
- Chronic26 13y ago
  You should try Bing.
- sheetjs 13y ago
  On the other hand, I'm sure that FB has something in the terms or customer agreement saying that the locations are recommendations and that the ads may be shown anywhere, even if you only request a certain region.

raverbashing 13y ago

Of course, the post could have risen naturally to be more visible to a given audience through reshares. If the post was a link to a news piece or something that could interest the audience that could have happened naturally. Would it be possible to show the original post? (or the link to it if any?)

jonknee 13y ago
> Of course, the post could have risen naturally to be more visible to a given audience through reshares. If the post was a link to a news piece or something that could interest the audience that could have happened naturally. Would it be possible to show the original post? (or the link to it if any?) Considering FB even charges you to get your post to your own fans, it seems odd that when you're paying for it they would choose exactly the people you said not to show it to. They very tightly control who sees what, it was not an accident that Brazil was shown the content.
- jakub_g 13y ago
  Likely the reason was what is described in this video (topped HN some two weeks ago): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag TL;DW: there are tons of India/Bangladesh/Brazil-based spammers (those "buy 1000 likes on FB for $1" etc) who allegedly in order to prevent being caught by fraud detection algorithms, are liking whole array of random pages. Edit: didn't see this was posted already later on this thread.
  - raverbashing 13y ago
    There's even the likes of these: www.fblikejacker.in (I just found about it)
- Silhouette 13y ago
  You're attributing to malice that which is sufficiently explained by incompetence. Whenever we place Facebook ads at one of my companies, we always have a second person check the details before confirming. On numerous occasions we have confirmed the order, and then immediately seen different details showing up on subsequent pages compared to what both people on our side saw or selected on the order page, sometimes dramatically different. This has happened so often that some of the people involved now advocate taking a screenshot as evidence before confirming anything. We're talking about an embarrassingly bug-ridden system here, particularly so given that it's the point where the authorisation to do things that cost real money takes place. The kinds of anecdotes seen in this discussion really aren't all that surprising if you've had much experience working with Facebook ads, I'm sorry to say.

dutchbrit 13y ago

I experienced the same, but majority of likes came from Mexico... Fake accounts too.

antr 13y ago
When we checked the accounts these didn't seem as fake, they appeared genuine to us. My impression is that something was "wrong" on FB geo targeting. But as we never heard from FB, I guess we will never know what happened.

unreal37 13y ago

Facebook does have a sales team, contrary to popular belief. They're easier to contact than Google is.

mathattack 13y ago

€2,000 is a cheap lesson in the grand scheme of things. (The context of the original article is 600K) You did right by experimenting small.