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Facebook reported fake numbers to advertisers

(news.yahoo.com)
618 points elorant | 9 comments | 19 Feb 21 14:34 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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sputr ◴[19 Feb 21 15:18 UTC] No.26194057[source]▶
I 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.

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1. JMTQp8lwXL ◴[19 Feb 21 16:02 UTC] No.26194504[source]▶
After spending $~25 on ads and getting absolutely no conversion, I can assure you Facebook did a terrible job at making me feel like I got any value.
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2. wiether ◴[19 Feb 21 16:18 UTC] No.26194662[source]▶
You forgot a "k" after 25 I guess ?
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3. faeyanpiraat ◴[19 Feb 21 16:33 UTC] No.26194832[source]▶
No way!

25k gets you more than 50k clicks, which would require less than a 0.002% conversion rate to produce no results.

4. faeyanpiraat ◴[19 Feb 21 16:35 UTC] No.26194854[source]▶
$25 is a very small amount, you need to experiment more, driving traffic is only one part of the puzzle, you haven't got enough data to confirm which part of your campaign is the bottleneck to conversions.
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5. sputr ◴[19 Feb 21 17:52 UTC] No.26195770[source]▶
You know the concept of "conversion".

So, so, so many people don't. Idea of ROI is foreign to them. Facebook is going this whole "be your own advertiser" thing and ... well, it's working.

They see the pretty graphs and big number ("You reached 50k people!") and they thing it's fantastic. The idea that the conversion from 50k impressions could be 0% ... does not compute, because they imagine 50k people spending cognitive energy on their ad ... not 50k people scrolling past the ad never even noticing it.

6. ◴[19 Feb 21 19:05 UTC] No.26196676[source]▶
7. com2kid ◴[19 Feb 21 23:37 UTC] No.26199535[source]▶
I spent a few hundred dollars, in $25 increments. I ran different ad copy, different visuals, different times of day.

The difference in effectiveness between different visuals and ad copy ranged from "no one clicked this" to "10% conversion after hitting my landing page."

For the right audience, with the right campaign, FB ads do work.

But you have to play around, and what does work might not be intuitive.

Also I found out that the ad copy that worked on FB didn't work on Reddit, and vis versa.

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8. mtnGoat ◴[20 Feb 21 02:08 UTC] No.26200798[source]▶
$25 is not enough to prove anything. Statistical significance is important.
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9. faeyanpiraat ◴[23 Feb 21 20:33 UTC] No.26242512{3}[source]▶
Wouldn't finding a well converting copy and targeting combo throw all the statistical significance issues out the window?

I mean you can start experiments with statistically significant results branching from that, but when you are tight on budget, and just want to start out, it might be better to just randomly find something which can get the ball rolling?