Facebook reported fake numbers to advertisers

Facebook is one of the only means to do reasonably targeted advertising with a broad reach.

Google is keyword only, and that's limited. Banner network display ads are useless.

The privacy debate is woefully lopsided by people who have never spent a dime marketing. I suggest all the startupy people on HN spend some time trying to get the word out and then they'll realize what the 'hard part' of the business is because it's not code.

Efficient advertising, which is to say getting in front of people who have a legit curiosity for your product with ads that are not distracting, is possible and ideal for everyone, but can only be done with at least some data.

The economy would grow literally by 1% more if we could get people connected with the things they need, when they need them and we'd all be better off.

This is an advertisement for advertising...

Suprised at the downvotes on your comment, but you're right, Facebook provides an advertising targeting engine that doesn't have a parallel. Whether that's good or bad for is separate from whether it's a useful business tool.

@jariel can you share any resource for people looking to understand and dip their feet running their own FB ads?

I would but there's actually quite an enormos amount of information out there already.

Also, the pitfalls of FB ads are generally well known as well, we all know their numbers are a little ragged and we all know that 'likes' don't have much value in most scenarios.

Frankly, I would encourage anyone to stick $20 into FB ad platform and just run a few ads to drive some traffic to their own pages. It's a powerful and revelatory experience, advertising is a 'dark art' to too many people but it shouldn't be.

The moment you are in a position of having to market and sell a product, especially coming from another discipline, your world turns upside down and you see everything differently.

I've tinkered with it, and had poor experiences hiring people to run FB ads, so any specific resources you can recommend would be appreciated. Kind of like how I would recommend Michael Hartl's Rails tutorial for someone looking to explore Rails in a productive way.

There is certainly a lot of information out there but much is generic, others are paid, and many are scams.

This entire thesis hinges on targeted advertising being effective. There is a growing group of people who are increasingly doubtful of this [0].

I personally have worked as a data scientist trying to assess the value generated by various advertising campaigns, and I personally found that the field is rife with egregious statistical misuse, usually because it was necessary to prove significant ROI on advertising.

[0] https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-h...

Which targeted is ineffective.

Keywords can be useless while the whole field can be useful. Which is to say noting that I'm searching for C++ and so advertising your compiler or programing class is useless - I'm already a programmer (I just forgot the exact spelling or order of arguments to the thing I need) and my company has chosen my compiler. However if you know I my hobby you can target me with your new drill bit and be better yet.

Though the largest advertisers don't care. Coke doesn't care that I don't like soda, they still want to target me just in case I'm called to bring drinks to some event. Ford can safely assume all Americans own a car and be close enough to right. Likewise everyone uses toilet paper (bidet users can be ignored) and soap (if you don't use soap you should be the highest target, though the ads perhaps should be different from those who use soap)

When it was time for us to start PPC ads for my B2B SaaS product, I took a whack at doing my own FB and AdWords campaigns. I found FB to be much more intuitive than Goog. I uploaded some collateral I threw together and targeted it towards people who were in specific Groups, people who liked specific things and excluded people who already liked our page. I clicked submit and after a day we started seeing an uptick in leads. Real, actionable leads. Meeting people at industry trade shows told me that they saw our FB ad. It worked (and still works) well for us in that small niche of the world with a well defined target demographic. I never felt compelled to hire anyone to manage it. I don’t have any books to recommend for you, but why not do some trial and error with small budgets to see what works for you?

Coke doesn't advertise to get you to buy the product. In many situations you don't actually have a choice (restaurant, theatre, etc). They advertise to make you feel a certain way about the brand. Car companies do something similar. They aren't advertising to get you to buy the car but associate a certain prestige with the vehicle which in turn makes their actual target buy their car. I'm not sure why everyone thinks ads are strictly about buying things. There's political ads, religious ads, pubic service announcements, etc. Ads are versatile.

"This entire thesis hinges on targeted advertising being effective. "

Targeted ads are unequivocally more effective than non targeted ads, on the aggregate - there is no dispute other than at the margins.

Do you think that advertising makeup to the general population has the same effectiveness than advertising it to women? Or women who have shown an interest in makeup?

Ads are complicated and nuanced, but everyone in the industry already knows this.

There will always be science at the margins as we discover the means by which people truly engage, but otherwise, there is no arguing with core demographic targeting. It would be like completely non-technical people saying "Javascript is completely ineffective because of null ambiguity" whereas it's universally used, and the limitations of JS are recognized to all but the most junior developers.

Thanks for making my point better than I did.

> The privacy debate is woefully lopsided by people who have never spent a dime marketing.

Why should marketers influence how much privacy I have? Their incentive is for me to have as little privacy as possible.

This is like saying anti-war campaigns are woefully lopsided by people who have never sold munitions.

The general consensus is that personalized advertising, specifically, is no better than contextual advertising that came before it. Everyone was fine and happy with contextual advertising.

The 'C++' keyword however, already narrows the target down to the 0.2% of the population, i.e. C++ devs. making it 500x more effective than a non-targeted ad.

If only 10% of those typing C++ would ever be interested in a course, then those are not bad numbers.

More nuanced: at the 'non-targeted' threshold the ad would not make sense at all, total inefficiency. At the targeted threshold of being able to target at least C++ devs, the ad probably starts to work.

That is the difference between a viable business and not

That means engagement, value creation, sales, C++ developers trained and ready for the market. This is extremely good for society. We definitely want aspiring C++ devs hooked up with quality courses.

This anecdote very tangibly demonstrates the effectiveness of targeting for individual companies ... but it also points to the market efficiency that comes along with good advertising.

If you have a startup, and you can't reach any of your audience, you're dead. This notion of 'word of mouth' is ridiculous as a business plan, it's exceedingly rare, and usually it's not that anyhow in reality - it's usually a form of effective social marketing by the early movers. Clubhouse for example is being helped by the 'celebrity' of the VCs behind it - they don't have mass market following, but a very avid following in a certain niche that will come onto the platform. I'm noticing a lot of Marc Andreseen on Clubhouse, too much for a busy VC, but not too much for someone who's hyping his own investment and bringing in a lot of viewers, helping out a lot of panels.

The essential nature of basic targeting is not controversial, it's quite obvious at least at the most crude level.

> There is a growing group of people who are increasingly doubtful of this

Most targeted advertising, sure.

Targeted ads based on interests? Diet? General age range? Of course those will be more effective.

Showing me targeted ads for fitness products has been very effective, I have a yoga and a workout app I use that are both 100% due to targeted ads. I also have tried out various food products (keto cereal!) due to targeted ads.

Interest based ads work, if done well. Now that said, ads for stuff I already bought, eh, less so. Even worse if I buy something from an ad, get it home, unbox it, then google for help. Now I get ads trying to sell me the same product again. Though I'm not sure how horribly invasive ads would have to be to avoid that scenario.

I've generally found FB ads to be, honestly, useful at times.

What I really don't trust are kickstarter campaigns running YT ads. Shouts 'scam!' to me almost instantly.

Also that YT ad that was playing a few months ago for the $20 adjustable dumbbell set that went to a super shady site. (Normally adjustable dumbbells go for $500+...) It appeared to be a fake storefront, but YT kept happily running the ad day after day.

It was well targeted though. :)

A measly 1% for the loss of our online privacy?

The economy is growing 2-3% these days, so another point on that is about a 30% increase in growth and would be a spectacular for humanity.

Your privacy is not compromised by Facebook. Nobody is harmed. There are zero cases of people being hurt or their lives being denigrated due to targeted advertising.

FB is not perfect, I think there are better ways, I don't like them, but it's hyperbolic to suggest there is material systematic harm. Nobody is really losing that much.

> Your privacy is not compromised by Facebook

Do you and I live in different universes? The one I live in blamed FB for allowing 3rd partner apps to download loads of personal information, and then use it to send targeted adds to influence an election. Also, adds spreading misinformation about Covid 19. At the early part of FB, kids could upload pictures with their EXIF data that included GPS coordinates- which were then used for kidnapping or serial molestation.

With location tracking for adds, no one even needs a legitimate reason to buy location data. Thus can be used for thugs to track down and kill people they don't like.

No specific resources, but I’ll give you a tip that has turned around a lot of campaigns and helped a number of clients figure it a profitable FB advertising strategy.

Offer something free, like an ebook, webinar, etc. and gather email addresses to access it.

This gives you a chance to follow up and grow your email lists. So even if they don’t buy, you at least get a lead. When you just buy a click, you always gotta hit a Homer. Figure out it a way to make base hits count.

Yes, this is true, but I suggest it's because despite the privacy invasion, we don't know that much about individuals. We don't need to though.

Literally just basic demographics, plus a few interest points ... that's all I think we need to do well of those could be reliable.

Wow, the "general consensus". That's why FBs advertising revenue is so low compared to Reddit! If only personalized advertising were effective, FB could be worth something.

This is incredibly not true. For one, the best data point FB has on predicting personal likelihood to click an ad is which ads that person has clicked in the past.

I don't know what you are objecting to i.e. Social Media surprisingly not knowing a lot about us - or - the need only for relatively small amount of solid demo data.

On the first point - they just don't know that much about us. That's what the whole post is about (!) They were lying advertisers ad to the probabilistic estimates of who we are.

Go here: https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated?hl=en

Google will show what they know about you if you have that on. It's not very accurate at all. It's very fuzzy. For me they have wrong age, a lot of wrong interests.

So they surprisingly don't know a lot, just because someone clicks on an add ... that is not a lot of information - there's so many reasons we click on ads. Google thinks I'm into cars and I don't even drive, I hate cars!

As for basic targeting - it's mostly what advertisers need. So age, education, income, zip code (or zip code classification), rough location would be great. Plus just a few, solid interests (real ones, not estimated) - and that would be a big step forward for ads.

So yes - our privacy is fairly aggressively invaded at the same time they can only glean so much from it. Seems like a Paradox.

That's why Google average revenue per user is so much higher than Facebook.

> the best data point FB

Do you have any evidence to back this up? I can't find any published literature where Facebook has hinted this, including this paper [0] saying:

> As expected the most important thing is to have the right features: those capturing historical information about the user or ad dominate other types of features.

0. https://research.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/practical...

You are crossing streams.

Nobody is harmed by virtue of invasion of their privacy.

Ads, which relate to misinformation about COVID and elections are completely separate issue, and basically have nothing to do with the detailed nature of targeting.

'Harmful Ads' can be on any platform in the world - Google, Television, Magazines, Billboards.

There is no harm to you due to the fact that FB has a 90% chance of knowing your gender, age, and a couple of your interests. None.

Google display network (contextual ads) is tiny. Google search is direct intent, very different.

It's still 15-16% of Google ad revenues, or about 40% of Facebook.

Google search also uses personalised advertising. If you search for restaurants you will get ads for restaurants nearby, if you search for clothes it will match the ad results to your gender if google knows it, you can also do the same remarketing techniques with other ads (eg if someone has visited your website and they search for a related topic you can make sure your ad is displayed).

You're following trends. Of course targeted advertising works on people that chase the Jones's.