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618 points elorant | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.21s | source
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zupreme ◴[] No.26194436[source]
It took time, and many thousands of dollars, before I realized that the vast majority of “likes” my pages received as a result of paid campaigns on FB were from accounts which were clearly not real people.

A simple look enough of their profiles revealed that, like would he expected from any fly by night CPA network, FB was using bots, or at least straw man accounts run by low-cost staff, to like and view content which FB was paid to advertise.

Worse, I found that the clickthrough metrics reported by them to off-FB destinations I advertised NEVER was anywhere close to what was reported on the destination, including when tracked by Google Analytics.

In short: like-fraud, click-fraud, and more.

I cannot be the only person to notice these things. I assume it persists because most people, self included, simply complain and move on once we notice the “game” but don’t sue.

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1. marketingtech ◴[] No.26196701[source]
Page Like ads are the least ROI effective ads on Facebook. You tell their machine learning algorithm to optimize for people who will click "Like" on every page they see. That'll increase your vanity metric and meet your stated objective, but it doesn't drive business results for you because you're getting the wrong type of customer.

If you tell Facebook's machine learning algorithm to optimize towards purchases on your website or visits to your stores or to users onboarding to your app, then you'll really see the power of their beast. Those are the ads that people are spending billions of dollars on, because the outcomes drive real business value and have too much friction to be faked at scale.