I’m assuming Facebook is not so incompetent they can’t show an ad to its intended audience. I think the main issue is to do any sort of ML or user based targeting, you need to have a minimum amount of data to make good judgements in an auction. But then you realize you have multiple ads that are competing against each other and another ad might convert better or most important of all: pay more. Thus even if you have…
I think that if you consider it deeply, you might realise that revenue would be a poor metric with which to optimise an internet advertising system.
"Crap" is a relative term; 41% (many years ago) was still a lot better than putting out an ad in the New York Times. FB ads aren't perfect, but IME they're a lot better than anything else — the only purchases I've made off ads in the last few years have been from targeted IG/FB ads, and quite a few friends have mentioned the same. Sort of ironic how the Intercept is apparently capable of believing both that: * FB is…
> the only purchases I've made off ads in the last few years have been from targeted IG/FB ads Likely most of the ads in the last few years have been targeted ones.
What I mean is: I haven't bought anything off of non-FB/IG ads, despite seeing many of them e.g. in the New York Times app (among others). It is indeed true that these are generally also "targeted," they're just not targeted well.
I can support what you're saying with the same experience. I did some SEO for a local landscape company. They were already doing well, but asked me about doing ads on FB. I told them I thought it was a scam, but they persisted so I ran a few campaigns for irrigation in the Spring and then fall cleanup starting in August. Same thing happened. They got a ton of impressions and clicks (no surprise) and a about a dozen l…
How were the bids setup? When you underbid you'll get matched with people nobody wants. Also if real users aren't interested in whatever interaction you're soliciting you're bound to only get bots. I've done some FB advertising for news type content (much easier to target properly) and was getting incredible value for the money. Usually it's pretty obvious real fast if you're getting real action or not and you can ad…
I'm not the person you are responding to, but I am the parent comment. Anyways, my issue was that often the users that were "liking" my ads weren't even in the geographic region I selected. So if I say "spend $20 a day" and target people in X area, why are they showing my ad to people in Y area? I know they have options for lived in vs travelled through etc but these were clearly people that lived in Y area.
As someone who has purchased Facebook ads, it's /so very evident/ that this is happening, that it's not particularly hard to compile evidence. Here's a specific example: we ran around $1k in ads last year, targeting senior-level engineers at technology companies, but the ads were getting liked by mostly people who worked minimum-wage jobs. Twitter and LinkedIn targeting were fine with pretty much the same parameters.…
I run $1,000's if not $10,000's a day in FB ads. I can confirm we've all known this for quite a long time. Our general rule is if the product doesn't have broad appeal, you don't run it on FB. My running theory on all ad networks is pretty simple. There are a very small subset of users, 25%-30%, of people who are regular purchasers and these companies know that based on conversion data. They generally just throw your…
Do you mean regular purchasers or regular clickers? There's definitely a subset of users who'll click much more frequently than the average user.