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Facebook Fraud [video]

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Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent $46k on Facebook ads last year, with very healthy ROI. First, I want to say THANK YOU for the many improvements to the ad system that have recently taken place. Second, I want to say that you have a LOT of work left to do. Facebook marketing is hard. Too hard. I have many suggestions, but here's one of them: Allow the same targeting options when posting directly to the page, as when posting an ad. For example…

I would challenge the correctness of this post.

[deleted]

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#232
post #215
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not think you addressed the actual point of the video: the clicks on his cat page came from click farms. They were not real people.

It's not like that would be the first "non-denial denial" Facebook has ever issued...

Sounds more to me as if, despite skirting the issue, this guy works there, is constantly trying to make Facebook a better ad serving platform, and him and his team are doing the best they can to achieve that, one fix or improvement at a time.

It's obviously not a company wide statement on the issue. It's one engineer saying "Hey, I work there. This is what I'm doing and this is what we're doing. And this is what happened when X did Y which is what he wanted."

I can't imagine that solving the entirety of this issue could ever be simple.

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#233

I found a way to dramatically improve facebook. Around the beginning of the year I unfollowed every single friend and page, so my newsfeed is completely empty. Now when I want to know what my friends are up to, I go check out their pages, essentially going from a push feed to a pull. It gets me out of the empty crack addiction-esque cycle of going to the news feed and being disappointed/bored with the lives of my fri…

I have completely hidden my news feed. Since I consider FB only to be valuable as a utility, i.e. a means of communication or a repository of information such as where someone lives, the newsfeed is a complete waste of time and useless. My solution is to use custom CSS to hide the newsfeed, but keep everything else. As a result, I spent 1/10th the time on Facebook, and only use it when I need to get information from…

Thanks, this is great!

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#234
post #226
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wish I could do that. I used to ask a friend to change my password, now I use www.offsocialnetwork.com to do it (I'm doing it this week). But I can't go really long without facebook since all is planned from there, the parties, the social events, the foreign friends visiting my city, foreign friends keeping in touch with me... I guess it's easier not to have facebook when you didn't travel a lot and don't ha…

You are a freaking WUSSY! And you have NO life,let alone social life. Social life is OUTSIDE, face to face, NOT on facebook. Get a fucking life, freaking zombie.

If deleting your Facebook would not have a negative affect on your real life social life, you are not using it the way most people do.

Almost every organised event that I go to starts with a Facebook invite, or someone sharing the event on their feed. It's also a massive time waster, but until another event service gains actual adoption (a service such as this is useless without users, right?), I'll keep using Facebook.

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#235

Nice video. All true. I have performed tests with the same ad budget ($20k) and target audience for Google and FB. FB ROI was negative. Google ROI was 400% (travel space). The only thing that seemingly "works" has been buying likes by advertising. This video should help educate my clients of the utter uselessness of those too. This brings up the interesting question of the general (non)value of a lot of mobile advert…

Since it was my post, let me hijack the hijack and refocus the discussion. FB advertising has major issues and not just fraud. #1 - FB has a feedback loop issue The main reason why (for us) Google works so much better, is that it spans the full sales funnel, from impression to click to registration and finally conversion (room bought). Google optimizes ad serving for themselves AND for me, and I can see the results.…

Well, since you're "here"

Here's the question I'd want to ask: if the Facebook ad clicks are from click-farms but you don't pay for them, how did they get there?

One guess would be that click-farm people like stuff at random to "seem legitimate". Maybe Facebook itself incentivizes fake account to like stuff by not deleting fake accounts that behave "conveniently".

But that's just a guess, I've look for someone to do more research.

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#236
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey everyone -- sorry to hijack the top thread but I’m an ads engineer at Facebook so I feel qualified to respond. I posted this over on reddit too but it's still pending approval. In the case of this ad — I think we actually delivered on what was asked for. The targeting specs were fairly broad (cat lovers in four countries). Getting 39 people who like cats to like a page with a cute cat picture in 20 minutes sounds…

There's a brave (and perhaps naive) engineer. I think you'll find this audience a bit skeptical, but there's a bigger issue. If people are paying FB for relationships with people that want to be engaged with a product, they will quit paying as soon as the ROI is proven to be negative. And I think you'll only get one chance! If you honestly think the guy with the $20k ad spend is going to "try again just to make sure"…

You sound like somebody who hasn't done that much search engine marketing. You can lose $20k on google in the blink of an eye and have nothing to show for it but clicks and exit-pages. Some of this may truly be Facebook's problem, I don't know, I personally doubt it. But no, if one negative-ROI campaign led people to abandon Google, they'd have no advertisers left, either. So I think your premise is flawed.

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#237

Nice video. All true. I have performed tests with the same ad budget ($20k) and target audience for Google and FB. FB ROI was negative. Google ROI was 400% (travel space). The only thing that seemingly "works" has been buying likes by advertising. This video should help educate my clients of the utter uselessness of those too. This brings up the interesting question of the general (non)value of a lot of mobile advert…

Hey everyone -- sorry to hijack the top thread but I’m an ads engineer at Facebook so I feel qualified to respond. I posted this over on reddit too but it's still pending approval. In the case of this ad — I think we actually delivered on what was asked for. The targeting specs were fairly broad (cat lovers in four countries). Getting 39 people who like cats to like a page with a cute cat picture in 20 minutes sounds…

Peter, Derek did not get 39 people who like cats. He got 39 Likes from fake accounts. There is no option in the Facebook Ad UI to "exclude fake accounts." Don't blame him for broad targeting when the result is fake accounts.

> Fake (and low quality) likes are bad for everyone.

But they're endemic to the advertising product you sell. "It sucks for us, too!" is no comfort.

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#238

The way to advertise on FB is to use a custom audience and pass in a list of every Facebook ID / email address you want to target. Yes, it's a lot more work, but it's also the best bang for the buck if you do the hard work to figure out who you really want to reach. I've driven a lot of revenue through Facebook ads, but it requires unconventional thinking. Just like Google, the obvious advertising options are usually…

Wow, I didn't know you could even do that. This is a great solution and sounds super powerful. Thank you.

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the developer of Reddit In Pictures and I'm sorry about that issue, please go into 'Settings' and disable ads! I just wanted to give as much space for images as possible, so when the ad loads it puts itself between the text showing the number of images and the ActionBar, if the ad doesn't load it doesn't take up any space. Is the bounce you're talking about when the ad initially loads (like on orientation change)…

I'd be a bit careful with that. Someone on /r/AndroidDev had his app removed from the store because Google thought it could get accidental ad clicks. He didn't have a space for the ads and the ad would just appear on top of the bottom content. Not sure if they are cracking down on it or not but thought you'd like a heads up. Popping up onto an area not meant to be touched in the first place is probably fine though.

Thanks for the heads up, I will have to try out some other layouts for the ads.

Right now the ad shows above the bottom split action bar, and you can pinch to zoom on the images. http://imgur.com/DfecJar

If an ad isn't showing the image will fill up the rest of the space to the action bar.

I didn't expect many people to keep ads enabled, I released it as RateWare, asking that users rate the app if they choose to disable ads.

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble is this is 100% from the content creator's perspective. From the user perspective, this ends up working out quite well.

Not necessarily. If content from your friends and family and other pages you enjoy is regularly filtered out and replaced with paid "promoted" posts, it decreases the quality of the site.

Yep. Half of my news feed is bullshit stuff that my friends like because they haven't discovered true content aggregators. They use Facebook for the sort of stuff that I use Reddit for and it completely ruins my experience.

I'm there to see what's happening IRL with my friends, not to see pictures of stuff that I saw a few days ago while on the toilet.

For context, I'm a 19 year old student going into my third year at uni, so that puts me right in Facebook's original target demographic. It's disappointing that a service so useful for staying in touch with friends has degraded into little more than an IM service because the rest of it's been spammed to hell.

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