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Facebook Fraud [video]

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Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#281

Post by raymondduke »

apinstein wrote: post #191
xxbondsxx wrote: post #179

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…

My company spends about 100x more money with Google on ads than we do on Facebook ads. Why? Because every time I test advertising on Facebook (outside of retargeting), 90%+ of the engagement looks like garbage. I buy likes, I get likes from people that are clearly not target customers. I boost posts, it makes no sense who seems them and who comments. I could never figure out why people that are clearly not target cus…

This is not a Facebook problem. It's a problem with how YOU are running Facebook ads.

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#282

Post by ameister14 »

mschaecher wrote: post #208
unclebucknasty wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article (video) is pointing to fundamental flaws in FB's advertising offerings. I don't think that any amount of "social media marketing" expertise will compensate for the fact that a large proportion of the ad spend on those offerings may likely be wasted on what is effectively fraud. Even if you optimize for better performance, there will still be inordinate waste to fraud. Beyond that, I think a lot of people…

BS - I've watched both videos twice and more sophisticated targeting solves 90% of their "problems." How much facebook advertising have you managed? I hope it's a lot if you're going to call out "fundamental flaws" and "large portion of ad spend...likely wasted...on what is effectively fraud." I've managed many millions across a handful of companies. Has their been issues? Yes, just like every other channel. You're s…

If you're going to make me create a custom audience in order for my ad to be successful, don't also make me use or write a scraping tool to grab open groups to populate that audience. It's really a bad idea for Facebook, though it works for savvy advertisers. I stopped doing it because I don't really feel like it's a good thing to promote.

Basically, I have to create the targets extremely specifically, and then Facebook lets me advertise to them. Unfortunately, I haven't had the same success with Facebook's pre-set targeting criteria.

Facebook's advertising tools promote the page like system too much and are too complex for non-specialized workers, I think.

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#283

Post by jay_kyburz »

Facebook should stop trying to sell advertising and just start selling premium services directly to users. Seriously, just ask for $10 a month from everybody, then build some genuinely good new features.

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#284

Post by raymondduke »

I'm not a fan of this video. One is that it's told in a very convincing way. He sure spent some time on his charts and making his opinion sound factual. The problem is that he is wrong. Facebook ads are the most effective way to advertise, if you do them correctly. It's not Facebook that's fraudulent here. Facebook did what they said they'll do. It's the way this guy ran the ad that's the problem.

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#285

Post by jay_kyburz »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #283

Facebook should stop trying to sell advertising and just start selling premium services directly to users. Seriously, just ask for $10 a month from everybody, then build some genuinely good new features.

Hrm.. just reading on the net Revenues: $2.59 billion, Monthly active users: 1.23 billion. Just need about $2 per MAU which is not crazy at all.

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#286

Post by ksk »

debt wrote: post #16

Here we go again. It's a new quarter. Now that earnings decimated the young-people-dont-use-facebook myth, now we have the click-fraud-is-a huge-systemic-problem myth. Haters be hatin.

What factual errors did this video make?

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#287

Post by wutbrodo »

avn2109 wrote: post #260
Sheepshow wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sincerely hope names like this become widespread if they accurately describe the job. Very helpful to have a bright red "KEEP OUT" sign.

I'm a soon-to-be graduated student and am job hunting, so identifying dead ends is presently very relevant to my life. What about a title like this smells fishy to you? I'm not being pedantic, I really want to know how to avoid crappy jobs.

I work in natural language processing now, but I was working on ads for the last couple of years (right out of college).

There is nothing inherent to ads that makes it universally something to avoid. Different people have different priorities for their ideal engineering job (num of users reached, power within the team, liking the product, liking the actual technical work, etc). I know people who loved working in ads: some of them didn't care a ton about the product they worked on, but loved the challenge of their technical work, and some who truly found the world of ads itself to be interesting. This set of priorities isn't necessarily something you'll realize immediately out of school; I was happy for a while with the technical challenge of the work I was doing in ads, but after a while I realized that my personal preference prioritized the actual product I was shipping higher than I thought, so I switched to something I was more excited about.

Don't listen to anyone stupid enough to tell you that there's any universal rule about jobs in ads being crappy (much less a "dead end"; I couldn't be happier where I am at this point and spending a couple of years working in the area of ads didn't hurt me at all). Keep in mind what your priorities are for your job (they're different for everyone) and do research on what a given role would entail (something that even good CS programs don't really prepare you for: I had to discover my aversion to front-end work the hard way).

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#288

Post by doctorpangloss »

ed wrote: post #279
deepGem wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding #1 - Facebook conversion pixel (a JS script that has to be loaded the HTML header) solves the feedback loop problem. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/ads-api/offsi...

Is there a native mobile equivalent for this? Identifying our FB ad cohort is a major problem when trying to calculate the effectiveness of our ad spend on FB.

Yes, there are dozens of preferred marketing developers who provide this service.

In my experience, Facebook actually has the best performing ads with respect to measurable financial objectives.

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#289

Post by raymondduke »

I'm a fan of what works. And right now Facebook is what is working. I don't know if it's the same for you, but not a day goes by where I don't overhear someone talking about Facebook in public.

About the video, the guy ran a poor campaign for a pointless page. He was expecting advertising to work like a magic button where you click it and you get engagement. The guy had no product and no target market. He advertised nothing to everyone. Of course he's going to get poor results.

About the click farms. Yeah, they do exist. But it's not Facebook's fault. Just like it's not Google's fault if people use the internet to send spam. You have to think about the scale that Facebook operates. They're the number two website in the world. And the number one social network. Let that settle in for a second. Fraudulent activity is, unfortunately, inevitable when you have a site like that.

The bottom line: become smarter with your ads. Have an actual product and a real audience. Ironically, I know of a copywriter / marketer that made a website for the dog niche. He gets 800,000 engagements a week on it. Every one of his posts gets 500-26,000 likes and tons of comments. The site is basically a news site for dogs. He just does content right. And he knows how to advertise. He doesn't spend time making fancy videos like this guy did. He gets things done. He gets results. He partners with dog related products and services and makes a killing entirely from a Facebook page.

This video is an insult to marketers. It's like me trying to insert a floppy disk into a cdrom drive, then complaining that computer makers are all frauds. 

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#290

Post by UweSchmidt »

flycaliguy wrote: post #140
eumenides1 wrote: post #133

In every Facebook HN post, there is always the "I deleted my FB account" and the "you can't really delete your FB data" back and forth. Instead of deleting your account has anybody tried to "trash" your account via "Liking" everything you can and posting a large sets of unrelated pics? your info is only really valuable because its "true". if you trashed your account, its pretty much the same as deleting. also based o…

That is interesting. I'm wondering if you have thought of the best way to remove an account from Facebook, turning your account into a spammer. You could have a friend report it after a couple days of spamming. When, for example, an intelligence agency gathers people's information from a service like this they probably save themselves the hassle and do not include information from accounts marked spammer. Am I making…

Analyst to the new Intern: "Here is a list of stuff people have come up with to foil our algorithms. To familiarize yourself with our sophisticated tools, have a look at this problem: Find social media accounts that used to be real but are now flagged "spammer". Make categories such as "account was hacked", "sold" or "someone tries to go off the radar". For last category, we will set the scrutiny-level to 'elevated'."
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