Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook Fraud [video]

youtube.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 412 posts

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#351

Post by GFischer »

notlisted wrote: post #70
calbear81 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good questions raised about the UX issues that contribute to fraudulent clicks and installs but I take issue with the generalization that only bottom of the funnel, high purchase intent ads are valuable. Startups generally have a bias towards doing things that they can measure accurately. This leads to heavy reliance on highly attributable channels like AdWords since you can target people who have expressed high purc…

True. I should have generalized less. It didn't work for us. Reasons include the product in question (hotel rooms) which in New York are plenty in supply, the price of the product (median stay ~$800), a client with a relatively limited advertising budget (branding exercise unlikely), a defined purchase cycle (typically 2-4 weeks in advance of a trip), and last but not least, something people actually search for (not…

It's my experience as well that Facebook pages work extremely well for small stuff, also geared towards women - I've seen shoes, bags, jewellry and arts & crafts in particular be extremely succesful, mostly thanks to viral campaigns. Facebook should try to monetize that (and it actually started doing so with promoted posts and such) instead of facebook ads which, as mentioned, are awful.

My own Facebook ad campaign got us zero conversions, as opposed to Google campaigns. BTW the Google campaign on mobiles was as awful as the Facebook campaign.

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#352

Post by blumkvist »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #345
blumkvist wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what you are saying doesn't make sense to me. You want to achieve meaningful results when competing with people who are vastly more prepared to you. Why do you feel entitled to making facebook work? The truth is you (and majority of the people who posted here) have spent negligeble amounts of money testing and have read very little on the subject and even less time on putting down a strategy. I have a newsflash f…

> I have a newsflash for you - marketing is hard and you are not entitled to results, just because you throw $50 on facebook ads. Interesting that you know how much time and money I've put into it. It's also, interesting that you know what other means of advertising I've employed and am using for COMPARATIVE purposes. Marketing is hard? No kidding. I have been marketing online for over 10 years and have driven well o…

>So, you say you went off and built a slide-rule, strapped on a rocket pack, and obtained a PhD in psychology and statistics, and an MBA in marketing. Now, Facebook Ads work for you. Great! So I guess it was me and the other 90-something% of Facebook's ad customers who were wrong after all. We should just do what you did.

No, I'm saying that you marketing is a field like every other and should be treated like it. It's like me saying "Oh, C++ is so stupid, I can't do "X" with it, although this book says it's comprehensive. Btw, I'm a mommy blogger".

I will give you the benefit of the doubt on your accomplishments and tell you that if you are good at marketing facebook is a goldmine. Go read whitepapers from success stories. Read Gary Vaynerchuk's stuff. Be super precise with your targeting (like laser precise). Think differently about facebook traffic. Get in the mindset of your customer when he's on fb. You are not looking to fulfill a demand. You are looking to create it, so all your efforts should be completely different from adwords for example.

There are 2 groups of people who whine about facebook ads - marketers who fail to adapt and people with 0 knowledge about marketing/advertising.

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#353

Post by wutbrodo »

tomp wrote: post #325
wutbrodo wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:…

> 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"; Also, be aware that this can change in a few years. Some people consider working for Monsanto a "dead end", because not many other companies would want to hire a person like that afterwards.

>Some people consider working for Monsanto a "dead end", because not many other companies would want to hire a person like that afterwards.

Is this even true? I know it's the kind of thing that's hard to explicitly source, but I have a hard time believing that many companies (let alone most) would blacklist someone for working for Monsanto. I feel like the actual reason to avoid Monsanto would be if it's incompatible with your personal morality, not for some imagined fear of widespread reprisal.

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#354

Post by bambax »

pcurve wrote: post #91
j_s wrote: post #20

Can Facebook ads be targeted at users with less than a certain number of likes?

That will encourage click farms to just create more bogus accounts.

You could target ads to accounts that have less than x likes AND are more than y years old.

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#355

Post by pcurve »

bambax wrote: post #354
pcurve wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That will encourage click farms to just create more bogus accounts.

You could target ads to accounts that have less than x likes AND are more than y years old.

That might work short term, but it still won't prevent click farms from hoarding new accounts, and letting them 'mature'. Hopefully advertisers will become more savvy and stop paying for these broken metrics.

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#356

Post by prostoalex »

interstitial wrote: post #308
prostoalex wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have two questions to respond to this - how did people do all of these things before the facebook platform? What is stopping you from doing these same things? Some of "these things" did not exist before. Like yesterday a former coworker of mine posted a bunch of pictures of her kids growing up, it was interesting and reminded me how the time flies. Would I ask around acquaintances for her phone number, then get o…

Jesus H. Christ, watch some old TV shows and movies. How would one see coworkers kid's photos before facebook!?! They'd pull them out of their wallet or purse, an album on the coffee table. It was a cliche and staple of sitcoms to be annoyed by the endless stream of kid photos from a wallet.

How about ex-coworker?

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#357

Post by Loughla »

mullingitover wrote: post #202
pirateking wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a terrible analogy. The modern telephone is the computer, and Facebook, if being forced to stick with the telephone analogy, is some kind of phone book / telemarketer / wiretap agency hybrid. The fact that computers are too inconvenient to use for communication without using locked centralized platforms and proprietary software is a testament to the failure of computers as a communication tool, rather than a…

> The fact that computers are too inconvenient to use for communication without using locked centralized platforms and proprietary software is a testament to the failure of computers as a communication tool Or maybe social communication platforms are a natural monopoly and the computers are working just fine.

Please describe this theory for me. I have always had a hard time understanding the concept of 'natural monopoly' when most of nature and the human experience demands diversification.

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#358

Post by Ryoku »

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…

That is correct. Facebook campaigns don't work for actual conversions. But it is in large part due to the casual way most users navigate the website; which is not going to change. Fake accounts or not you will get a large amount of users that have no relation to your product 'liking' it. This is not necessarily bad. I am not sure if this still applies to USA because of the people that have been leaving Facebook lately. But in my country (Mexico), Facebook is used to give 'presence'. We don't expect any actual ROI or new customers directly from Facebook campaigns, but a user looking at a high number of likes does make a difference in trust perception.

That said, this problem is not present in Google because of the way they present the ads and the way users are navigating when they find them. I believe for this reason Google will always have a great advantage over Facebook and although we won't stop spending a small amount of money to keep a higher amount of likes in Facebook it won't be near as much as we do for Google.

For the same reason, that Facebook's reaction to ads is based in the way users navigate the website, I don't think Facebook will never get a ROI similar to Google.

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#359

Post by santidarman »

Of course I would to run a few tests to run my hypothesis, but an almost too easy feature could make this avoidable: the ability to remove from demographic people who like X. That way, if you want to target people who like Apple you can also avoid people who like HP or Dell. An easy enough solution, that Facebook should look into.

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#360

Post by raymondduke »

dasil003 wrote: post #324
raymondduke wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not. This is as much of a Facebook problem as it is Google's problem that people send SPAM to people on the internet. This guy doesn't know how to market. People think that advertising is a magic button that you push and you get results. Hilarious.

And let me guess... you get great results with your Facebook campaigns? My marketing teams have spent a lot of time with a variety of advertising campaigns. The Facebook has always been by far the worst, an order of magnitude worse than everything else we tried even though it's supposed to have greater targeting ability. Snarky comments on HN aren't going to make me believe that Facebook advertising is anything but o…

I'm not here to make you believe anything. Do what's working for you. If Facebook ads are not working for you, stop using them, or seek the help of someone more qualified than you and your team.
Post reply on HN