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Facebook CPC – Don't Waste Your Money

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Re: Facebook CPC – Don't Waste Your Money

#71

Post by mcherm »

rfergie wrote: post #43
paul_f wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OP is not stating the approach is bad. I think the claim is that Facebook CPC is implemented somewhat fraudulently. What is promised is not what is delivered.

Fair point. As the adverts are sold in an auction, shouldn't the cost per click reflect the proportion of fraud? E.g. if value of true click is $1 and 50% of clicks are fraudulent then CPC should surely approach $0.50?

So long as the fraud is uniformly distributed, that is true. But more significant is the fact that you really can't estimate your costs and benefits correctly when the vendor (Facebook) is giving you incorrect or fraudulent data.

Re: Facebook CPC – Don't Waste Your Money

#72

Post by ameister14 »

rfergie wrote: post #43
paul_f wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OP is not stating the approach is bad. I think the claim is that Facebook CPC is implemented somewhat fraudulently. What is promised is not what is delivered.

Fair point. As the adverts are sold in an auction, shouldn't the cost per click reflect the proportion of fraud? E.g. if value of true click is $1 and 50% of clicks are fraudulent then CPC should surely approach $0.50?

That only happens with greater transparency. Essentially, you have to recognize the fraud to evaluate prices properly, and my impression is that most people don't.

Re: Facebook CPC – Don't Waste Your Money

#73

Post by mpeg »

napoleoncomplex wrote: post #39

Like others have said, it really depends on what you're selling and who you're targetting. Our example (country specific mobile app for doctors), spent 100 € on AdWords, end result was literally 0 app installs, 0 sign-ups, 0 everything. Medical keywords are expensive, no chance of sending them directly to the App Store/Play Store (that we saw at least), and no other useful targetting. Here come Facebook mobile instal…

I don't know if you're doing it already, but in the interest targeting you can include professions too and it will target people who have it set to their "work" on FB; plus adding hospitals to workplace targeting you can quickly close the gap

And as another handy tool, you can use the FB ads api without authentication to perform certain types of search: http://graph.facebook.com/search?type=adworkplace&q=hospital... and build your targeting criteria

Hope it helps :)

Re: Facebook CPC – Don't Waste Your Money

#74

Post by mattmaroon »

paul_f wrote: post #15

CPC is just the wrong model for Facebook. It turns into "spray and pray". In this case, nobody is looking for a personal budget app, it just shows up uninvited. Whereas with Google, we know someone is likely looking for it when the ad appears. I don't know what Facebook's long term business model is. IMO, this isn't it.

Re-targeting. It's already driving a huge share of their ad revenue and will only increase.

Re: Facebook CPC – Don't Waste Your Money

#75

Post by Silhouette »

DivByZero wrote: post #36
cshenoy wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of me suspects you didn't actually read the article. While the title is sort of link-baity, the actual content is interesting in that it compares Google Analytics, server logs, and his Google Adwords campaigns to the Facebook one. I don't think his conclusion is that Facebook ads don't work. It's more that Facebook is charging him for false clicks and non-unique clicks. His last sentence sums up his own experien…

Screw the cpc and the fake clicks :) they exist, nothing you can do about it, live with it. The only thing you should consider to get to any conclusion is the overall CPA. Facebook is a different beast from AdWords, you cannot simply target people searching for "Online budgeting tool". You have to find a good demographic and that requires lot's of testing. From that point of view $50 is actually meaningless. Yeah ...…

You're saying that if Facebook is fraudulently charging advertising customers for more than they are really supplying, that's OK and we should all just deal with it? Really?

FWIW, the last few small scale Facebook campaigns we've run at one of my companies followed a broadly similar pattern to the one described in the article, and we too have checked against our various analytics tools and server logs for comparison, finding the quality of Facebook's referrals far lower than any other source.

However, we do have some other plausible theories about why this might be the case. For example, if visitors to our (B2C, leisure-related) site first see the ad on mobile while they're at work, they're unlikely to explore significantly at the time, but might come back later. We do tend to see a significant spike in both direct visitors and visitors via search engines while we're running FB campaigns that would be compatible with that theory.

Even so, it's very awkward to audit what is really going on with Facebook ads. This is partly because it's hard to determine which clicks claimed by Facebook are actually coming through to our landing page and which are either phantom clicks or other events like Facebook "Likes" that aren't worth anything unless they ultimately translate into paying visitors. It's also hard to track how much money is ultimately charged, because the charges they actually make where they collect real money and the corresponding notifications they send out seem to be based on arbitrary billing periods that don't necessarily correspond to specific days/campaigns where you originally set your budget.

At this point, given the number of reports of strange patterns that do correspond to our own experience, we are sceptical both about how many clicks we get through FB are deliberate rather than "accidental" and about how FB accounts for clicks and calculates its charges. As a small business in a niche market, our FB campaigns only have a small budget and usually they at least break even almost immediately, so we tolerate the uncertainties because our bottom line is usually positive anyway. Even so, the lack of transparency and amount of potential funny business we see at FB is disconcerting, and it certainly makes us hesitant to commit serious money to any FB campaigns in the future.

Re: Facebook CPC – Don't Waste Your Money

#76

Post by stonemetal »

cshenoy wrote: post #34
austenallred wrote: post #20

This is a single campaign, and a single test, with one set of variables. Concluding something overreaching like "Facebook CPC ads don't work" after a test like that is like saying, "I tried mixing two chemicals, and there was no reaction, chemicals must not cause reactions." Think of it like a computer program. If 99% of the program is right but one thing is broken, the entire thing won't work. Marketing is, in a lot…

Part of me suspects you didn't actually read the article. While the title is sort of link-baity, the actual content is interesting in that it compares Google Analytics, server logs, and his Google Adwords campaigns to the Facebook one. I don't think his conclusion is that Facebook ads don't work. It's more that Facebook is charging him for false clicks and non-unique clicks. His last sentence sums up his own experien…

What is the driver of false clicks on FB? So far as I know it isn't like Google where a third party will be paid something for the click. Isn't FB the only one getting paid when I click a FB ad?

Re: Facebook CPC – Don't Waste Your Money

#77

Post by mpeg »

ameister14 wrote: post #67
bigbugbag wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please enlighten us about those right circumstances that somehow magically turn facebook ads into successful and profitable campaigns.

Well, I used to scrape audiences from open groups in order to get extremely targeted segments. That works.

Just in case someone else thinks of doing this; it's totally against the Facebook Ad Guidelines

There's other ways of doing exactly that which maintain user privacy and are within the guidelines though.

Re: Facebook CPC – Don't Waste Your Money

#78

Post by [deleted] »

simias wrote: post #61
will_brown wrote: post #30

Within the last week I performed a similar "experiment" for newly created facebook.com/AmeriStartup. I created two FB mobile advertisements to direct traffic to the website, though the website is more eCommerce/service than any type of sign up. Budget $50 over 3 days reach was ~20,000+; the click through rate was .5% and .4% for the 2 ads; just under 100 clicks to the website with none resulting in conversion. More d…

There's a good analysis for this phenomenon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag It was posted on HN a while back. The gist is that there's a high chance that your ad was clicked by click farms, even though you bought it legitimately from facebook (in an effort to fool clickfarm detection, apparently). What's even more interesting is that not only are you wasting money buying the ads, you also end up with les…

[deleted]

Re: Facebook CPC – Don't Waste Your Money

#79

Post by will_brown »

sanswork wrote: post #52
will_brown wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook was the only paid advertising/promotion campaign to date.

Then it's equally likely that the poor conversion rate has to do with the destination instead of the traffic source. Though I do agree with you that buying likes is useless and a waste of money.

You could be correct that only legit users clicked the FB ads and upon review of my site they had no interest in using my service or my pricing scared them away (or any other legit number of reasons).

However, it would be willful blindness to ignore what I can verify vis-a-vis the FB paid promotion. Moreover, when I can verify the majority of likes are from illegitimate users/profiles, based on not having any posts and otherwise being inactive, then I have no expectation the users clicking the ads are any more legit than users clicking the promotion. If FB had faith this was not the case I see no reason they would not disclose the users who clicked the ads so advertisers could confirm their legitimacy.

Re: Facebook CPC – Don't Waste Your Money

#80

Post by jimmytidey »

rfergie wrote: post #43
paul_f wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OP is not stating the approach is bad. I think the claim is that Facebook CPC is implemented somewhat fraudulently. What is promised is not what is delivered.

Fair point. As the adverts are sold in an auction, shouldn't the cost per click reflect the proportion of fraud? E.g. if value of true click is $1 and 50% of clicks are fraudulent then CPC should surely approach $0.50?

Yes, assuming everyone prices everything perfectly rationally and knows what they are buying. I expect a good deal of Facebook expenditure is people trying make it work for them, and assuming they are doing it wrong. In the long run perhaps the price will reflect a lower value.
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