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Facebook CPC – Don't Waste Your Money

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Re: Facebook CPC – Don't Waste Your Money

#151

Post by lutusp »

DivByZero wrote: post #135
lutusp wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is the driver of false clicks on FB? Facebook's reputation as en effective advertiser is improved. As Deep Throat said during the Watergate scandal, "Follow the money."

How fake clicks that don't generate business results would improve Facebook reputation as an effective advertiser ? Actually every time these posts comes out (once a week lately) Facebook reputation is hurt.

> How fake clicks that don't generate business results would improve Facebook reputation as an effective advertiser ?

In online advertising, there's a pretty big chasm between when people think is going on, and reality. Facebook has every incentive to increase their apparent standing in the online advertising business, and the fact that some of the traffic is bogus may not matter to anyone but a purist (or a client).

Consider that everyone in the business has some bogus traffic. Maybe the players feel they can compare statistics without bothering to find out how much is nonsense masquerading as business.

> Actually every time these posts comes out (once a week lately) Facebook reputation is hurt.

Yes, that's true, but a corporate strategy might be to simply say, "We're working on this problem", and hope no one pays too much attention to the actual level of effort.

Re: Facebook CPC – Don't Waste Your Money

#152

Post by kposehn »

gfodor wrote: post #144
kposehn wrote: post #102

The problem with the article is that the author draws a conclusion with far too little data, akin to signing up for NetFlix and saying it is a terrible service when the first movie doesn't buffer fast enough. I've spent mid six-figures on Facebook CPC ads over the last several years and can definitively say that they work very, very well - depending on your use case . Mine is not the OP's use case (though I've sold a…

You didn't read the article. The point of the article has little to do with the campaign performance and more to do with the forensics he/she did to show evidence most of the clicks are misclicks on android phones. If this is true it means even "successful" campaigns are paying this tax.

I read the entire article. My point is that even that small a spend does not denote the entirety of the click base quality.

Re: Facebook CPC – Don't Waste Your Money

#153

Post by kposehn »

ry0ohki wrote: post #113
kposehn wrote: post #102

The problem with the article is that the author draws a conclusion with far too little data, akin to signing up for NetFlix and saying it is a terrible service when the first movie doesn't buffer fast enough. I've spent mid six-figures on Facebook CPC ads over the last several years and can definitively say that they work very, very well - depending on your use case . Mine is not the OP's use case (though I've sold a…

This is OP, I'd admit there could be more data, what isn't shown here is the larger spend I did previously (but was not measured as "scientifically" which produced similar results). I'm doing a new campaign now, targeting only Desktop with a larger spend and will report back the results.

Ok, glad you are doing a bigger campaign. If I can help please ping me via email (for reals!)

Re: Facebook CPC – Don't Waste Your Money

#154

Post by easy_rider »

Those visitors probably didn't make it to your server, and got lost during redirects (canceled the request). This makes sense if they are using 3G. As there are at least 1 (sometimes 2) redirects between the click and your site. They track the visitor before they get redirected obviously.

I have dev'd for an advertising company, have worked with several campaigning networks like HasOffers, and have found similar results. This is more than common.

Still very interesting that the bulk seems to be Android (mobile traffic). A must know if you are not targeting mobile..

Re: Facebook CPC – Don't Waste Your Money

#155

Post by acoyfellow »

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 totally agree, "it depends". Facebook advertising can be much more useful than the OP and many others are suggesting. One tiny little thing that 99% of people are completely overlooking:

-Page owners have the ability to restrict access by country.

This means it's literally just a couple clicks, and you can completely disable the "click-farm" countries from seeing your page (+ advertisements).

http://sendgrowth.com/blog/simple-defense-facebook-click-far... (short post about it, shameless plug) http://i.imgur.com/snkv77Q.png (screenshot of facebook settings page)

Re: Facebook CPC – Don't Waste Your Money

#156

Post by mpeg »

dcpdx wrote: post #133
napoleoncomplex wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the tip! Were professions added recently? "Doctor of Medicine" wasn't on the list at the time we put up the ads a month ago. For workplace targetting, it looks like none of the hospitals in our current markets (Balkans) are in the system, so it's not as useful. We had a similar problem when trying to target people with "Medical School" as education and got something like 10 people total, seems education as…

Yes, FB added the ability to target job titles in February this year: http://adage.com/article/btob/facebook-takes-shot-linkedin-j...

It's actually been there since the very beginning, but it wasn't publicised too much.

Re: Facebook CPC – Don't Waste Your Money

#157

Post by fabiandesimone »

Not sure why all the hate towards Facebook lately in HN. I do FB ads exclusively ALL DAY and I can pretty much tell you it works.

FB Ads is a very stubborn creature. There's a lot to learn in order to make it work, their editorial team is trigger happy with account bans... but the volume is massive and the targeting options are amazing.

Running a 60$ is nothing on FB, you need to run volume and optimize.

I"m doing a lot of mobile right now and you can go anywhere from .10 to .50 per install and basically scale to infinity if you like.

Re: Facebook CPC – Don't Waste Your Money

#158

Post by underdown »

wellboy wrote: post #108
simias wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Plus, you won't be able to remove that negative as you can't remove likes and your page will be seen less forever. What does this show? Don't ever, ever pay for likes.

...Unless you are targeting your custom audience (past buyers/users) etc.

Re: Facebook CPC – Don't Waste Your Money

#159

Post by ColdHawaiian »

babs474 wrote: post #28

I made this comment the other day in a thread about children accidentally clicking on google display ads, but I think it also applies here. The problem is measuring the effectiveness of early funnel ads from clicks. Here is a good presentation from the quantcast guys about the "natural born clicker" problem. The people clicking on your display ad are probably anything but actual potential customers. Clicks is just an…

For what it's worth, that earlier Hacker News discussion regarding the Google case can be found at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7524473.

Re: Facebook CPC – Don't Waste Your Money

#160

Post by grimmfang »

I have used Facebook CPC extensively for my e-commerce company and it has worked wonderfully ( with the right settings ). I have had over 5% of clicks convert in certain months.

However, I have had little luck with adsense for the same company. Honestly I think picking an ad network for your market is a much bigger decision than "tuning" a network you are set on using!

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