Live data from Hacker News

Facebook’s ad metric problem is becoming Zuckerberg’s headache

nypost.com

51–60 of 71 posts

Re: Facebook’s ad metric problem is becoming Zuckerberg’s headache

#52
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true. However, Facebook & Google deal mainly with 'dumb money', eg, ad money not analyzed or checked. Fraud doesn't affect people that know how to calculate ROI from a CPC campaign -- fraud affects "Coke" trying to run a large spend near the end of the quarter. Thus when these large companies ignore fraud or view inflation -- it does steal from ad companies that could have offered a real ROI and it steals fro…

And as long as there are dumb clients out there spending vast sums of money indiscriminately without demanding to see results, there will be very little motivation to fix anything. Those clients are mentally still stuck in the TV age, where measuring results is hard and hoping for the best is the mindset.

Lol what? Facebook and Google promised to solve the measurement problem and uhh... they haven't.

As far as I can tell the entire ad industry is just all the various parties either fudging numbers or blatantly lying to each other. So long as no one calls anyone else out, they all walk away with a happy sum.

Re: Facebook’s ad metric problem is becoming Zuckerberg’s headache

#53
post #12

This is not new, and I've spoken about this here before. Facebook used fraudulent methods to artificially inflate their view counts, and pedelled those fake and grossly exagerrated #s for "eyeballs" to the unsuspecting advertizers. "How Facebook is Stealing Billions of Views" - Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell exposed this with detailed analysis and evidence. Watch it here => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q I c…

I watched the video you linked to, which is mostly about people who rip content from YouTube and upload it to Facebook. The people who view the pirated content are still viewing content on FB. That isn't "artificially inflat[ing] their view counts." Those are real views, which is what advertisers are paying for, even if what they are viewing is stolen. The point about counting 3 seconds of auto-play as a view is prob…

I'm guessing he meant to link to this one about paid promotions leading to mostly fake likes and views from click farms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag

> When I paid to promote my page I gained 80,000 followers in developing countries who didn't care about Veritasium (but I wasn't aware of this at the time). They drove my reach and engagement numbers down, basically rendering the page useless.

> I thought I would demonstrate that the same thing is still happening now by creating Virtual Cat (http://www.facebook.com/MyVirtualCat). I was surprised to discover something worse - false likes are coming from everywhere, including Canada, the US, the UK, and Australia. So even those carefully targeting their campaigns are likely being duped into spending real money on fake followers. Then when they try to reach their followers they have to pay again.

Re: Facebook’s ad metric problem is becoming Zuckerberg’s headache

#55
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forget about this article and consider the video metrics they inflated. They counted a 3 sec play as a video view and that's a big thing. 4 out of 220 is still a big number for a big company such as FB to be wrong at.

> They counted a 3 sec play as a video view and that's a big thing. 3+ seconds representing a single FB view has been the definition of a video view on FB since the metric became public.

What I don't understand is why people think FB lying about metrics helps them. Aren't these people keeping track of sales? Those should show that if FB was getting all these views they aren't worth much as their sales didn't go up.

Course the clients might be running several campaigns at once and can't tell what is driving sales. If only they knew what half of advertising dollars worked!

Re: Facebook’s ad metric problem is becoming Zuckerberg’s headache

#56

Facebook Scam: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag Most of views, if not all, are from click farms. Stop wasting your money.

I've got to throw in my two cents, I recently ran an ad campaign that was extremely successful with very low cost per not only click, but cost per conversion/acquisition. Keep in mind this ad campaign only dealt with people located and posting in the US but even if some of the "clicks" were fake it still was the cheapest and by far most effective campaign that I've ever ran.

I was constantly updating and monitoring my campaign just like an Adwords campaign which you should. These aren't "set and forget" hope you get customers. Monitor your return, if results are poor move your ad dollars elsewhere.

Re: Facebook’s ad metric problem is becoming Zuckerberg’s headache

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is that ad ROI is super hard to measure for branding campaigns. Coca-Cola can't tell exactly what their Facebook ROI is and a lot of the people who buy ads for those types of companies have incentives to overrate the ROI of these ads, too (because thats basically the rating of their work).

Interesting, I suppose I never thought about it from the perspective of an advertiser who is not direct response driven. That is, there may actually be players in the exchange who are buying eyeballs -- not conversions.

Of course. You can't click on a billboard and those have existed forever.

Re: Facebook’s ad metric problem is becoming Zuckerberg’s headache

#59

FB ads are complete scam. I tried to run few ad campaigns on fb for my pet project, and the got hundred likes from absolutely irrelevant people, with zero engagement.

Yeah, we can get tons of cheap clicks that do absolutely nothing for us. Lame.

Re: Facebook’s ad metric problem is becoming Zuckerberg’s headache

#60
post #28
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I watched the video you linked to, which is mostly about people who rip content from YouTube and upload it to Facebook. The people who view the pirated content are still viewing content on FB. That isn't "artificially inflat[ing] their view counts." Those are real views, which is what advertisers are paying for, even if what they are viewing is stolen. The point about counting 3 seconds of auto-play as a view is prob…

Bit into the video they mention explictly that "Facebook is cheating" and "they autoplay and count 3 seconds (even with no audio on) as view", meaning that if you are scrolling trough your feed slowly enough, you count as viewer, event if you don't.

> "they autoplay and count 3 seconds (even with no audio on) as view"

Yes. Exactly this. And a few more 'hacks' the 'Zuck' way ... :)

Post reply on HN