
Facebook’s ad metric problem is becoming Zuckerberg’s headache - SQL2219
http://nypost.com/2016/11/17/facebooks-ad-metric-problem-is-becoming-zuckerbergs-headache/
======
elgenie
FB audited a bunch of metrics and found issues with 4 out of 220. The
narrative being pushed here is that all of them nefariously favored FB. The
only problem with that is that it's not true.

> """Elsewhere, Facebook admitted to exaggerating the number of full views
> that video ads received"""

You can tell they didn't do any homework, since the issue was that full views
were _under_ reported when the audio and video tracks were not the exact same
length. The result is that full views were actually roughly 35% greater than
what page managers saw reported.

[http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/11/an-update-on-metrics-
and...](http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/11/an-update-on-metrics-and-
reporting/) goes into the details of what the issues with each metric
calculation is. You can draw your own conclusions as to whether each was (a)
important and (b) favored FB. That link also goes into FB's plans for next
steps in making metrics externally audited and more transparent.

~~~
krige
"FB investigated FB and found FB not guilty"

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Dylan16807
A valid point, but it's ludicrous to report it as "FB found guilty".

~~~
krige
Well, yes, it was just a paraphrase, maybe a bit exaggerated in this context.

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sean_patel
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q)

I contracted with their Ad team for a few months, and can't say more for NDA
reasons, hence I am pointing you to publicly available media / expose.

~~~
tyre
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 problematic,
unless advertisers know that is what they are paying for. Maybe 3 seconds is
enough for someone to glance at it and at least read the brand name in their
mind, which does seem to count as an "impression".

~~~
gthtjtkt
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](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](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.

~~~
sean_patel
> I'm guessing he meant to link to this one about paid promotions
> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag)

Yes, this one also. If anyone thinks this is a 'Conspiracy theory', you can
confirm or refute it yourself for less than 50$, the way I did and the way the
BBC reporter in this above video did.

After I left the Ad Team, and horrified at what I saw as widespread fraud, I
registered a throwaway domain, put some viral videos from youtube, injected
google analytics on the site / blog, bought a pre-paid visa card for 50$ (so
facebook doesn't keep auto charging my card) and 'promoted' my blog posts
shared on a Facebook page I set up.

Just like the BBC author, I noticed most of my 'Likes' on the FB page were
from Indonesia, Pakistan, and many from Vietnam. And I checked some of the
profiles, and they either appeared down right fake (i.e. no activity other
than liking a 1000+ FB pages, or they weren't active since like 2011 or 12.

Worse still, for the pages I did promote - i.e. blog posts shared on FB wall
for 5$ / day, I barely got 10 click-throughs to the actual post, but the Ad
analytics said I "reached 600 / 700 something" viewers.

WTF does that mean??? ( I know what it means, that they "displayed" it in
their feed) But how does this help any one, think small businesses, grow their
brand or business??)

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chenster
Facebook Scam:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag)

Most of views, if not all, are from click farms. Stop wasting your money.

~~~
smallgovt
Assuming that click fraud is pervasive across all advertisers, the fact that
it exists should have no bearing on your ROI as an advertiser.

FBX is a RTB ad exchange. If only 10% of clicks are real, you simply bid 10%
less than you would otherwise. You'll get the same ROI.

~~~
ransom1538
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 from the client.

~~~
arbuge
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.

~~~
ethanbond
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.

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rebuilder
Is there any way for advertisers to independently verify FB's reported numbers
at will? Or do they all rely on FB being honest? If FB's self-reporting is all
that advertisers rely on, that seems like it would be an obvious problem, and
the same goes for any other platform. The problem seems so obvious there must
be checks in place, so I'm curious what they are.

~~~
ransom1538
Yes. If you see reports of sdks proliferation in the top apps you will see
strange sdks like "mobileapptracking" from has offers. They are independent
firms that can check ids from clicks and perform auditing. These firms are
under assault by Apple & fb by means of removing traceable ids (uuid is gone,
mac is gone, idfa is now resetable). Larger firms rely on dumb money and their
audits can be crushing.

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kodfodrasz
I'm pretty sure its just an accident. Any false news suggesting else will be
filtered from people's newsfeeds for their own safety.

~~~
raverbashing
"Against our terms of service"

Now if you want to post a lynching or ads for ISIS feel free to do so

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smallgovt
I've spent millions on FBX. Unless I'm missing something, Facebook has nothing
to gain and a lot to lose from "artificially inflating" views.

FBX is an ad EXCHANGE where inventory gets sold to the highest bidder. If FB
over-reports views by a factor of 2X to advertisers, the average CPM that
advertisers are willing to pay will simply fall by 50%. Sure, there may be a
short time period before bids equilibrate, but FB is liquid enough that this
would happen extremely quickly.

The same principle applies to people up in arms concerning "click fraud" on
Facebook and/or Google's ad networks. As an advertiser, you really should not
CARE if there is click fraud. So long as it impacts all advertisers equally,
we're all bidding for the same quality inventory.

It's useful to keep in mind that the vast majority of advertisers on any
liquid ad network will not be successful. It's easy to rationalize that the
reason you aren't able to make the channel work is that the network "rips off"
its advertisers. In reality, there is no incentive for them to do so.

~~~
fahrradflucht
This assumes an even distribution of click fraud and wrong measurement along
all advertisers and the ability to perfectly measure the ROI of your Facebook
ads which is as strong (and in my opinion wrong) assumption to make...

~~~
smallgovt
That's fair. It's not fair if advertisers are impacted differently. But, my
main point is Facebook has a lot more to lose than gain by inflating
clicks/views, so it's very likely to be an honest mistake.

~~~
sean_patel
> so it's very likely to be an honest mistake.

So naive. Inflating clicks / views let's them charge more to advertizers (who
falsely think that advertising on facebook is more ROI than on Google or
elsewhere). And what Facebook gains is increases in share price every time
they declare their earnings.

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ar15saveslives
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.

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

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Silhouette
Good. Regardless of the details in this particular disclosure, the sooner
these huge online companies are properly accountable for the money they take
and the results they provide, the better it will be for everyone using them.

But remember kids, there are only two metrics that truly matter here: how much
did you spend on Facebook ads, and how much revenue did you bring in as a
result? Everything else, all the other metrics, all the different forms of
advertising and different relationships Facebook invents in their world, these
things are merely tools to optimise the ratio of the two metrics that count
and they have value only to the extent that they do so.

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rebootthesystem
Facebook advertising ROI is horrible. Not worth the effort. Sure, it works our
for some but most end up learning the hard way that FB is a great way to burn
cash, fast.

~~~
2sk21
Not trolling but genuinely curious what kind of things you are trying to
advertise. I have read elsewhere exactly the opposite that Facebook ROI is
very good due to the precise targeting. I am just a back-end developer!

~~~
rebootthesystem
A variety of consumer products by our customers. Google has better ROI and
pretty decent targeting.

One of the most blatant issues with FB is what they did with their pages. You
spend tons of money and effort building an audience and they don't let you
reach it unless you pay. And pay through your teeth you must, every time you
want to reach your followers.

In other words, you never own your audience. This is a huge business mistake.
You want to own your audience. Your list is worth gold. Here's where email
marketing (to a vetted list) still beats FB.

If you use FB to drive traffic to a site, have people hop-on to your email
list and then market directly, sure, yeah, that works. You can do that with
Google just as well.

~~~
evgen
Someone hit a 'like' for your post or your page is not a follower. I see this
assumption in people who think that convincing people to hit the like button
on whatever click-bait they throw out there is somehow building an audience.
I, and just about everyone else, is quite happy that FB forces you to pay a
toll to spam my page as it cuts down on the marketing BS I have to wade
through every day.

I truly hope everyone follows your advice to drive traffic over to an email
list, being able to dump your marketing into my spam folder takes fewer clicks
than marking your follow-up posts as something I never want to see again in my
FB news feed.

~~~
rebootthesystem
I was over-simplifying the "like" thing. Of course, you are right. It takes a
lot more than clicking a "like" button for someone to truly engage with your
business.

And this is exactly one of the problems with FB. So many people pay good money
for what effectively translates to nothing. I have personally watched a
campaign delivered 400 visitors per minute (peak) to a site and produced
exactly zero sales in three days. Not blaming FB 100% for this, of course.
But, if you measure it, they do tend to produce a lot of useless clicks.

Here's the difference between FB advertising and AdWords. It's simple.

People to to FB to chit-chat with friends and family. Not to buy.

People go to Google because their are looking for something and, yes, they are
far more likely to be in a buying mindset. Particularly when compared to FB.

When was the last time anyone said: "I need to buy a rug. Let's go check them
out on Facebook". Never. It's Google or Amazon.

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bsg75
Is there any surprise here? A platform whose existence is based on clickbait
and other worthless content was not careful in tracking ad success metrics?

This is why we don't pay programmers to find bugs, but from the opposite
perspective.

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patmcguire
I take Facebook video view numbers about as seriously as the Google+ numbers
from a few years ago. Remember that monster growth in users month after month
that didn't really exist? Feels like the same thing.

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0xmohit
If you're generating metrics to benefit _yourself_ , chances are that those
would be broken. If those are broken in ways obvious to the users (advertisers
in this case), it'd cause headache too.

Potential causes would include greed.

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jarnix
The article is wrong on a few things :

"It’s not difficult to measure engagement." => with video ads it's doable but
it's always approximations when it comes to ad viewability (and for example,
even if I can see an ad, it does not mean I'm watching it)

"Online advertising has a history of opaque reporting" => compare this to TV
or radio

It's clearly an article against Facebook Ads, even if they are miscalculating
things, it seems too biased to be taken seriously.

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anilgulecha
Weren't the advertisers paying for the results by proxy -- clearly they saw
that the results were worth the payment made. And they continued paying what
they felt was a fair price for the results they saw.

So while the numbers measured may be different, the advertisers weren't naive
enough to use that as the only metric to plan ads.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
I get the impression a lot of Facebook/Google advertisers aren't making any
money on their campaigns, I know from my own experience it was a lot of work
to get a positive result from them.

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DavidWanjiru
The only anecdote I can give where I know for a fact Facebook ads have a real
and clear ROI is people who build pages and groups to sell stuff exclusively
on Facebook. The 3 or so people I've asked tell me the ads work. Of course
Facebook fully determines the "doesn't work" outcome as well, so...

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pansinghkoder
but can you code the DAG in 30 minutes?

