
Facebook CPC – Don't Waste Your Money - ry0ohki
http://jamespanderson.tumblr.com/post/81672314715/facebook-cpc-dont-waste-your-money
======
napoleoncomplex
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 install ads. 40 € spent so far, 500+ app installs,
200+ sign-ups, great retention. We can roughly target medical professionals,
take them directly to the app stores, and the clicks are cheap as hell.

I have no doubt that AdWords work much better in other cases, and that FB can
be useless, but it's not black and white, you need to know which tool fits the
purpose.

~~~
jamiequint
Are you really getting $0.10 installs via Facebook Mobile ads? If so you're
performing better than any FB ad account I've seen in the last 6 months (and
I've seen a lot). Even gaming doesn't perform close to this well.

If this is actually true you should be doing affiliate installs which
routinely pay out $1 with no (or high) caps. You could literally make tens of
thousands of dollars daily.

~~~
arkonaut
Where can you find affiliate arbitragers like this? Totally get that he/she
should be doing this, but how do you find the people doing this effectively?
I'm all for paying when someone has figured this out, because the installs I
get often make me want to give up trying. Thanks!

~~~
jamiequint
The installs you get from mobile affiliate are usually shit in terms of
performance fwiw. The install flows are things like ads that say [get the app
now] then link directly to a random app in the app store, so there is very
little intent.

------
will_brown
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 disturbing was the fan page promotion through FB (paid "Likes" in my own
words). $10 budget per day over 3 days; reach = 3,000+; total likes 34. What
disturbed me though was when I would go to the profile page of the users who
"liked" the fan page as a result of the promotion, many of the user profiles
did not appear to be legit. Moreover, the majority of these users who liked
the page had a single facebook post in their entire facebook timeline. As
unlikely as it is that of ~30 paid likes nearly all were were inactive
facebook users who were otherwise compelled to interact with my paid
promotion, it is equally unlikely that facebook would be so brazen in
committing fraud on advertisers by creating and managing fake accounts to
click paid promotion/ads which could easily be proven. Nevertheless is begs
the question what are these accounts (fake, bots, ect...) and who controls
them and why?

~~~
y4mi
i believe the current theory is that the illegal bots hide their paid likes by
liking innocent pages as well...

~~~
Riseed
Yes. Here's a video (by youtube user Veritasium) that walks through an
experiment and explanation, for those who are interested.

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

------
austenallred
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 of
respects, the same way. You can be missing one single variable and your entire
campaign falls apart.

Look at all of the variables in this campaign - title, image, targeting
options, whether you do sidebar ads, newsfeed ads, or mobile newsfeed, and
most importantly the product/service offered on the other side (not to mention
the conversion rate of the specific landing pages). Apparently this campaign
wasn't profitable, but I run a half dozen profitable campaigns on Facebook at
any given time (most of them CPC), and I know people who spend $10,000/day on
Facebook ads.

Facebook ads _do_ work under the right circumstances. Concluding that they
don't after one try is a little absurd.

~~~
cshenoy
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 experience:

"But it definitely doesn’t seem like you are getting what you pay for, and
certainly the value, at least for my site is not there."

~~~
DivByZero
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 ... he can say that Facebook is charging him for fake clicks ... that's
an old news :)

~~~
Silhouette
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.

~~~
DivByZero
Of course I'm not saying that it's extremely frustrating both to have click
fraud and having little data from Facebook to better understand what's going
on. I totally agree with that.

However: 1) I don't think Facebook would be so stupid to intentionally fraud
on clicks ... the damage could be much bigger than the gain. I'm pretty sure
this is mainly due to click farm, bots and so on.

2) I don't care about the click fraud. I don't advertise to get clicks. I
advertise to get customers. As long as the overall CPA I get from Facebook is
lower than AdWords I'll keep advertising on Facebook.

------
netcan
I don't know about the bot/fraud accusation, but do not listen to the
conclusion here. Those bounce rates are not the overall average and it's
irrelevant anyway. With any online advertising you need to track conversions.
Optimize & spend based on those, not based on hearsay or anecdotes. Hearsay
and anecdotes are for deciding to try it and Facebook is so big that you
should try it anyway.

There are unlimited examples of failed advertising campaigns on every single
medium where failure can be seen measured. Most campaigns fail. They are a
cost of doing business. Generalizing based on those would be very mistaken.
Facebook is a new but giant ad program. The tools are still rough and "best
practices" are even rougher. The consultants...

That doesn't mean that good campaigns can't be run on facebook. Facebook
allows campaigns to be run that would be impossible to run anywhere else. In
some cases the ROI is ridiculous. In others it's one of few things that works.

The number one reason for all these Facebook sux rants seems to be " _it 's
not adwords_." People want their adwords campaign to work on Facebook. If Coca
Cola wanted to tell you that they're "the real thing" on adwords, it would be
an uphill battle. A budget app on Facebook might be hard going on fb. Maybe
not impossible, but it's a squeeze.

If you want to advertise a local children's art exhibition taking place this
weekend, Facebook ads will work like magic. 'Friends of friends of the gallery
who live close by and have kids.' There is no other platform that gives you
anywhere near the reach, relevance and context that FB gives you for a
campaign like that. I would expect the "ROI" to be under a dollar per physical
ass-through-door.

~~~
rubyn00bie
I think people just want to know what they're paying for...

I don't think the article in anyways suggest that they have a perfect
advertising campaign.

He's just talking about the discrepancy between what FB reports and what he
sees. I don't see how any of what you wrote actually relates or is pertinent
to the article.

It looks like you just took offense, along with a lot of other commenters, to
criticizing Facebook.

------
unreal37
I think the evidence of something being wrong is very compelling. But one of
the problems I see is that if Facebook even attempts to fix the problem, their
revenue drops by 30% and investors/advertisers sue for fraud.

They're in a tough spot. But they should at least start to turn the ship in
the right direction before their total ad business collapses as "ineffective".

~~~
interstitial
So you're saying a Walled Garden Monopoly is inherently a distopia. Please
pass that along to Silicon Valley VCs and Wall Street.

~~~
doesnt_know
I don't understand how you got to that conclusion after reading the parent
comment?

------
kposehn
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 metric a __-ton of
SaaS on FB).

I advise everyone here thinking about FB ads to do the following:

\- If you try it, dedicate a serious amount of money. Nothing less than $500
will suffice as you need to get statistically significant data across all your
targeting sets.

\- Focus very narrowly on your target market. Trying women age 22-29? Do that
in your metro area only. Keep your targeting sets small so you have fewer
variables to contend with.

\- Don't lose your nerve. If you give up too quickly you'll know nothing.

Finally, I do understand the OP's frustration with click numbers from FB vs.
GA. Don't let it get you down, as this is common on every platform. Optimize
for your actual logged data and you'll profit.

~~~
gfodor
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.

~~~
randartie
The article is titled "Facebook CPC – Don't Waste Your Money ", I think it's
fair for him to explain why it was not a waste of money for him.

------
babs474
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 easy holdover metric from the paid search side of digital
advertising. It doesn't make sense in the context of early funnel ads. You
need to measure the effect your display ads are having on your purchasing
endpoints. Which is what the whole cross channel attribution industry is
about.

Its quite possible your are getting good value from facebook ads, you've just
inadvertently focused in on the worst subpopulation, the clickers.

[1][http://www.slideshare.net/hardnoyz/display-ad-clickers-
are-n...](http://www.slideshare.net/hardnoyz/display-ad-clickers-are-not-your-
customers)

~~~
ColdHawaiian
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7524473).

------
ShaneOG
> Google also lets me target only Desktop users. If Facebook would allow this
> same control, I could run this test again with more confidence.

FB do let you set a Desktop Only audience for ads. You need to use Power
Editor (Google Chrome only) and select Desktop under Placements.

I'd like to see a re-run with Desktop targeting only.

Edit: [https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/ads-
api/targe...](https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/ads-
api/targeting-specs/#placement)

~~~
lauraglu
You don't have to use power editor, you just have to update the Targeting to
desktop only.

~~~
ry0ohki
I could not find this option anywhere, but I think I see how to do it now,
going to give it a try, thanks!

------
paul_f
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.

~~~
gdilla
Google's intent based ad platform is relatively effective. Facebook is a
little bit like old school TV and Radio advertising. Ad buyers are lured in
about 'reaching' target demos. Age, sex, geography, brands they like
(affinities). But yeah, it's still somewhat noisey since the users are really
just interested in using facebook. Maybe your brand will see some recognition
boost, but measuring against a funnel conversion is likely going to be worse
than those who use Google and show intent to actually do something.

------
DivByZero
The article raises some great points and it's very frustrating to read these
articles as the founder of a Facebook Ads Optimization tool aimed at SMBs
(AdEspresso - [http://adespresso.com](http://adespresso.com) \- Shameless plug
:P).

I'm not going to say that copy was not good or that the number Facebook tracks
are correct. I find the copy of the ad used pretty good overall. However I've
some consideration about it:

\- I totally agree that Facebook must improve its tracking and must do more to
prevent clicks fraud ... a problem which is still very relevant

\- Lot's of Facebook Ads traffic comes from mobile nowadays. This can be good
or bad. If you're promoting a website and aiming at conversions on a non
mobile-friendly website you MUST disable mobile targeting.

\- Overall $50 budget is not enough to get to any relevant conclusion.

\- On a product like this (budgeting, finance, etc.) it's critical to find a
very good audience to target. I'd suggest using a lot custom audiences.

\- Facebook Ads bounce rate & overall quality is very often lower than Google,
Yahoo & Bing, this is implicit in the nature of the platform. On Google you're
getting traffic from people who are actively searching for a keyword strictly
related to your product. On Facebook you're targeting people based on
demographic profile and a vague interest. However Facebook is very often much
cheaper than Google.

\- CPC & CTR are meaningless metrics. You should always have conversion
tracking and measure the overall CPA to acquire a customer. Click frauds,
wrong reportings etc. ... they exists. You cannot do anything about it. You
should not give a crap about it. Just check your Cost to acquire a customer
and see if it makes sense.

\- Sometime for some markets Facebook Ads for direct conversions simply don't
work. Create valuable content like eBooks, webinars etc. to get cheaper leads
and then close the sales funnel with targeted emails.

My 2 cents, hope it's useful for someone :)

------
NoodleIncident
How much of Facebook's traffic is mobile these days? I personally prefer the
desktop version, but I spend unhealthy amounts of time at the computer anyway.
I know that my mom uses FB almost primarily through her iPad since she got it.

If FB's traffic is almost or even largely from mobile devices, paying to show
ads for a non-mobile site to that traffic seems just silly. The site is
downright hostile to mobile users; the text loads last, it starts with a video
and a worthless image, and the actual text ping-pongs across the page to
accommodate the clip art and screenshots.

Given this exact same data, the OP could spend a week making at least his
landing page mobile, run another FB ad, and make a blog post about A/B testing
your landing page for mobile users. But no, it's all Facebook's fault, because
bashing Facebook will always, 100% get you upvotes on this site...

~~~
yabatopia
A recurring complaint in most of the post is the inability to separate desktop
users from mobile users. This makes it very difficult to optimize their
advertising strategy.

I find it hard to believe that Facebook is not capable of separating mobile
(smartphones, wearables and tablets) and desktop traffic in a reliable
fashion. I don't know if that's intentional, or why it takes so long to
address this problem. But it's hard to deny that right now the only
beneficiary of this foggy situation is Facebook.

~~~
jptoor
There's a radio button that lets you decide between Mobile, Desktop, or both.

------
willholloway
The fraudulent clicks are a fact now, and they were in 2009 too, but if your
earnings per click margin is high enough FB ads can definitely be worth it.

I did really well running dating ads in every English speaking market, and a
lot of Spanish speaking markets as well.

FB ads were the second step in my post-college process of bootstrapping myself
as a viable economic entity amidst the fallout and financial devastation of
the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

So thank you Mark Zuckerberg, if it wasn't for your creation I might have had
to get a real job.

------
chrisweekly
YMMV, but as an anecdote my wife's FB CPC campaign for her new private
psychotherapy practice saw a > 2% click-through rate to her PsychologyToday
page, and the number smust have been close to real because they led directly
to phone calls from prospective clients who confirmed they'd seen her ad,
deliberately clicked it. It took her maybe 6 weeks to fill her schedule and
she turned it off.

Note a photo of a smiling female is the best creative for CTR, and narrowing
the demographic in her use case was simple: females within 15 miles of her
office, aged 25-45, in certain income range. We think the average lead who
actually called probably saw her ad 6 or 7 times before clicking.

OP may have valid criticisms of FB ads, but in our case it was a _massive_
success. Spending a couple bucks to acquire a client w a LTV over $1000 is a
no-brainer.

Again, YMMV but if you use it right FB can be a fantastic tool.

------
rfergie
I'm getting fed up with these post saying "Media X" is bad (where X is usually
something to do with Facebook or Google display).

Two comments:

1\. This media is sold in an auction. If the quality of the traffic vs what
you pay for it is bad value then the bids are set too high. If I pay over the
odds for something on ebay it isn't just ebay that is at fault.

2\. Doing online advertising well is harder than Facebook and Google are
incentivised to make clear. In some cases this stuff is very hard which is why
there are people whose full time job it is to get it right.

As someone with some expertise in biddable media reading posts like this must
be like a coder reading about how a programming language is flawed because the
Todo app scaffolding doesn't quite do what the author expects.

~~~
paul_f
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.

~~~
rfergie
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?

~~~
mcherm
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.

~~~
rfergie
I agree with what you say about the estimation of costs.

The benefits to site owners normally take place outside of Facebook and so
should be measurable regardless of what Facebook do.

In the case where the benefit is within Facebook then the buyer is purchasing
likes or similar and then they are in for a world of hurt (in my experience)
because of the difficulty in valuing what is being bought.

In this case the advertiser presumably knows the value of what is bought. Then
valuing a click involves working back from that towards a CPC bid based on the
conversion rate of the traffic source.

As you say, things get interesting when value is not evenly distributed and
are complicated further when incrementality is taken into account. But who
said it was meant to be easy?

------
jonathanjaeger
I don't know enough about your business to know whether you will ever get a
positive ROI on Facebook ads, but a clear call to action and more targeted
copy will have a world of difference in terms of conversion.

Compare the author's: "Easy to use, free online budget" to "Scared of being in
debt? Get your FREE budget report instantly. Click here to request info."

I'm not saying that's the ideal copy, but you have to get people's interest
and explain more. Make it specific to a location like "Virginia" or "Sydney"
or "Melbourne" or "Kentucky" and target those specific places you'll get a
higher CTR and conversion. The mobile vs. desktop part is a whole other
discussion.

------
cmstoken
>I created a Facebook CPC campaign (“Clicks to a Website”), and targeted
females aged 22-40 in the USA and Australia who like several of my competitors
pages and have an interest in Personal Finance.

(Sorry, this is a little off topic.)

Can the OP or someone else fill me in on how he was able to target people who
like other pages (that he doesn't own)? Is it through lookalike audience or is
there a more direct way to do it? I've been trying to do the same (target
similar pages) but I'm clueless as to how to do it.

~~~
j_s
Beware TOS violations (read comments)

[http://www.quicksprout.com/2014/02/19/how-to-steal-your-
comp...](http://www.quicksprout.com/2014/02/19/how-to-steal-your-competitors-
facebook-fans/)

~~~
southflorida
Neil is brilliant, good find.

------
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.

------
bigbugbag
Interesting post but it's hardly news, a few years back when facebook was
struggling to make money I remember reading a detailed article about how
facebook delving into advertisement could mean the end of the web as we know
it and by that it meant the end of ad-supported websites.

First facebook ads would drive online ads pricing towards the bottom, then it
would make obvious something almost all of us know: online advertisement is
mostly an overpriced scam that doesn't work and most netizens despise.

Then the usual business model to support costs for running a website would
crumble and disappear.

Sadly I can't find this article now (thanks to google tweaking its search
engine, it's now hardly possible to find an old results or anythine relevant
past the first half of the first results page), but I remember it pointed out
that facebook users are much less receptive to ads than google search users.
People using a search engine are actively looking for something and ads can be
actually be useful to them, but for people looking for social interactions
with people they know ads are quite useless and an annoyance.

Right now facebook lack of transparency and accuracy in their ad business
means more profit and less trouble for them while hiding the elephant in the
room, so don't expect the situation to change soon unless they're given
incentive to do so.

------
acoyfellow
I'm baffled that no one has realized a simple solution to the "click farms".

Simply exclude the countries that are known to be click farms from seeing your
page at all.

On your page settings, you'll see a "Country Restrictions" section.
[http://i.imgur.com/snkv77Q.png](http://i.imgur.com/snkv77Q.png)

When your page is not visible to a certain area, Facebook will not serve ads
to people in that country.

Bam?

~~~
acoyfellow
It takes 5 seconds to fix the problem. [http://sendgrowth.com/blog/simple-
defense-facebook-click-far...](http://sendgrowth.com/blog/simple-defense-
facebook-click-farms/)

------
shadowmint
This is vaguely interesting I suppose, but while 123/21243 (click through
rate) is significant, 61/92 (lost clicks) is _not_.

...and therefore every single derived stat is completely nonsense. A
percentage you say, on a sample size < 100?

Whats your confidence level on that?

(I also think that Facebook ads are a waste, and the conclusion is plausible;
but the stats in the post are meaningless and probably deceptive)

------
interstitial
Let's fix the title: "Facebook - Don't Waste Your Time or Money." Who wants in
on the Facebook cash cow? Well, you need to be on the other side of this
international scam. The click farms, the fake likes, the fake pages, the dark
side that actually MAKES Zuck rich and he has no incentive to block.

~~~
eli
Do you think this is a unique problem to Facebook? Google appears to have the
same incentives.

------
flibble
This isn't a problem. A problem occurs only if people assume a click is worth
one amount when really it is worth another amount.

Simply run your campaign for $X and measure your resulting sales, $Y, and now
you know if you are wasting money or not.

If Facebook 'fix the problem' then the CPC rate will simply increase.

------
danra
While it's definitely possible that OP's ad campaign sucks, that's not the
main point in the article, so how come many comments focus on that?

The post's conclusion is that there's a strong indication of Facebook charging
for mis-clicks and double charging for non-unique clicks.

------
bigmario
Running an ad on mobile for a site that's not optimized for mobile is a HUGE
red flag, not some afterthought that should be mentioned in the conclusion.
I'd wager anything most of Facebook's traffic comes from smartphones and
tablets nowadays.

~~~
psionski
The interesting thing to note is that he has different results for people that
come from Google - maybe people have different expectations about the website
depending on whether they're looking for it on Google or just sitting in an
app like Facebook?

------
gburt
My very rough and sloppy analysis gives you a credible interval of a
conversion rate between 0.28% and 5.61%. At the upper bound of that conversion
rate (5.5%), I would handwave and suggest this is comparable to your Google
CPC results (depending on the actual cost per click). If I were you, I'd
collect more data.

And try different ad text. Acknowledge that this is a different platform than
search and you need to advertise differently. Don't be so quick to dismiss it.

Edit: and I was comparing apples to oranges anyway. If I use your Google
Analytics data for both measures, we get a range of 0.39%-7.7%. This upper
bound actually _exceeds_ your Google CPC result. You don't have enough data.

~~~
tinco
How confident?

~~~
gburt
sig=0.05, but please don't trust that for anything meaningful. This is sloppy
8am blog post response statistics. My personal confidence is basically 0. I
just wanted to communicate the idea that 60 impressions was insufficient to
make this judgement.

~~~
tinco
If I'd do such a study, I'd pick a lower confidence interval, like 0.2. This
is not a big scientific break through, or a business critical decision. This
is a theorem that we're evaluating to be worthy of deeper investigation.

If there's an 80% (also known as 'a significant') chance that the conversion
rate is significantly lower than that of Google hits then I'd say that
warrants deeper investigation.

That's why it's important to always begin research with a hypothesis, not just
randomly throw a confidence interval of a something in there :)

------
Kiro
I'm getting pretty good results from Facebook CPC. I pay $0.12 per click and
get around 50% "conversions" from that. I run a service which doesn't require
any registration though and a conversion is just someone doing anything in it.

~~~
spada
are you only targeting users from outside of US/Canada?

~~~
Kiro
No. I'm targeting US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland. Age
13-30.

------
jliptzin
Facebook ads don't work for us anymore because they disabled them, without
warning, without explanation, with no apparent recourse. The ads aren't
against any TOS and our competitors continue to advertise without issue.

~~~
junto
Interesting. I wonder if users flagging ads have any impact.

I say this only because I had a habit of flagging ads with the reason of
'other' and entering 'wrong language' when FB showed me ads in the wrong
language.

FB ignore browser language for ads, preferring to use IP address. Duh.

It might just be that x% of people flagged a number of your ads for similarly
odd reasons and you got banned automatically.

Also I'm testing a theory that FB will at some point just tag me as an 'ad
hater', because any ads that show in the timeline I mark as 'don't show me
again', reason 'not interested', purely because I don't like the feature.

------
danielsju6
I just tested the water with Facebook Ads for my startup AppBlade.com as well,
budgeted some $500. Did my best to target mobile application developers, this
was my exact experience. Thousands of clicks, not a single sign-up. Also the
CPC was higher than Google for our keywords.

Google in the same timeframe has had a measurable ROI and is converting at
~10% for us; even mobile clicks.

This is just data, it's worth experimenting for yourself but I definitely feel
that something sketch is going on. Make sure to use utm_ codes and something
like MixPanel so you can track the originating source for your paying
customers.

------
chromaton
I've had good luck with Facebook ads. I think the targeting is key. If you
target people who are already familiar with your brand, it helps a lot. You
can target, for example people who already "Like" your page. And you can
target their friends as well. Facebook also has a feature that lets you serve
ads to people by their e-mail address.

If you stick with those, you're pretty much guaranteed to be targeting real
people, and not bots or fraudsters.

Also, learn to use the Facebook Power Editor, as you get a lot more control
over how your posts appear, how your ads work, etc.

------
aelaguiz
A CTR of 0.4% is absolutely abysmal for a newsfeed ad and the fact that the
author thinks that it is "quite high for an ad like this" makes me think he
has no idea what he's talking about.

------
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..

------
spamross
Desktop and iPhone traffic are better converting than Android traffic, so
advertisers bid higher to display on these platforms.

For this type of website, he should be bidding desktop - will pay maybe 40%
more per click, but much better site engagement.

FB Ads still have a long way before the tools are as robust as Adwords, but
learn the platform and run more tests before you trash it. Unless you're going
for something ultra-targeted it's rare to nail a CPC platform on the first go.

------
DeusExMachina
Related:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7211514](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7211514)

------
viggity
I think it highly depends upon how you're targeting and what kind of product
your selling. I've got a friend who is using fb CPC for physical products
(that includes a concierge service) and my jaw hit the floor when he told me
the ROI. Admittedly, they have a pretty high revenue per customer, but my
point stands that it depends on what you're selling.

------
rubyn00bie
So to sum up the article: advertising in an information cesspool renders bad
results.

Call me a hater, I am one, and completely revel in the privilege :)

------
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!

------
hagbardgroup
Oh boy. Another one of these posts.

While you can self-serve advertising, it is not necessarily a good idea, in
the same way that representing yourself in court is not necessarily a good
idea.

Facebook cares much less about fraud than Google does, because FB has been
under much less external pressure from shareholders to do it. That is not to
say that various Google properties do not have fraud issues still. This is
reflected in the price differentials.

After all, entire IPOs built around Adsense fraud occurred in the mid-2000s.
There have been countless small businesses built around link fraud. It is
quite likely that some of the major media names built on social traffic are
also based in part upon defrauding social advertisers, because as of yet, few
have cared about it, and many investors will just reward companies based on
trivially faked traffic metrics.

But guess what? Circulation fraud is a problem that has been with us for over
a century in media. Some combination of the price system, auditing, direct
response ad testing, corporate incompetence, the good ol' boy network, and
other methods have kept it from making advertising either totally useless or
totally risk free.

Despite this, here are some issues that could help you advertise better in the
future:

1\. This is not a good ad. The copy is bad. The illustration is bad. The call
to action is unwieldy. The logo placement is haphazard. The headline is Wrong.
The human figure is in the wrong position. The button placement is haphazard.
You would be better off plagiarizing ads from Mint and swapping out the logos
and colors. If you want to keep the lady accountant mascot, put her to the
left of whatever copy you want the visitor to read, and make her look at it.

2\. The demographics you selected might as well have been at random. Market
research is not throwing a dart at the entire planet and targeting whatever
the dart landed on.

3\. FB != Adwords in the same way that a newspaper != the yellow pages != a
niche interest magazine != radio != flyers != e-mail spam != direct mail != a
catalog and so on and so on and so on.

4\. Your budget is so small that it barely qualifies as a test campaign. You
ran a test campaign and discovered a hazard to avoid. That is the point of the
early tests. If you run out of budget before you can discover a profitable
marketing strategy, your tests will uncover that you are out of business.

In this case, you are dazzling yourself with your measurements because it is
easier for you to do so than it is to think at a higher level about your
objectives and the methods that you want to use to achieve them given your
resources. You could call this Silicon Valley Degenerative Metrics Dementia.
Sadly, there is no known cure for SVDMD.

I could personally care less if Facebook goes out of business, but as long as
real people with wallets continue to use it, it will have some utility to
advertisers, so long as they put forth at least some good faith effort to
control their bot/fraud/misclick problems.

Considering some of the things that I have seen with Facebook, I am not
confident that they really care, because many investors will reward them when
they count bot users (or human users living in third world conditions) as if
they were humans with first world bankrolls. There is no comparable Matt Cutts
figure for Facebook. I think the real money on the platform, like was the case
with Google for a long time, is on the criminal side.

Hopefully some short sellers are paying attention to these stories, because
terror is the only thing that will induce Facebook to stop its absurd
gyrations on the product side and actually police their platform. Short
sellers can orchestrate a PR campaign and either pressure Facebook to start
caring or can just make a lot of money by torpedoing the firm through
aggressively publicizing its failures.

All that being said, I hope that this is helpful to you, and I am glad that
more businesses are learning that online advertising is difficult, complex,
and risky (like advertising everywhere and always in all mediums over all time
periods using all sorts of technologies).

~~~
jseliger
_All that being said, I hope that this is helpful to you_

I'm not the OP, but WRT point number one, what in your mind would qualify as
better copy, and better a better call to action, and logo?

~~~
hagbardgroup
Not qualified to comment on the logo design.

It's just in a haphazard location. Humans read left to right and are attracted
to faces. The logo is off there in the lower left corner. The lady is to the
right of the copy. If this ad were in Hebrew, that would be fine, because that
language reads right to left. English goes left to right.

'Better' copy is what tests better with the market. I do not know what is
better. I have inklings on what direction to move in to improve the campaign.

I would test the current image copy vs. 'Join the 100,000+ people like you who
have saved money with BudgetSimple.'

Body copy test: You can become financially secure using our free budget
planning service.

Button test: 'I want my free budget' or 'Teach me to save money' \-- 'learn
more' is too generic.

Like most ads for tech of most kinds this is a little too heavy on the
features and not enough on the 'what's in it for me?' No one cares about
'getting a better understanding of their finances' except accountants. No one
gets excited about budgets except for politicians eager to spend money that
belongs to other people.

Individuals want more money. They want safety. They want financial security.
They want control over their own life.

If the OP wants to run a female-targed campaign, it'd be a great opportunity
to pose as the authority and quote a magazine article about the problems that
some women have with credit card debt or general financial planning, and
reference that in the ad. This just comes to mind because a friend of mine
wrote a feature for Cosmo on this topic a couple years ago. Ads that do not
come off as pushy and instead present themselves as trustworthy, useful
information can win over the trust of the target audience better.

If it is really just Oz, then Oz up the ad. Australians would care more about
joining 20,000 other Australians just like them than 100,000 Yanks, for
example.

There is a dude who runs a budgeting business off of Something Awful banner
ads that I remember from a few years back that uses goon jargon to establish
rapport with the target audience. He succeeded by matching the tone and
content of his message to the readers in the right context.

------
hazelnut
You should try out the Facebook Power Editor for Facebook ads. There you have
the option to target just desktop users.

It is a bit more complex but you will get more possibilities with this editor:
[https://www.facebook.com/ads/manage/powereditor/](https://www.facebook.com/ads/manage/powereditor/)

------
AznHisoka
Why are you wasting your money sending mobile users? Even mobile web users are
useless as most are drive-by visitors that might not get the FULL impression
they'll get through a desktop browser.

Even if you optimize for mobile web, I'm sure they won't experience the true
power and wow-ness of your app unless they visit it thru a desktop.

------
jsonne
I'm a huge fan of only using FB for retargeting. You know you aren't targeting
spammers, and there's some sort of legitimate interest there. The only risk
here is some cannibalization and duplication, but if you use some higher end
analytics and pay attention to it that shouldn't be too much of an issue.

~~~
hagbardgroup
This is basically the correct way to go about it when you have a small budget.

------
arbuge
Paying for traffic by the click/impression/<anything other than conversion> is
the most dangerous thing to do on the internet if you don't fully trust the
integrity of the payee or the quality of its network.

------
nigo
For my travel startup DealScoopr, we saw similar similar results from Facebook
CPC Ads - low conversion rates, mostly Android traffic. Google Adwords turned
out to be much more effective.

------
amaks
"First, note that Facebook seemed to have charged me for non-unique users
clicking the ad, as well as myself clicking the ad."

This sounds like a bug (or a feature, i.e. fraud).

------
bwb
Ya we stopped all ads as well, they just had shitty results. And most of the
likes for those campaigns were from people who looked fake.

------
joshdance
Try both, double down on what works. Why wouldn't you try fb ads? Many
companies have success, see if you can be one.

------
skavish
we had very similar experience with facebook ads and stopped it completely.
here is our post on that [http://blog.animatron.com/post/79877876767/the-
mysterious-ca...](http://blog.animatron.com/post/79877876767/the-mysterious-
case-of-the-lost-facebook-link-clicks)

------
danielweber
I grepped here and the target page for CPC but I didn't get a critical
question answered:

 _What is Facebook CPC??_

------
joanojr
Lol paying for marketing. Go find your customers, it's free.

------
southflorida
with the traffic this cat is getting now for running a crap campaign on FB i
think ill do a bogus writeup on how bad my campaign was put together and put
it in HN too :/

------
pyrrhotech
I'm loving my FB short. What a terribly managed company. So frivolous with
their cash, and immature overall

------
interstitial
I'm not saying Facebook is astroturfing, but there seems to be a lot "new"
accounts when these thing come up.

------
notastartup

        How can Facebook fix this? They need to work like Google.
    

but they simply cannot/unwilling to do this because they are NOT google,
otherwise they'd already have done this. I think come earnings report, they
will have a lot to answer to, possibly lawsuit or investigation happening.

------
whatevsbro
> _I think half of the Facebook business model is based on people accidentally
> clicking things_ .. _How can Facebook fix this?_

\- Why fix something that's not broken? It's working exactly as Facebook
intended it.

------
mpeg
Why would you send mobile FB clicks to your website? Send them to a mobile app
on mobile (!!!)

You can target only desktop users, if you want to send people to a website

~~~
bigbugbag
I assume you are a mobile app developer looking for a job.

I don't know a single user who enjoy being sent to a mobile app instead of the
website.

If being hated by your users is not enough of a deterrent, then factor in the
cost of building said apps on mobile platforms and maintaining them through
time and new smartphones versions while having a website versus simply having
a website.

Unless you're a big corp with tons of money to throw out the windows, the wise
path is a well thought and designed website.

~~~
mpeg
Not really, I used to work at one of the main Facebook SPMDs so I'm saying
that out of having seen the performance of mobile app campaigns on advertisers
that spend $100k+ a day on fb.

I don't see why you would be hated by your users? The ad makes it super clear
that it's an app, it takes you straight to the app store where you can read
reviews / description / screenshots and then you just install it.

I think you are making the mistake of thinking that the average user is like
you, most people will just want to get the app ASAP when they see an ad for
something that seems useful; not having to navigate a website which doesn't
have a mobile version (try budgetsimple.com in an android phone, it's
impossible to use !)

------
fredsanford
The moral of this story?

Don't do business with scumbags.

Facebook is professional scumbaggery.

Just a taste

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook#Privacy_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook#Privacy_concerns)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook#Data_min...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook#Data_mining)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook#Inabilit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook#Inability_to_voluntarily_terminate_accounts)

[http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/06/03/facebook-ceo-mark-
zuc...](http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/06/03/facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-
denial/)

[http://www.socialmedianews.com.au/zuckerberg-in-trouble-
over...](http://www.socialmedianews.com.au/zuckerberg-in-trouble-over-leaked-
im-chat/)

[http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/it-security/why-you-
should-...](http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/it-security/why-you-should-never-
trust-facebook/4708/)

------
jyu
People with no idea of how to run ad campaigns should not be bad mouthing X ad
platform.

There are so many ways this post is wrong. First, a .4% CTR for a newsfeed ad
sucks. That means either your demo targeting sucks, or your ad sucks, or both.
Second, if android visits don't convert, change targeting to desktop visitors
only. Third, traffic sources behave differently. You can't jump to the
conclusion that they're scamming you just because one traffic source worked
and another one didn't. Another possibility is that you haven't tried hard
enough.

