
The Great Facebook “Boost”: How Click Farms Make Facebook's Paid Promos a Scam - OrwellianChild
http://www.greysquall.com/2016/06/wasting-money-advertising-on-facebook.html
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adambratt
I've spent a good amount of money on Facebook ads in Asia (>$300k) and while
there may be some fraud, there's definitely a completely different pattern of
Facebook use in some countries. I think what you're observing is cultural
differences in Facebook use, not fraud.

It's incredibly hard to get people to like or engage with your posts in
Korea/Japan unless you have a ton of social proof already. This is definitely
a cultural aspect as no one wants to be the first or one of just a few to
engage with the post. In general, I've found these two countries to be more
expensive than the US for getting likes even though it's about 1/3 the cost
for getting post clicks.

Meanwhile, in Indonesia/Vietnam/Philippines it's incredibly easy as many
people just "Like" everything in their feed as they scroll down. I've talked
to several people from these countries about Facebook usage and they say it's
their way of marking that they've seen a post. It's funny but I frequently get
more likes than clicks on my posts that I run in these countries. Some may be
fraud, but after seeing how people actually use Facebook in these countries
I'm inclined to believe it's legit.

One of the hacks that works well for me is to take something I want to run as
an ad in Korea or Japan and run it in Indonesia first. $2 for a post
engagement campaign will get me around 500 likes. That seems to be enough to
tip the scale in Korea/Japan and get them to start liking it en masse as well.
It's crazy but my like rate goes up around 30x in Korea when I use this
strategy of pre-seeding likes.

Anyways, going back to this author's post, the Facebook algorithm seems to be
trained to follow what works and gets you the cheapest engagement rate. This
is why I never ever run a single ad set with multiple countries and interests
as it will just all end up saturated on the one that starts out working best.
You should be running separate ad-sets for each country/interest, doing it any
other way is a COMPLETE WASTE. Do not run Facebook ads like this.

Furthermore, these really don't look like spam accounts. These look like real
Southeast Asian FB accounts. Most of my friends in that part of the world have
very similar looking Facebook accounts with a shit ton of random
friends/likes.

~~~
OrwellianChild
_One of the hacks that works well for me is to take something I want to run as
an ad in Korea or Japan and run it in Indonesia first. $2 for a post
engagement campaign will get me around 500 likes. That seems to be enough to
tip the scale in Korea /Japan and get them to start liking it en masse as
well. It's crazy but my like rate goes up around 30x in Korea when I use this
strategy of pre-seeding likes._

Interesting that, if we accept the click-farm premise of the article, your
hack puts the farms in _your_ service to get the initial likes, and then drive
the kind of engagement you are actually seeking (in the crowd-influenced
countries like Japan/Korea)...

In an environment like this, where the "likes" themselves are suspect, what
counts as a success story for FB promotion for the work that you do?

~~~
adambratt
I focus mainly on driving clicks to both content and eCommerce. The actual
likes and comments on a post don't really matter much to me but it does help
for increasing the CTR

------
itake
Anecdote time:

I just got back from VN after a 2 month stay. Culturally, the people there
really like liking and growing their social network. I was shocked at how
active many of the people I met while traveling there were active on Facebook.
People, that I knew spoke 0 english, would like many of my text only English
posts.

I took a photo of one girl in a costume and she posted it on Facebook. One day
later, she had over 600 likes. Based off of these experiences, I think 90% of
Facebook liking is done by VN girls lol.

She had tagged me as the photographer, and suddenly I got about 20 friend
requests.

I would not be surprised at all that these are real girls clicking on your
ads.

TL;DR: Based on my experiences of living in VN, I think those likes were done
by social-media crazed vietnamese.

~~~
rasz_pl
>People, that I knew spoke 0 english, would like many of my text only English
posts

so what you are saying advertising on FB for asian markets is pretty much
throwing money away, and any engagement stats are meaningless trash.

~~~
lmm
Gresham's Law is at play here. If you advertise for likes, guess what? You'll
get likes! If you want a different kind of "engagement", you have to make sure
that's what you measure.

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jrbapna
Be careful with Facebook advertising. If you're not, you'll waste a lot of
money very quickly.

Some guidelines:

1) Change your targeting to reduce fraud clicks. As an example, you can choose
to target only users of your audience who use Gmail. In the U.S. at least,
this works because Google makes it very difficult to set up fake accounts in
mass due to phone verification. There are many other targeting options as well
that will significantly reduce fraud.

2) Always use the hack mentioned by adambratt. Your posts will show much more
ROI when there is social proof.

3) Focus on post quality and virality. Posts that have low interactions are
just going to be difficult to show any sort of ROI. The power of Facebook is
when you combine the organic WITH the paid reach. The paid helps you initially
get in front of the appropriate audience, and then when your post is shared
and liked it will organically show up in the newsfeed of their friends and
followers. This is where the the true power of Facebook advertising lies.

Now personally, I've seen much more ROI with Google than with Facebook.
Search/purchase intent is the differentiator: visitors are coming to your site
with a goal in mind. With Facebook ads, however, I've run campaigns where 70%
or more of the incoming traffic bounces within a few seconds. In my experience
it's much more difficult to get quality traffic from FB, but far from
impossible.

~~~
GreySquall
Thanks for chiming in. A few comments regarding your guidelines.

1) Change your targeting to reduce fraud clicks. \- I did, and I actually had
M, the Facebook Global Marketing Specialist, comment that my targeting was
solid. If this becomes a game of guess-and-check, then that's borderline
gambling. I had a pretty specific target group, and that got me nowhere.

Also, whenever FB responds with "you need to improve your targeting," I
interpret that as "stop sucking, and then you'll be awesome."

2) Always use the hack mentioned by adambratt. \- I incidentally tried that
with one of my previous ads. No luck. Try try again?

3) Focus on post quality and virality. \- This sounds like a bit of 1 and 2
put together. Again, when FB gave me this canned response, it started to sound
like "stop sucking, and then you'll be awesome." My messaging was both clean
and direct. Even for the Japan market (with specific targeting), I wrote IN
JAPANESE "whether your on the train, at home, or in school, listen to my
podcast to help you improve your English listening skills." Again, nada.

Do you have any specific anecdotes with your own business and FB advertising
that you could share?

Thanks for mentioning Google, I'll research it to see how it could help me.

~~~
jrbapna
Hi, unfortunately I've stopped Facebook advertising altogether and have not
been active in it for a while. The key takeaway I learned with
marketing/advertising is that its equally an art as it is a science. It's a
different mindset than what I'm used to (you could say I'm a programmer). This
combination of art and science is what makes marketing effectively on
platforms like FB so difficult.

I can understand your frustration with FB. I was just as frustrated when I
dove in. Good luck to you.

PS: It absolutely is very close to borderline gambling / borderline day-
trading. However it's NOT, and that minute difference is where the arbitrage
can be found. Cheers!

------
Magicstatic
Unfortunately this is nothing new. Facebook advertising has long been seen as
garbage in many respects, especially when it comes to "liking" a page.

After $1,000 spent, I would estimate over 75% of all the accounts that liked
my clients page were fake. Pretty inexcusable.

~~~
GreySquall
Indeed, but the fact that this problem persists raises a few questions, not
limited to:

1) WHY does this problem still exist, considering all of the resources at FB's
disposal? 2) Where do these click/like farms come from, and what's in it for
them? 3) Why does FB only do sweeps annually? Why not daily?

As you might've read in the Updates section of the post, I came to the
conclusion that these click/like farms, although not supported by FB, are
still a pleasant surprise for FB, as FB vis-a-vis these farms TRICK
unsuspecting low budget ad buyers into thinking that they're still getting
something for their money.

In other words: * Big corp with multimillion dollar ad budget = we put your ad
in front of your desired audience, and you get lots of quality engagement. *
Those with smaller ad budgets = we put your ad in front of garbage accounts,
and you get garbage engagement. It's still engagement, though, so be happy
about that.

That, or (and prep your tin foil hats for this one) one of FB's business
models is to covertly financially support these click/like farms so that they
encourage ad buyers like myself to keep spending $5 here and $10 there on
advertising with the belief that it's actually working for them.

~~~
ericabiz
I don't know the answer to 1 or 3 because I'm not a FB insider, but I can
answer #2 for you:

> 2) Where do these click/like farms come from, and what's in it for them?

All you have to do is go on Fiverr and see people advertising Facebook likes
for $5. The bots like a bunch of other pages and posts to simulate "real human
activity", then the sellers direct all the bots to "like" a page that their
client paid them to like. Rinse and repeat.

~~~
kesor
And in order for these fake accounts not to look "too" suspicious, they have
general activity like clicking on ads and other things on these accounts. Most
newsfeeds of real people are not very public, so all these accounts are left
with is clicking on public newsfeeds (of celebrities, etc) and clicking on
ads. Boom - account is not "abandoned" anymore.

~~~
yohoho22
And that's all it is?

Because this guy is obviously not a click-farm customer, and Facebook is
presumably not paying them to click, either. They're just spam clicking the
"boosted" posts Facebook puts in front of them to seem more legitimate?

~~~
dilemma
The parent is saying that these clickfarm accounts are randomly liking stuff
so as to look like normal users. If a group of 10,000 accounts only like
things from 5 different pages, the farming would be easy to detect.

------
randartie
Running ads is difficult. There's clearly people spending huge amounts of
money through online advertising and this happens because they are able to get
results (understanding what works and what doesn't work on each platform).

Once they figure out how to get the results they need, they can put a dollar
into Facebook and get more than a dollar out. Then they just turn the budget
knob to 11.

Point is, those who make posts saying that Facebook is scamming people are
just dipping their toes into advertising and will more than likely fail at
first. Advertising online takes some investment to find out what works for
your situation.

------
scottmcleod
Maybe you have to practice and experiment to learn advertising channels. Or
one of the other 30 variables that could have gone wrong here?

As far as I've seen every ad channel has spammy/scammy/bot like engagements
but as long as they are factored into the cost its OK. Google search this same
idea applied to every ad network.

Mis alignment of goal, ad channel and creative here, not a shitty platform.

~~~
GreySquall
The parts I didn't include in the post due to length were the previous ads
(boosted posts, promote page, etc) I created and paid for before this very
last one that I wrote about on my blog.

Those previous ads raised enough red flags for me to pay very close attention
to my last one. That's not to say that I didn't pay close attention to the
others; I was tracking data and seeing how well Japan-only targeted ads (that
included both Japanese and English language) performed against Vietnam-only
targeted ads, and how well those two performed against ads that targeted
Japan, Vietnam, and Korea all at the same time.

The data collected and differences among the three were enough for me to
conclude that something foul was afoot.

Sure, there may be 30 other variables that could've gone wrong here. However,
M's verbal (via phone) approval of how I created my ad and crafted my
targeting and the consistently large amounts of garbage accounts from VN leads
me to believe that this entire thing was a waste.

Furthermore, again, FB makes it so easy for new FB page owners to believe that
they can drop $5 here and $10 there to promote anything--a post, their page,
and even their website. I gather that FB WANTS these page owners to pay these
small amounts 30 times to play trial-and-error, even though doing so still
only puts these page owners 1) up against larger budgets, and 2) in front of
garbage accounts that are only cleaned up once a year in FB's annual sweep.

------
Black-Plaid
Advertising with them has actually been shown to be detrimental. The
Veritasium YouTube channel has bit on this.

~~~
GreySquall
Indeed. I actually included (with links and credit) both of Veritasium's
videos in the post.

The rest of my post explains in detail my own experience with this problem,
including data, screenshots, and my own email correspondence with Facebook's
Global Marketing Specialists.

------
Xyik
Likes should never be the measure of success when advertising on Facebook.

~~~
arbuge
Indeed, especially in this age when even authentic likes are arguably almost
useless - any post on Facebook nowadays seems to need boosting to reach more
than a negligible fraction of a page's likes.

But it's definitely worse when the likes aren't even authentic. Boosting posts
to reach fake likes is a total waste of money, on top of the original waste to
procure such likes.

------
kevinpet
Something looks fishy, but the author has some unreasonable expectations.

Specifically, if FB is optimizing for click through rate, you cannot expect an
even distribution across the demographics. You aren't paying enough to
saturate all channels, so you should expect to be mainly shown to whichever
segment converts best for your ad.

~~~
GreySquall
Thanks for chiming in.

What were the expectations you took away from my post?

"cannot expect an even distribution across the demographics" \- I mentioned
that if there were even a modicum of distribution. I was driving home the idea
that 1) if we assume a tiny level of distribution across the three
geographies, then I should see something from JP and KR. But, that didn't
happen; and 2) if targeting multiple geos is, in fact, ineffective, then the
option to target multiple geos shouldn't even been an option if FB really
wanted people to be successful with their ads. Furthermore, I actually DID
target a single geo, and even THAT didn't work.

"You aren't paying enough to saturate all channel" \- NOW you've gotten to one
of the main cruxes of my post. As I wrote on the post an in a few replies
below.

The point I want to drive home is that there is a segment of the population
doing business online and, for better or worse, including FB as part of their
ad strategy. FB knows this and makes the entire ad process CHEAP and EASY,
knowing full well that these ad buyers are going to receive crap for
engagement. FB makes it so easy for new FB page owners to believe that they
can drop $5 here and $10 there to promote anything--a post, their page, and
even their website. I gather that FB WANTS these page owners to pay these
small amounts 30 times to play trial-and-error, even though doing so still
only puts these page owners 1) up against larger budgets, and 2) in front of
garbage accounts that are only cleaned up once a year in FB's annual sweep.

If it's a matter of paying enough, then why bother encouraging people to pay
$5 here and $10 there to promote knowing that it'll be a waste?

------
matznerd
More importantly to me is how does the agent "M" have 6,000 friends when the
limit is 5,000? And why the hell does FB still keep a limit like that for
accounts that are phone-verified and known to be real etc...

FB, it is time to raise the friend limit! I have heard of many complaints from
people with max friends that they have to delete someone to add a new friend,
kind of messed up!

~~~
ceejayoz
I think 5,000 friends is the messed up part, not the limit. Humans can't
process that many friendships. Why not just have a page if you're blasting out
to that many people?

------
kesor
I have tried using Facebook Ads in Israel on several occasions, strictly
targeting to a very specific demographic: Lives in Israel, knows Hebrew, knows
English, Age: 18-35, Interests: various technology buzzwords.

Each time I got a (very) large amount of likes from Palestinian and other
Arabs who most definitely don't know Hebrew, or English, or interested in
tech. Most of their profiles have thousands of friends, and everything is
written in Arabic and not English/Hebrew.

For the last 4 years I tried putting small amounts of money to see if the
situation has changed, and each time the result was very similar.

I didn't go and talked to Facebook support about it, since that would be a
waste of my time imho, and not do any good. The support engineers with canned
responses most probably cannot do anything to change the situation, or even if
they have ideas for improvement those would be drowned in the huge FB ocean of
outsourced employees.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>Each time I got a (very) large amount of likes from Palestinian and other
Arabs who most definitely don't know Hebrew //

Isn't that fraud on behalf of Facebook. You're paying them to present the ads
to people who have characteristic A, but they instead show them to other
people and charge you as if they'd done what you asked? Or are all those
people saying in their profiles that they speak Hebrew? [Which makes it just
people lying and not fraud at all].

~~~
Hondor
Maybe FB thinks they speak Hebrew because they liked lots of other Hebrew
language posts too. Could be a vicious cycle. These like-trigger-happy Arabs
probably drown out the real Israelis simply because they like more posts.

------
dredmorbius
That particular Blogger theme (and other dynamic themes) are among the most
reading-hostile abominations foisted on the Web.

I've come to appreciate the two-gear overlay that pops up in advance: they
tell me it's save, and a good idea, to close my browser immediately.

(On platforms with JS blocking enabled, all that shows is a blank page. This
is also an improvement.)

~~~
GreySquall
Thanks for the feedback. Noted and updated with a better theme and format :)

~~~
dredmorbius
Thanks, that _is_ an improvement.

I'd be happier still with something solidly black for body text, and a larger
font.

Blogger also breaks Firefox's Reader Mode, which is unfortunate.

------
niftich
Even if the accounts behind the likes are 'fake', isn't the page/brand still
getting exposure mindshare? Namely, real users will see that your brand has N
likes, where N is hopefully a number that resonates with real people who'd be
interested in your content. It creates an aura of legitimacy in their minds,
which says 'someone else also likes this'.

There is a thriving, if questionable, market in fake Twitter followers, for
example. People wouldn't buy fake followers if it weren't effective.

~~~
GreySquall
The Veritasium videos on my post provide a decent counterpoint to the idea
that there's a potential "credibility" upside of having a bunch of fake
accounts like your page.

For example, let's say you have a mix of 90% fake likes, and 10% real/organic
likes, presumable because they saw your page, saw all of the likes, and
thought, "I want to be in on this."

Now, let's say that I post something, and chances are that it's only going to
be seen by 100 people. This means that whatever I post will be put in front of
90 garbage accounts and in front of only 10 people who I actually want to
target. Unfortunately I can't target based on fake vs. organic accounts.

If I want to increase that 10ppl number, then I'll have to pay more to
increase the visibility across the entire population. Let's say I pay $10 to
get 200 people to see what I've posted, then 180 fake accounts see it, and
only 20 real/organic people see it.

Unsuspecting businesses of any kind, and especially small ones, can't afford
to waste money on this kind of mess.

~~~
niftich
I appreciate your explanation. Let's go with your numbers, and say 90% of
likes are bots, while 10% are real. You're getting much less value from your
ad spend than you would if 100% of the likes were real, but so is everyone
else who's running ads.

Meanwhile, the 10% real people have friends who could potentially like your
brand organically as they see it in their feed. These second-degree-of-
separation people, who have not seen your ad, will first be exposed to your
brand through their friends' likes. You're building mindshare, however minor.
In the small chance they decide to check out your page, having a believable
number of likes already on your page is beneficial in winning their attention
-- and interaction. The post that talks about 'bootstrapping' your likes with
SE Asian users who are more like-prone to entice the Japanese/Korean likes is
making the same point.

There is no doubt that bot-likes are much less useful than real-person likes,
but they're not useless.

~~~
GreySquall
You raise a completely fair point, and conceptually I agree with you.

Again, this entire example rests on the assumption that bots DO exist, which
it sounds like they do based on everyone's comments so far.

The point I want to drive home is that there is a segment of the population
doing business online and, for better or worse, including FB as part of their
ad strategy. FB knows this and makes the entire ad BUYING process cheap and
easy, knowing FULL well that these ad buyers are going to receive crap for
engagement.

Before confirming my purchase, if FB gave me a warning saying something along
the lines of "based on your targeting and how much you're paying for this ad,
about 10% of your engagement will be from real people," then at the very least
FB has both acknowledged the risk and done something to manage my
expectations. Perhaps we wouldn't even been having this exchange.

But, FB doesn't. They keep quiet about this, allowing the farms to exist to
make it seem as those unsuspecting business owners are actually getting what
they paid for. That's the scam in all of this.

------
siquick
Can someone explain how the 'click farms' are getting money from this?

~~~
GreySquall
For the life of me, I have no idea.

I replied above in another person's comment that it is no longer out of the
real of possibility that one of FB's business models is to covertly
financially support these click/like farms so that they encourage ad buyers
like myself to keep spending $5 here and $10 there on advertising with the
belief that it's actually working for them.

Pay some group of kids $100 in VN ($100 goes a LONG way there) to create and
manage garbage accounts, and then like the smallest and newest of FB pages
that pay the $5 or $10 to advertise so as to make it seem as though that
person's ad is successful.

On a side note, isn't it strange that these farms seem to come from developing
countries/areas?

Why wouldn't FB work harder to delete these fake accounts, especially if 1)
they've been called out on it, and 2) FB page owners who have advertised in
the past are pissed off about it.

If FB sweep deletes these accounts once a year, as both M and J claim, then
why couldn't they increase the frequency?

------
personjerry
Doesn't Facebook allow you to "target" to whom your ads go to? Doesn't this
basically solve the problem, because you should be going for a narrow market
anyway?

~~~
kesor
The post explains exactly how this doesn't work in reality.

