1) The author made a Facebook page for a fictional product that was rather obviously silly - downloading bagels - and talks about it as if it were a real product.
2) The FB ads campaign ran with an absolutely horrid targeting set:
> I chose the United States, the UK, Russia, India, Egypt, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. I narrowed it down slightly by targeting under 45-year-olds interested in cookery and consumer electronics, but was told that would still give me a potential audience of 112 million customers.
This is completely silly. Trying to target 112 million people means you won't be able to draw any sort of conclusion or get valid data - nor expect a meaningful response - without spending tens of thousands. If he wanted a response in the US or UK, he should have started there and focused on it to the exclusion of all else.
3) His statement "it seems that Facebook adverts can be very effective in generating interest in your business from certain countries but not in the US or the UK" is borne through no real testing or time. He spent less than $100 - you cannot draw any sort of conclusion from that information.
He got just enough data to write his article and jump on the fast moving "Facebook ads suck" train. If he did this for a living he'd be fired, if he was a small business man he'd learn his lesson quickly. The same as it's ever been with any ad medium, internet, periodical, etc..
Exactly. It's a news organization. You have to milk that trend while it's there and rack in those pageviews. This wasn't a scientific academic study, it was a marketing ploy with a pre-conceived result in mind. Honestly I might "like" it as a result sheer quirkiness, or as a result of curiosity it would inspire.
Your #1 is a good point. Since the only value of this "product" is that it's a joke, the number of "likes" he got in different countries could just be a reflection on how funny people from different cultures think "virtual bagels" are, and not an indication of any commercially significant behavior.
Or, users in the U.S. might just be so jaded from having seen too many joke products advertised on Facebook that they don't bother liking them anymore, while they may still be a novelty in Egypt.
Or rather than making tortured assumptions that Egyptians are especially tickled by VirtualBagel, you could use Occam's Razor. It is more likely that "Ahmed Ronaldo" is an indiscriminate clicker than that some obscure aspect of Arab history makes Virtual Bagels especially more funny to Egyptians than to Brits.
I agree, this entire article is a waste of time. How can you draw any kind of blanket conclusions from such a contrived experiment? At the very least talk to some actual businesses and see what their opinions are.
Depends on whether his data points were cherry picked. We don't know if they are or not, so we assume he jumped to conclusions. Maybe.
If his sample set, consisting solely of Ahmed Ronaldo, is representative of the rest of the people 'liking' his page, I'd say he has a point - and there's something fishy going on that warrants further investigation.
OTOH, if Ahmed is one of Facebook's 1.5% 'undesirable' users, then I'd say I agree with you, and that India and SA is just full of people who love virtual bagels.
1) The author made a Facebook page for a fictional product that was rather obviously silly - downloading bagels - and talks about it as if it were a real product.
2) The FB ads campaign ran with an absolutely horrid targeting set:
> I chose the United States, the UK, Russia, India, Egypt, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. I narrowed it down slightly by targeting under 45-year-olds interested in cookery and consumer electronics, but was told that would still give me a potential audience of 112 million customers.
This is completely silly. Trying to target 112 million people means you won't be able to draw any sort of conclusion or get valid data - nor expect a meaningful response - without spending tens of thousands. If he wanted a response in the US or UK, he should have started there and focused on it to the exclusion of all else.
3) His statement "it seems that Facebook adverts can be very effective in generating interest in your business from certain countries but not in the US or the UK" is borne through no real testing or time. He spent less than $100 - you cannot draw any sort of conclusion from that information.