We were successfully running retargeting ads on Facebook by uploading our customers email addresses. We were getting lots of conversions cheaply. Initially CPM was $1.70, then a few months later it was $4, now 6 months later it's $9. At this point it became unviable.
I spoke to our account manager at Facebook and he confirmed my suspicions. Every time one of our customers converts though our ads, Facebook assigns a high value to that user, since that user purchased something through a FB ad. So now I have more competition to get in front of our existing customer from our competition who our customer is not interested in. FUCK THAT. Moral of the story DO NOT tell Facebook about conversions from your existing customers. Keep that info to yourself.
Here is a catch 22. In a sufficiently competitive environment, "it's profitable to do X" quickly becomes "It's essential to do X."
Here is a contrived example that doesn't reflect reality:
There are 10 banks in a market. The banks have a range of new online services. Adoption of as many of these services as possible is the key to success. A viable strategy is to retarget customers (segmented by income/family status and other things that make certain services relevant) and tell them about various services. This increases the adoption of value add services substantially.
If one bank takes a moral stance, they either need to live with lower adoption of their services or spend more via less effective advertising channels.
If Facebook advertising is good enough, that one bank would go out of business, have its management replaced by shareholders or get bought out by one of the others.
This probably doesn't apply to banks, but there are businesses where effective online advertising is the difference between success and failure. All the tourist/hotel/flight booking sites, for example.
In that scenario, not violating your users' privacy would become a differentiator for your product, something you could market. Ever noticed how much advertising in highly competitive businesses seem to hinge on ever more strained explanations of how one product is different from the other?
Except, of course (and this is probably the ugly truth) - as long as Facebook doesn't do creepy/embarrassing things or otherwise actively annoy their customers, the vast, vast majority of customers just doesn't care. And then there isn't really a problem.
Privacy is very much a market for lemons. Lets take two scenarios and see which is more profitable.
1. Respect privacy.
2. Carefully mislead the customer to believe the company respects user privacy in a way their fuzzy morals tell them isn't a "lie," bury the truth in the fine print. Lose the handful of customers both technically savvy, principled and capable enough to not use the product while profiting from abusing the privacy of their users.
Your second paragraph explains it. As long as companies are sufficiently non-creepy in their privacy invasion (or at least APPEAR to be such), then the only people who will care are cypherpunks and privacy nerds, who don't form a large part of the market. The "masses" usually go for the latest shiny toy.
You're not allowed to break my facetious example by adding your own facetious information! :)
This is true in some cases, false in others. If you have 8 years worth of emails, that's what you have. If you want to segment your data based on info in your DB (people with & without a mortgage), you will probably need to use emails.
In any case, you are still leaking data. FB now know that your customer is John Lennon.
The email in this case is somewhat trivial. It serves as a userID. If you are super concerned with giving away an email, there are services like LiveRamp that can translate that into an anonymous audience ID for use with your DMP and/or DSP so you target the ID without handing over the email.
In case anybody else has no idea what Ashley Madison is: it's an online dating service that seems to be focussed on people who are already in a relationship and cheat on their partners. Or something like that.
I agree that the privacy violation is bad as it is, but I don't see how this is a good example for why it's bad.
I've been doing it for years without problem, it's a lot easier than you'd first think. Markov chain makes the leader of the email address, domain is selected from a random pool.
For things I care about the domains are owned by me, for things I consider spammy I have a round robin of afraid.org aliases which are for all intents and purposes disposable. They are very effective for this sort of thing, but you would be wise to do your research into the history of the domain you're piggybacking to be sure it's not going to disappear.
This trick only works because it's not that popular. If a substantial amount of people started doing it, firms would simply start removing the extra +info that you pad to your address.
This could potentially be solved by using alias emails instead of just adding a tag to your normal e-mail address. I can imagine gmail offering a quick "generate alias" button that creates a EkTG522f3fhgtfh@gmail.com address that instantly forwards to your real address. Obviously you can delete this alias if you find that you are being spammed.
You set up a catch-all on your domain, and just make up whatever@domain.tld whenever you need an address. I have all my domains set up that way. Not even for unique addresses, just for convenience.
"Facebook’s custom audience feature enables you to create an audience using your data such as email addresses and phone numbers. When using Facebook’s custom audience feature, your data is locally hashed on your system before you upload and pass such data to Facebook to be used to create your custom audience (the “Hashed Data”)."
This practice is very common. I'm not saying I agree with it but you should expect that every service you signup with to do this. As the company retargeting you do not know anything extra about your customers. The retargeting audience is a black box. It's Facebook you have to worry about. My suggestion is to have a different email for Facebook than everything else.
Thanks for this. I have to say that it is rather short sighted for Facebook to be using this data to cut the legs off their advertisers. This sort of activity is really going to poison their platform.
It's not malicious. FB have been trying everything frantically to make their super-complicated ad platform work since the IPO.
They use all sorts of (rapidly changing) black boxes to figure out what ads to show to who. Second order effects spring up. They are trying to profile users in various ways so that ads with a particular goal (clicking off-page ads, interacting with advertiser content, "conversions," etc.) are shown to users with a propensity to do those things. This increases competitiveness for customers with a propensity to do in demand things.
Man, this is intuitively and empirically so true. I'm not sure who would be surprised by this study, though some may point to specific exceptions.
But, there are a number of reasons this is obvious, not the least of which is that people go to Facebook to socialize, not befriend companies.
So, it always felt like a ruse that brands should encourage their customers to engage on Facebook's turf, as it always seemed that it accrued much more value to Facebook than to the brands. Why do I want someone else owning or even inserted between that relationship with my customers?
Yet companies (regrettably, including my own), would even hold contests, etc., effectively paying to get more likes from customers they already had! Then, Facebook pulled their master-stroke of ratcheting down the reach to all of those fans unless the company paid for it. It really was like some kind of racket or "minor extortion".
Remarkably, they also really began to push the idea of paying them even more to get more fans.
So, send you my current customers by converting them to fans, advertise with you to get more fans, then pay you again to advertise to reach all of them? No thanks. I'd rather get a good old-fashioned email address.
I look at their ad numbers and I just don't get it.
This is the root of my concern with where Facebook and Google are heading.
In the email world, you invested in building your house list, and it was likely your most valuable marketing asset.
You...
-- Controlled it
-- Could associate whatever data with it you had access to
-- You could (pending deliverability) communicate with them as frequently as you wanted for a fixed/variable rate depending on what your send costs were. For most ESPs (email service providers) there is typically a fixed platform fee, and a variable volume fee
-- Most importantly, your costs to message to your acquired audience was relatively fixed which helped balance the variable cost of acquiring them
With Facebook, they abused the trust marketers put into them. From day one the conversation was about building your brand's presence on Facebook with the "understanding" you would more or less be able to communicate with your audience freely once you invested in building the list.
I put "understanding" in quotes because there was of course nothing ever spelled out...but that was literally how it worked at the time, so it became understood to be how it worked.
The reality of what Facebook has done and where they are going has changed that relationship...
-- They want you to invest a variable (and likely ever increasing) cost to build your list within Facebook
-- They own the majority of the data on that list and their targeting tools are essentially you renting that information from them
-- They own your list, and want to charge you a variable cost via a black box algorithm to reach said list at the scale/frequency you desire
It is this last part that is the biggest issue. Email was a space where marketers had control over their ability to reach their opt-in audience, not the platform or network. But fixed-price models are not always as profitable as variable priced models run through a black box.
My broader fear is that Google has come to the same conclusion, and Inbox (and the tabs before that) is the first manifestation that Google is working on a serious monetization play for email beyond the horrid Gmail placements in AdSense and whatever targeting data they may be able to indirectly monetize.
He who owns the ability to reach that contact list has a company by the balls. End of story. Once you have that, why charge them a fixed rate when you can maximize profit by tweaking whatever variables you want whenever it suits you with regards to the costs (ie. the auction model)?
It remains to be seen if Google is going down that path, but it is clear Facebook already has. There is still hope for off-site ads with them for advertisers who know how to measure it from a conversion standpoint, and more importantly, a cross-channel attribution perspective. Social tends to be more of an awareness/upper-funnel driver when you can see the birds-eye attribution picture, with some exceptions like mobile app installs that see success from a direct response standpoint.
Smart marketers will likely focus on owning their audience data to market to them as much on their terms and a predictable cost structure as possible. Their continued ability to do so may be largely out of their control however if the companies who own the ability to reach their "list" have visions of being more than a basic fixed-price conduit.
With Facebook, they abused the trust marketers put into them. From day one the conversation was about building your brand's presence on Facebook with the "understanding" you would more or less be able to communicate with your audience freely once you invested in building the list.
Bullshit. There was never this "understanding", just an assumption by people who were too blinded by greed to do a little simple math. There is only so much attention to go around and only so many items that can be put into a persons feed before it loses any value to that person. You were only able to communicate freely to this audience because there were so few using the channel. Once it was shown to actually be effective you were competing with everyone else for that small slice of attention. Welcome to the market pal, hope you brought your wallet! If a marketer complains because everything they post each day isn't pinned to the top of people's news feeds for free then it seems to me that FB is doing it's job. I would much rather have my feed curated for things that are relevant for me than for every piece of marketing some store I once liked four years ago wants to send me.
The harsh words here are unnecessary and don't do anything for your argument.
There were actually plenty of people using the channel when advertisers still had the ability to reach their entire fanbase. There was a long period of time when this was simply the way it worked. Thus, I think it is reasonable for companies to be forgiven for thinking that they would continue to be able to reach this audience in the same manner once they invested in acquiring them.
Now, I have always thought email had more value just because of what you can do with it, but if you tell me to invest in your ad platform to drive people to signup for me to contact them on a page on your platform, and let me reach them for free after the initial investment, I think it is perfectly reasonable to feel extremely cheated when you change the terms of the deal to suddenly double-dip. There is a reason a large part of the ad industry has erupted at FB over this and why anyone spending serious money on social these days is driving all that traffic offsite to places they control, and/or using their own audience data through a DSP with FB simply serving as a "dumb" placement.
>There is only so much attention to go around and only so many items that can be put into a persons feed before it loses any value to that person.
True, but it's reasonable to expect that users might've simply dialed down the noise by "un-liking" whatever pages with which they no longer wanted to be engaged.
So, I don't think it was at all unreasonable for a company to assume that it would have to compete on interest and thus ensure that its content was more compelling/engaging. That versus simply being forced to pay, else reach only 1% of the people they worked so hard to gain as "fans".
Further, if FB's direction should have been obvious to companies, as you say, then FB should certainly have known. So, while encouraging pages/likes/etc., why not telegraph to the businesses that their reach would eventually be so heavily gated behind a paywall?
You're being far too "forgiving" of FB and far too harsh on the companies that were, effectively, on the receiving end of a bait-and-switch.
"These ad units are largely purchased by free-to-play game publishers such as King (maker of Candy Crush Saga) and Big Fish Games, which leverage Facebook’s incredible demographic data to target the small percentage of players who will spend hundreds of dollars on in-app purchases.”
.. So to recount, Facebook is going gangbusters because of ads for free-to-play games, developers are excited about the chance to cash in via Facebook ads, Google and Twitter are trying to mimic Facebook’s success, and Google and especially Apple are hanging their app store hats on the amount of revenue generated by in-app purchases.
In other words, billions of dollars in cold hard cash, and 20x that in valuations are ultimately dependent on a relatively small number of people who just can’t stop playing Candy Crush Saga."
Many of whom are women, their purchases leveraged up into Valley value. How is that for irony?
My explanation will be less entertaining than your imagined alternatives :)
There have been recent articles and company statements on workplace diversity in Silicon Valley, including gender diversity. And perennial debates on how to encourage more female students to STEM courses of study.
If billions of dollars in Silicon Valley market cap (which drives startup acquisitions and salaries) are currently dependent on ...
mobile ad revenue, of which a large portion depends on data mining to generate likely-to-pay customers for ...
F2P games like Candy Crush, which combine time-tested casino techniques with the ubiquity of mobile phones to addict mostly ...
women, it means there is an upside-down pyramid of leveraged technology financing teetering on the psychology of the very subgroup that is mostly absent from the development community.
:) Or, how much more efficiently could machine learning algos locate profitable F2P customers, if there were more female engineers?
Or, would more female engineers choose different mobile manipulation/psychology models, leading to less harm and more financially sustainable female "digital whales"?
I would caution against making broad sweeping generalizations (most installs from FB mobile ads never even open the app once) from one incident where this one person had an issue.
Companies like King and others have VERY competent teams of digital media and analytics experts, as well as the engineering resources to implement VERY advanced tracking.
They would most definitely not be spending the large sums they are if they were not very confident in the return it gave them.
The reason why these guys are getting cleaned up is because the teams at companies like King set it up so that they will choke out their possible competitors with sky-high rates.
I'm going to disagree. My agency helped take one of our clients to #1 grossing in education off the back of mostly facebook and twitter mobile install ads. We had an average of $0.60 to $0.80 downloads with an over 10% conversion to our $30 paid version.
I've also tried some things that don't really work on facebook at all. I think as marketers, we need to be nimble and quickly figure out if a given platform is where our audience lives. Iterate quickly and do statistically relevant test sizes before you commit a massive budget to anything.
The idea of a "social relationship" with a brand was always pretty silly, I think.
But Twitter is a good tool for PR (because every blogger and reporter uses it), and Facebook can be an efficient content distribution channel.
I think brands have a hard time on social media when they have nothing interesting to say. "Like my page" or "download my app" or "tell us how much you love your toilet paper" are not interesting, and Facebook is doing the right thing to hide that crap from more feeds.
But if you can create good content, you can spend money very efficiently on social media. You just need to boost it a bit over the noise floor, and then folks will share and comment to spread it farther.
You know how people want to interact with products? By using them. Not "engaging" with them as an abstract concept on Twitter.
They don't give a crap about having a conversation with a Mt Dew representative. They do give a crap about a YouTube video of a guy jumping out of a plane with a wing-suit and if it happens to be covered with Mt Dew logos, it might just help move some product.
You know what all this "social relationship" and "engagement" talk reminds me of? Telemarketing. New buzzwords for what seems to be about as effective as calling up someone while they're eating dinner and trying to talk about their favorite brand of dish soap.
I think you're comparing apples and oranges as the 'engagemnet' you're referring to is more 'after sales care/complaints' focused and your Mountain Dew example is more wow-factor/mainstream branding and awareness.
I'd say the consumer would give a crap about a conversation with said representative if they had a product complaint and bad experience with the brand. Furthermore i'm sure they'd prefer to have said conversation on their terms, in real time, and not after waiting on the phone to be connected with them. And that's just pertaining to customer feedback where there is a wrong that needs to be made right.
I also feel like your discounting the power of developing a social relationship (as an awareness tool) by likening it to telemarketing. People opt in (Like/follow) Facebook pages / Twitter pages and if they aren't being provided with value, disconnecting that relationship is as easy as a tap of a finger, on their time, be it while eating dinner or not.
Social should never be underestimated as a powerful passive branding and awareness platform which consumers access on their time, on a medium they are comfortable engaging with.
The difference between get a telemarketing call at dinner time and seeing a promoted post on Facebook is the consumer psychology before the touch point is made, i.e. "fuck off, i'm eating" and "entertain me, i'm bored" respectively.
> The idea of a "social relationship" with a brand was always pretty silly, I think.
I think this depends heavily on the size of the brand.
Facebooks recent actions annoy me as a consumer, there are local small companies that I want to keep up with! Yes I do want to know when my local chocolate shop has a sale on, yes I do want to know about my local farmer's market.
That's because those companies are doing it wrong. They view social as yet another mass marketing channel, one where you spam, convert, etc, and the use the same Google Analytics/Google Ads type of approach to CPM and 'conversion'.
What they are missing entirely is that, unlike the traditional web marketing world of clicks and IP addresses, social media gives you an opportunity to understand your target audience, see what interests them, what influences them - and lets you interact with them.
Once you truly know the audience, it opens up whole new opportunities for marketing (subtle product placement, indirect promotion via influencers etc) - which almost nobody is doing effectively right now.
What we see instead is the same tired web banner concept, clumsily applied to FB or Twitter, and we're getting inundated by ads (that annoying DOMO 'are you still using Excel for your data?' ad comes to mind) - no wonder they are not seeing any ROI.
Which their ad platform is mostly OK at doing. This is about using the social channels as a business like an ordinary user. Which is overall not a good move to make.
>Once you truly know the audience, it opens up whole new opportunities for marketing (subtle product placement, indirect promotion via influencers etc) - which almost nobody is doing effectively right now.
'Subtle' is actually illegal, but that doesn't stop a whole lot of people... these kinds of arrangements will deplete the trust of social channels, which I don't care about, because I expect it to happen, but some of you people might.
>What we see instead is the same tired web banner concept, clumsily applied to FB or Twitter, and we're getting inundated by ads (that annoying DOMO 'are you still using Excel for your data?' ad comes to mind) - no wonder they are not seeing any ROI.
Domo probably sees ROI, even though I agree their product is dumb.
Most banners are mediocre formats because of the way that the human eye tracks the page. These are increasingly being replaced by in-stream or semi randomized formats that mimic print tradition more than banner methods. The in-stream formats used by the social networks are not like banners because
a( they're randomized
b( they're within the typical user's eye-path
Those two points go after the banner blindness issue.
I think the bigger problem is that social networking is a fad that may not be capable of really supporting advertising, just because of the value that users expect from using them. For the same reasons we hate unsolicited marketing that comes in by phone, many people dislike advertising that comes in by social networking.
Girls clip out the ads in Seventeen magazine to save for later. Almost none of them save-as the ads they see on social networks. I would not care, as an advertiser, if all the social networks popped out of existence tomorrow and banned advertising. I would adapt. It really doesn't matter to me whether these companies live or die.
An important distinction: the waste in this case is on "organic" non-paid interactions with users on the social networks.
For Facebook, this means getting "Likes" on your dedicated Facebook Page (aka https://facebook.com/your_brand_name) for Twitter I'm presuming it's followers of @brandname.
This is separate from the actual paid advertising that the platforms offer - which is likely far more effective, targeted and profitable than say a magazine or newspaper ad.
Running a nail salon and want to reach women 18-45 who live in your city? Facebook lets you target that exactly and clicks to the ads just go to your website.
>the waste in this case is on "organic" non-paid interactions with users
True, but the two seem inextricably linked. Hard to imagine that the perception of value on one front won't impact the perception on the other.
>Facebook lets you target that exactly and clicks to the ads just go to your website.
This has always been the theory and it sounds really compelling--even intuitive. But, in reality, click-rates on FB ads tend to be abysmally low. We have experimented quite a bit and FB ads are consistently outperformed by Adwords campaigns. This has been the case across different products/services with different demos. Our experience seems to be common.
Interestingly, the thing we found most effective on FB was promoting our page through FB ads. But, of course, the value of the fans we acquired is relatively low, as is the point of the article.
I think this is in part due to the core problem that people are on FB to socialize and "do" FB. So, they will click a like button, but they don't want to leave FB.
But, it is ironic that the thing FB ads do best actually creates more value for FB.
Out of curiosity, when you say that FB ads were consistently outperformed by AdWords, can you clarify on the metrics you were using? Also, can you clarify on whether you were looking at it from a cross-channel attribution perspective?
In many cases, a successful conversion might require multiple touch points, and Facebook can actually be a pretty effective tool for building awareness and peaking initial interest. There are many marketers out there who will tell you they have social networks as a high-volume first (or early) touch point, and then it takes several organic clicks, display impressions, maybe some email, paid search, etc. before someone actually converts.
Each of those touch points ads some value. Calculating exactly how much they actually add is at the bleeding edge of problems the ad tech industry is trying to solve as it is a staggeringly difficult puzzle to solve with any degree of accuracy. But with the right analytics in place, it is currently pretty easy to see where certain channels tend to impact the funnel, and if you can control for it enough in your tests, you can try to measure the lift they contribute. Heck, you can start looking in the multi-channel and attribution reports in the free version of GA to get a sense. Of course the data-driven dynamic attribution modeling capabilities are reserved for GA Premium (or companies like Adometry, VisualIQ, Convertro, etc. which have all been acquired by Google, AOL, etc.).
>Each of those touch points adds some value. Calculating exactly how much they actually add is at the bleeding edge of problems
And that may be a big part of the problem: short of direct engagement (i.e. clicks), it can be very difficult to determine whether FB or any competitive channel is helping you to "build awareness". I think the relevant and objective metric of effectiveness, then, has to be the CTR (with conversions secondarily providing a measure of traffic quality).
That is, if you know you're getting, say, a 3X click-through rate from Adwords and the same conversion rate on both, then you don't have to guess as to whether FB has the near-impossible-to-measure quality of "building more awareness". Of course, Adwords could also be building that awareness, in addition to the very real value that you can easily quantify.
So, perhaps at some future point FB will be able to quantify this more elusive "awareness" metric and additionally prove its value over Adwords in that department. But, it's a tough hill to climb and the value of the awareness also has to supersede the very real and tangible value of the additional click-thrus realized through other channels.
Until that day, I can't see the value of continuing to invest in Facebook. There's just no discernible ROI.
Well, simple click-through rates were the starting point of engagement, and there was much fall-off there. Conversion rates, once on our site, were effectively constant across channels.
I think it's a sheer problem of visibility and intentionality while people are on FB.
>Facebook can actually be a pretty effective tool for building awareness and peaking initial interest...
I'm not sure about this, or at least from a cost-benefit perspective. I think FB ads are much more likely to be completely ignored, so you need many more impressions to build that awareness. And, you know, it's not a pure CPC model, so you're paying even when people aren't engaging.
I think the ads simply drown in the content that people are actually there to consume. FB tacitly acknowledged the issue by attempting to make its ad format more prominent and news feed ads certainly help, however, our experience has been that people are still more likely to ignore (or at least not engage with) a FB ad vs. a search result ad.
If a business makes spark plugs and sells them to stores it knows exactly how much it costs to make the product and how much the stores are willing to pay. These direct connections between inputs and outputs allow for effective price discovery.
However with Facebook and Twitter there is no pricing mechanism between what a user is worth and how much a user costs.
This is a general issue for any business that subsidizes operation costs with advertisements. Television and radio rely on outside ratings firms and market research companies to operate efficiently. TV and radio are passive experiences and advertisements are generally effective for certain kinds of products. The TV and radio stations are incentivized to make great content for both their audience and their advertisers.
Google AdSense has a fully functional marketplace where advertisers bid for keywords. This works because people use search engines to, well, search for things. A lot of the time they're searching for things they want to buy. The better the search results, the better the value for both the advertiser and the user.
People don't go to Facebook or Twitter to search or to buy things. They go there to communicate, to reference, publish and browse media, and to establish an identity.
They're fighting their users at every step. Their only course of action is to own their customers data and control their actions and identity. They cannot offer privacy to their users because they need to sell that information to marketers. They can't let 3rd parties have equal access to their users data and identity. They've got to control and restrict 3rd party clients. They rely on artificial scarcity.
This hurts both users and advertisers. These inefficiencies and misaligned incentives are passed on to both parties. It makes for a less effective marketing platform. It also makes for a worse product for users by interfering and adding noise to their communications.
The majority of Twitter's product was developed by outsiders. Retweets and hash tags are the result of a community of users and developers in control of their own evolution.
However, since the only way for Twitter to make money was to "just slap some ads on it", they had to have asymmetric read and write privileges.
That means they have to try and replicate the same kind of evolutionary product but with a limited number of internal and very expensive designers and developers. And again they're not incentivized to provide value for their users. They're incentivized to extract value.
Neither Facebook nor Twitter make content. They just provide the service of storing and organizing an ungodly amount of information. This is definitely a very valuable service. The problem is that it is a service much like how electricity is a service. It makes about as much sense to give out free energy and then "just slap some ads on it" as it does for these companies to give out free communication channels and then fill them with noise.
The store that sells spark plugs has customers. The spark plug manufacturer has customers. Their suppliers have customers. They know who wants what, how much they're willing to pay, and how to advertise to them.
Facebook and Twitter have users. The only customers in the equation are the advertisers. They have no idea how much their users are willing to pay and they have no idea how much their users are worth. They price ads based on what must amount to voodoo projections of their operation costs and a blind balancing act of signal-to-noise.
>"Facebook and Twitter have users. The only customers in the equation are the advertisers. They have no idea how much their users are willing to pay and they have no idea how much their users are worth. They price ads based on what must amount to voodoo projections of their operation costs and a blind balancing act of signal-to-noise."
Are you referring to advertisers or the social networks with your comment about "voodoo projections"? For many advertisers, yes, it is very hard to pin down a proper value for acquisition through any digital channel except in certain direct response cases. With advanced attribution technology though, it is increasingly possible to dial in the proper mix of channels needed to maximize certain targets (conversion volume, revenue, efficiency, profit, etc.).
The fact that marketers also struggle to pin down a value means that there is literally no price discovery mechanism for these social media products. What a nightmare...
We stopped advertising on Facebook. The whole thing is a big scam. Not only do I have to pay to get people to my pages, I have to pay again and again and again every time I need to reach those who liked my pages. I have no way to reach all of my page members without paying FB dearly for every single post. Then there's the issue of FB ratcheting up your cost for those who actually respond to your message. And, of course, then there's the lovely fake/unresponsive likes problem. Nah, it's a big mess. Don't need them. I'll wait until they hire some grown-ups who can relate to real people and understand how honest and serious people do business in the real world.
Thats because the like button is not the same as permission to spam.
I see tons of websites hiding content before you "Like" the page or nagging users to "Like" the brand, even the big ones.
People hated Facebook previous year because there was tons "spam". Basically every shitty page owner or marketer was thinking this is great, i can send my marketing or "spam" message to everyone dump enough to "Like" for no cost.
Also i don't know why people thing that facebook is worse then google adwords.
In adwords you pay for every click, and lets say it converts. The next time that same user searches for something on google you will again pay for that click, And if you want to re market to that same user, you can do that but you have to pay.
At least with facebook you get some of that reach for free after people liked you page.
Im not going into is it worth the money people pay, and facebook sure is pleased that people keep poring money into its platform thinking it is something its not.
First, if someone likes a page and later does not like the content they can unlike it. They are not hostages of bad pages.
When a page owner publishes a post FB uses a very limited distribution (2% or less) to pretty much force page owners to pay to boost the post. So, you already spent thousands to get people to your page and now you have to pay again to communicate with them. Sorry for saying it this way: That is bullshit.
With AdWords the model is simple: Drive traffic to your site, get registrations and then communicate with your audience on your own terms. That is precisely what the article says brands are doing once they understand facebook's problems.
Sure, you could use the same model with FB. Within limits. They are very aware of the exodus they face and seem to be making moves towards limiting your ability to take the same kind of approach you might with AdWords.
My position is simple: People who sign-up to my page/group are MY audience. I ought to be able to communicate with 100% of my page/group members at no additional cost.
Give users their own moderation tools. Let them decide, not FB. They already have the ability to unlike. That's easy. Next would be a throttling control. Let them choose what percentage of posts they want to see and maybe even set a schedule. So, on Mondays I want 2% of my page/group content to come from the Tesla page; on Tuesday's I want 10% from the Richard Dawkins page and 10% from the America's Cup page, etc.
In other words, no rulings from an immature totalitarian regime. Mimic the freedom of choice that exists on the net. If someone is hell-bent for the Underwater Pumpkin Carving page and don't want to miss a single post it ought to be THEIR CHOICE, not Facebook's.
Note that, as an advertiser, I am not advocating shoving my page's content to all my members. I want to deliver value and have THEM decide if what I am saying is worth their while.
Facebook blew away earnings this summer citing "mobile ads" as the reason for growth. Instagram had its first ad ever a few weeks prior to the earnings release, which had hundreds of thousands of comments. I can't help but feel Facebook was being misleading when they cited "mobile ads" for the revenue spike. Merchants had renewed faith in the platform thus resulting in a positive feedback cycle(merchants come back/signup -> more revenue -> revenue jumps again -> repeat). I think a break down of their mobile ad revenue would tell a much different story than the one they were trying to promote
How much of mobile ad revenue is VC money recycled by startups through facebook seeking installs of their apps? Is there a breakdown of this somewhere?
Interesting question. Makes me wonder about the breakdown of those astronomical numbers in general. Is it longer tail, with tons of smaller buys, or fewer large companies with massive buys that are generating the bulk of it?
In the same breadth - how many startups doing B2B today exist purely because of SV affinity? (not expecting a response honestly, just pondering) I could probably name a few...quite a few actually.
Sure. If you think you're reaching half a billion people, you're deceiving yourself (and/or falling for Facebook's deceptions, which, as an advertiser, you ought to know better than to have done) — it's a great place to put your information publicly and communicate with interested people instantly and directly. Wonderful tool for that purpose and used well by savvy brands that way today. But for actual advertising? Good god! A hole for money.
Our company successfully manages multiple Facebook and Twitter campaigns. Not only do we post on social media, but we also pull that content into website feeds with api's. This ensures visitors to the site see the latest social media posts. This, in conjunction with paid and targeted ads, produces a high level of customer interaction.
Just posting on Facebook/Twitter without purchasing ads and leveraging the content off/network won't produce favorable results.
Interested to hear the Hacker community's take on this.
We've been forecasting this for 2 years and agree with Nate Elliott : "As a result, marketers hoping to interact with consumers online might be better off investing in social features that exist on their own websites, or in smaller, more niche social networks, Mr. Elliott said."
That's why we built Hull in the first place.
Now this subject is this 15min's subject. What does the Hacker community think of this specific idea?
For the record, when people talk about "Brands" on Facebook, we're not talking about janky startups. We're talking about big old companies that blow >10 Million dollars in ad buys.
This is more specifically talking about maintaining your facebook company page and trying to engage with your userbase/followers.
After Facebook introduced the promoted posts concept if you were a brand you saw your engagement rapidly die off unless you were spending the money on it.
Purchased adds still work well if not better when targeted properly.
I found out this very early, a few years ago when their ad platform was barely launching for everyone. I had a digital magazine and overall it seemed like a good deal, send me people interested in music from these countries at very low CPCs, nice. In total, I may have spent around $1200 USD over a month for a little more than 100 subscribers; needless to say I felt scammed. When trying to figure out what happened (w/ Google Analytics, my own event tracking code and even a few apache logs) I found out very interesting stuff, like that 99% of those clicks were people who didn't stay for more than a second on my webpage, like in: they didn't even wait for the page to load completely... weird.
Just for the record, my ads were not clickbaity and were targeted fine, and my magazine didn't suck (IMO at least heh), so if someone clicked on my ad I would pretty much expect it to stay in the page and have at least a look at the cover of the current issue.
Why did I burn $1200 if the ads weren't working from the start? I wish I had figured that out earlier and spend that money on a fancy chair or whatever instead... The thing is that I was only looking at my daily visitors and believed that everything was fine, it was until the end of the month (where I always made some kind of audit thing to see if I was growing or not) where I noticed that the number of new subscribers had remained the same even though FB ads were active all time.
Since then, the only advice I give to friends and clients is "stay away from Facebook ads, it's not what you think they are". And on a small side note, I tried a lot of advertisers at that time and the best experience I had was with StumbleUpon, their referrals converted to subscribers at an incredible ratio (like >50%!!!) and on top of that they drove some extra organic growth even a few months after then campaign was finished, respect for them.
There was also a post a while back here on HN about ridiculous Facebook click-through rates with the same kind of 1-second time-on-site stats. I forgot what the cause was.
I've been acquiring SaaS users for <$10 for awhile now at around 50 cents a click. I find the ads extremely effective if you know what you're doing and target the right demographics. That being said, the conversion thing makes total sense. There's lots of little tricks that have worked like make a campaign with over $100/day on ads and you get prioritized over the little fish and then lower it right away so you're still prioritized in their display algo but you aren't spending at that amount. If your adspend really is 100 start it higher like 1000. Lots of little tricks you can do that will tweak the system to your advantages. but buy paying for likes or showing ads to people who like candy crush or "insert corporate page" you'll probably burn at over a dollar a click to your site and most of those will bounce hence leaving an ineffective campaign.
The thing is though even if it's slightly working it's probably cheaper then AdWords, so for larger budgets/non personal it's a great way to get the same amount and comparably the same targeted traffic for less capital.
Also if the ads are so horrendous please explain the numerous ad hackers that have done TeeSpring campaigns making 100k by targeting niche at scale. Sorry just some musings on facebook ads from someone who's seen people do it wrong, and has made money on the network for myself and clients.
It's pragmatic, with the right intent, niche, offer, and funnel. Custom audiences greatly increase your chances as well, and massive retargeting with "users that aren't truly retargeted but you have their data" Probably not by throwing generic money at it and expecting magical high value users/sales.
P.S. Agreed! re: StumbleUpon is SO HOT for their ads. I wish their were more native advertising networks. StumbleUpon and Facebook are hot. Twitter seems to only work for certain niches with custom cards for optins but even then it seems it's over a dollar per click and generic web traffic or the plethora. StumbleUpon CPM seems to be some of the best ratios out there, and clicks are really cheap sub $1.
I spoke to our account manager at Facebook and he confirmed my suspicions. Every time one of our customers converts though our ads, Facebook assigns a high value to that user, since that user purchased something through a FB ad. So now I have more competition to get in front of our existing customer from our competition who our customer is not interested in. FUCK THAT. Moral of the story DO NOT tell Facebook about conversions from your existing customers. Keep that info to yourself.