Get an individual patent and get arrange to get paid via royalty licensing. As I understand it, this is all long term cap gains. However. I am not a lawyer or a tax advisor.
Also most companies won't give you honest feedback on what you did wrong in the interview, especially w.r.t. soft skills.
Join an interview prep class or mock interview workshop and try to get someone else to identify what you're weak on. It could pay off majorly and help land your dream job.
I've been lucky enough to have collected feedback from at least a handful of companies. I've also interviewed with TripleByte. They didn't match me with a job but they are detailed on what I did wrong in the interview. They also said I sounded a bit nervous. I don't stutter or shake my voice so I'll have to figure out what are other signs of nervousness that I might be showing.
Most of the non-generic feedback I got on tech skills followed the same theme- I have breadth in knowledge, but not depth. I'm not as "T-shaped" as I thought I was.
A perhaps better measure is glycemic load, which takes mass into account. 400 calories of frosted flakes is about 100g. 400 calories of watermelon is 1.3kg. Watermelon's glycemic index is worse, but at reasonable serving sizes, fruits generally end up being way better.
You also cherry picked, figuratively speaking. More literally, you didn't pick the cherries at an index of 22. There are a lot of fruits in the 20s to 40s. I tend to stay away from both pineapple and watermelon.
For me, coding simple games was extremely valuable.
First, you can publish them as apps, which is fantastic for resume building. But also its the best way I've found to practice all the algorithms you'll eventually be asked to implement in coding interviews.
AFAIK, work for hire is separate from being contracted as well. Unless things have changed in the last 10-20 years you can have a valid contract to spend time and deliver software without the copyright assignment that comes with WFH.
In fact, this was common practice for doing enterprise consulting to small businesses when I was doing it at the start of my career. You could frequently reuse layouts and components between jobs since it was mostly basic 4GL+RDB, and it was typical to have no work-for-hire clause at all or a very limited one excluding reusables; or to charge a higher price if the client insisted on the clause to cover redevelopment.
I believe this was also the model that early open source companies such as Cygnus (who I also worked for) was built on. Large companies paid us to port the toolchains to their systems, but I believe the copyright was retained by Cygnus (and presumably reassigned to the FSF).
If someone had work for hire in a separate agreement, and I was otherwise inclined to take the "wait until requested" route, I'd probably wait on returning it too. I don't think I'd sit on the contract that said I'd get paid though, and I'm sure they're usually combined. I just wouldn't point out the omission if I got a contract without one.
> Thus the author's advice to sign the main contract but leave off the NDA.
That wasn't really clear to me. The wording (in the second situation in the post) made it sound like their partner signed neither the contract nor the NDA.
> “No,” my partner replied. “You sent a contract. I never signed it. It isn’t my problem that you never noticed.”
They could've been more explicit about which things were or weren't signed in the scenario that they described.
Anecdotal response: As a user, I hate facebook ads so much that the dislike bleeds into the product/service being advertised. I'm sure xyz widget is great on its own, but facebook insists on inserting ads into really strange contexts, like next to a heart felt eulogy by my friend or someone's random anti-Trump rant that I am tagged in.
Facebook ads for me are "anti-ads". They associate the product with really bad feelings through poor contextualization.
Not a Facebook user, but I see Twitter ads. If they're irrelevant to my interests, and almost all are, I flag them with the "Not relevant" link, which has become the awkwardly named "I don't like this".
I'm routinely surprised that despite me talking openly about my interests, I just don't get relevant ads. On one of my most frequently used sites (about basketball), the ads this week have been all womens fashion. I've not searched womens fashion and my wife doesn't use my laptop or phone. Waste of ad money.
They probably guessed that you were male and then showed you women's fashion to make you buy something for your wife.
I have come to understand advertising a lot better since I asked, while looking at some lingerie ad, "Who would ever want to wear something like that?" and someone replied "This ad is for your spouse who wants to see you in this."
> "This ad is for your spouse who wants to see you in this."
The same reason that underpants come packaged with pictures of hunky guys on the front. The guys aren't there for the men wearing the underpants, so presumably they're there for the women buying them.
My wife's fashion choices are best left to her. Giftware or gift vouchers for fashion stores I could understand, but not dresses.
Meanwhile, I research hiking trips almost every day of the year, talk online about hiking frequently, and I can't remember seeing a single ad for hiking gear or anything remotely related.
I agree with you, women's fashion choices are not something I think I'm an authority on.
But, I research music equipment thoroughly before I make a purchase. There are a couple sites I use that I've white listed in AdBlocker and they serve me ads for music gear incessantly.
Ironically, it's for a lot of the same equipment I've already purchased.
I did the same thing, except I turned it off after $500. My professional opinion is that Facebook's platform is very accessible for anyone to get up and running with (good). And in terms of offering advertisers good analytics and actionable feedback, it's pretty much garbage (bad).
My background: I spent a couple years optimizing Google PPC campaigns as a full-time professional when I was at a digital marketing agency. I held Adwords certification for a couple years. I added this so people don't think I just couldn't figure out how to do PPC in general.
It depends a lot on the product and the audience, but from my experience, you are never going to get results with your first $500 or $1000 on Facebook Ads, regardless your background. It takes a lot of trial and error just to understand what works, and then some more to drill down, get better, lower costs, etc. I'd say you are looking at three months and several thousand dollars of experimenting at least to start getting decent results, even with a strong PPC background. Facebook is just a completely different beast.
You can most definitely not set up your first campaign, pick the first targeting criteria that comes to mind, and expect good results with a positive ROI within the same day. If you don't keep at, it of course you are going to walk out with the idea that Facebook Ads don't work.
Source: Spent a six figure amount on Facebook over the course of two years.
>You can most definitely not set up your first campaign, pick the first targeting criteria that comes to mind, and expect good results with a positive ROI within the same day.
I have actually literally done this. Just took a stab at an audience, got sales that justified the ad right away.
But we're in a great position with profit margins. They're hand assembled craft items that people generally buy for gifts or weddings, so cost to make is low and sell price is pretty good. Businesses that require high volume on low margins would have a much worse time.
I have a suspicion that artisan products might also work better on Facebook in general, given the context that the users are in when they're on Facebook?
I have done this as well, but it really comes down to the product you're selling. We're an ISP and our market is extremely under served, so people are literally desperate for a better option. Easy sell, IMO. I imagine we'd have a hard time trying to sell literally anything else locally on FB.
Women, 24+, interested in family, weddings, gifts, babies, family photos, etc. We kept it to Australia for now, but I'm working on going international.
Since the items integrate the buyer's photo, people also often use them as memorials of dead people, but we didn't specifically target that. Yet.
We have just completed a profitable FB campaign (5.5x ROI), after many attempts. The key for us was:
(1) Audience. We created a lookalike audience based on the attributes of our high spenders, which outperformed all previous attempts by a significant margin. I appreciate this option is not going to be available to businesses with no existing customer base.
(2) Tracking. Given the majority of our ads are served on mobile, but convert on desktop or iPad, only Facebook is able to join up the impression and transaction. Previously we had expected to be able to see the attribution in Google Analytics.
This. I also rarely see mentions in comments like this about how they did some basic statistical significance checks. Depending on the conversion goal, sales cycle, and revenue, you might be looking at spending a large sum over a period of months to get proper benchmarks for efficacy.
> Is that for real? Is everyone else's experience with Facebook advertising similar?
Yeah. It's called "Facebook Fraud". See a real live experiment someone did, to figure out the true reach and ROI on Facebook Advertizing. => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag
I too did a similar experiment using a pre-paid Visa card (for 50$) so that FB doesn't keep charging my Credit Card and/or lets it get stolen from bad security practices. My results were similar to the guy in the Youtube Video.
Facebook's likes and "reach" are mostly automated or from in-house click-farms in South-east asia (think India, Vietnam, Phillipines etc)
That video is well worth a watch, but to summarise it: the channel owner's users are predominantly first-world and engage with his channel to some degree. He purchased FB advertising to promote his channel, and got a huge amount of traffic 'from' third-world locations that didn't engage (leave comments, etc) and that came from content-free FB accounts that liked hundreds to thousands of FB pages with no particular pattern.
Couldn't be more obviously a scam if it was twirling a waxed moustache.
I've had this experience as well. I'd love an opportunity to chat with someone who runs these click farms for a living, so I can understand their motivations a little more clearly.
I can't wrap my head around why someone would run a bot farm to click on my FB ads. It's not like AdSense, where they're getting a cut. I've read a theory it's to hide the bot accounts from Facebook's bot-detectors. But if people like in your experience can easily ID the obviously fake accounts, FB can (using the same criteria you mentioned).
I get FB has moral hazard to allow bot clicks, because they get paid. But if they're so sophisticated as to require fake engagement on ads (which is why I care -- I'm getting charged!), wouldn't they also be monitoring the simple heuristic you provided?
This could be explained by Facebook requiring bots to make them money to not get banned, but I don't think there's sufficient evidence for such a conspiracy just yet.
In the end, all I care about is how much I put into FB ads, and how much directly attributable revenue that generates. The fraud might hide otherwise profitable campaigns (ones that don't break even), but frequently this isn't the primary concern. (My concerns are usually, "does this part of Lake Facebook have any fish I can catch?", followed by the step 2 of optimizing the campaign to get a positive ROI.
Like someone below said bots are more complicated than just clicking on what brings them money.
In order to be not detected as bots, they need to behave like humans. Hence, they like and visit websites that they have no special interest in. Think of it this way: 50% of what they click is just something random, other 50% is what their masters programmed them to do.
This really doesn't have to do anything with Facebook. There are companies in Russia and India that sell likes, follows, etc. These bots then have to fake their identity and as a result they like stuff that you pay for as Facebook advertiser. I am sure Facebook does something to mitigate this and block the bots but it's a never-ending game for them and those who sell fake like/follows/etc.
The click farms are a bit more sophisticated than that. Follows and likes are priced based on the level of human intervention: simple bots are cheap but less persistent since they are easy to distinguish from organic traffic. Fake accounts created manually are much harder to detect.
A potential solution for facebook (if they were inclined) might be to not charge for likes from accounts less than N days old or from accounts with > M total page likes. At least this would make it harder for click farms to get around... or, ya know, try and model click-farm accounts which seems pretty tractable.
Sorry, but Facebook is not looking for a solution. I should've made it clearer in my response, that the like and click farms are managed by Facebook themselves.
They (the Ads Team) moved the click-farms and fake likes in-house after discovering other shady companies that were doing this. Then I think they realized how lucrative it was to their share price and quarterly revenues bottom-line so they went with it.
Why the heck would FB run their own click farms? They own the database... They could generate clicks at will. This is the dumbest conspiracy theory I've seen in a while.
Technically, it wasn't FB, it was Jared doing it secretly, until he was caught by Richard. They tried to keep it secret, but Dinesh and Gilfoyle eventually realized where the uptick in users came from. Dinesh _did_ then offer Richard a program to do just that, edit the databases directly...
Man, I can't wait for Silicon Valley to come back next season lol
Running a click farm instead of editing the database would be the sensible thing to do when trying to keep the operation secret. That way, people inside FB would not know about the fraud.
Just because you get a lot of clicks from Asia, it doesn't mean that they have click farms there. Don't know if you've been to Southeast Asia, but there are a lot of people and most of them use Facebook. If they see the ad they might click it because they're interested, even though they cannot buy the product because they're in the wrong country. Still doesn't mean that FB fakes clicks, it just means they target them badly.
And even if the accounts are fake, they were likely created to sell followers/likes, not to click ads. Clicking on things just shows activity.
Well, Facebook's been around for about ten years now, and people tend to check it about once a day, on average, with (say) 5 ads per visit.
So you've personally been served something like 20 000 targeted (!) ads on Facebook, if not more. Have you ever intentionally clicked one? I sure haven't.
When did you ever, upon seeing a TV commercial, pack up and head to the store to buy the thing you saw? Never. Even though you saw many hundreds of thousands of those (OK I'm actually talking about me, growing up pre-internet).
That's not what TV ads are for, and IMO for the same reason not what FB ads are for. They are however both excellent brand advertising mediums. And brand advertising spending is HUGE, therefore FB is worth a gazillion dollars. People don't buy Coke or Nike or Tide because of an ad they remembered seeing, they buy them because of ALL the ads they forgot they saw.
Growing up, I probably saw cool toys advertised and was like "muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuum I reaaaaalllly neeeeeed this enormous lego pirate castles it's got hidden doors and cannons everywhere and a TREASURE CHEST. pleeeeeeeaaaaaasssssse".
I didn't get it though. Poor Deprived Child.
Anyway, I always wonder about the brand advertising thing. Do I buy stupidly expensive razor doodads? Sure. Why? Well, I use the same brand my dad did. He bought me the first one and I don't really go in for change, so I've stuck with it. I can logically acknowledge that it's dumb, but here I am yearly spending £30 on razors with more blades than can possibly be necessary.
Coke? I guess I had it somewhere for the first time, I like the taste. I don't think I buy it because of the advertising, I buy it because I like it. Why don't I buy own brand stuff? It tastes different. Would I prefer the own brand stuff if I'd started on that and was used to it? I suspect that is true, so for me it feels like the massive win is in being the first product that I use.
Surely when I go to the shops and pick something off the shelf that I have zero context for: What did family buy? What do friends buy? Is there a brand that somehow jumps out as attractive (advertising works!). But if a first mover gets my social circle to use and approve then that's going to be way more powerful than a shit ton of facebook ads down the line
LOL, that sounds very familiar, I was a PDC too :P.
The global brand ad spend is >$400 Billion a year! It's about 10x bigger than the "transactional" advertising market (Google CPC, coupons, etc). Brand is a very ephemeral almost artsy thing though, and it's not easily broken down into metrics (probably why Google didn't focus on it). Building a brand takes a lot of time and ad impressions to build up. Consider full page magazine ads or most bigger TV commercials; they often don't have a immediately obvious conversion ask, they're more about establishing a perception of something over time.
If you look back to the beginning of commerce, there were no brands. You would go down to the bazar or church to ask around and find out the best grain farmer or milk producers or whatever. The butcher you trusted might say "Oh go see the Quakers, they have the best oats!" That reputation became brand over time as commerce got more complex. Eventually they stuck a picture of a Quaker on the bag of oats to associate a certain expectation of quality or price or consistency with their products. Brand is really sticky too. Once you make that choice as a young adult to buy Tide detergent, or Gillette razors, or Honda cars or Nike shoes, its very likely you'll keep buying Tide, Gillette, Honda, or Nike. The lifetime brand customer value is very high even though the marginal profit on each purchase might be relatively low.
Im just suggesting essentially that the FB news feed is the new TV; a passive state where you "flip though the channels" consuming entertainment, and that's an ideal place to present a brand message. The fact that a FB advert fills the users' mobile screen for a few seconds as they scroll is analogous to how TV commercials interrupt a show for a short period.
On razors: I just don't get why they are still a thing. I got an electric shaving machine in my mid teens, and I still have and use the same damn thing. Basic, cheap Philips machine that probably cost $60 and has lasted literally decades. The battery's long dead, so I just use it plugged in.
Closer shave, more time before I get bristly. I personally prefer a tidy facial appearance. And since having children, more time for snuggles before the whiskers get to scratchy for them :)
> When did you ever, upon seeing a TV commercial, pack up and head to the store to buy the thing you saw? Never.
I just spent $150 today buying a product online I had never before considered or researched, from a company I knew very little about, thanks to an (organic) tweet in my Twitter feed.
I'll say one thing about FB advertising. It really is starting to get creepy. I recently entered several new markets and FB was the first to start advertising. I can't believe I'm saying it, but I clicked a few links. A few of them I opened a new tab and googled the company name, just to feel less grimy.
I've been served more ads from Google than from Facebook and I've never clicked on one of those either... but somehow Google has managed to turn a profit during that same time.
I've seen the numbers for the company I work at and when they adjust their Google ad spending amount, it correlates pretty directly to sales. I was quite surprised as I had a similar feeling before seeing that.
What's interesting, though, is that the company I work for does a lot of repeat business. So I don't think we actually pick up many new customers. It's more that the ads encourage our existing customers to visit us again. They may not even click on the ad.
Then the ad is doing exactly what it needs to. As mentioned elsewhere, the ad doesn't even need clicks; as long as the ad instills a conscious reminder or unconscious reinforcement of the product/brand then it's done its job.
They make practically zero dollars on each, but make up for it in volume. That's a joke, but it's also their reality. They're much less spammy than most spammers, but they have much better targeting and hugely more volume.
i've stopped liking pages entirely because facebook has started showing you sponsored content from pages your friends liked. i didn't mind clicking like to increase the like count for companies i wanted to support, but i do not want to have any part in my friends being shown ads.
I click google ads when I'm actually looking to buy something. I don't when I'm looking for anything else. I never click Facebook ads, as Facebook seems to think I'm someone I am very far from being.
Most online ads today are not aimed for direct sale or click, but more for impression. When you have big budget to deliver hundreds of millions of impressions, it CAN work.
Yes, it's very possible to throw money into a hole with advertising. If you're selling something people don't want, targeting the wrong people, or have ads that don't work with your audience then you'll get nothing back.
Buying advertising isn't a guarantee. Lots of people with little advertising experience would do good to seek out tools and advice to get started.
I think it is too. We finally killed our campaigns on bing, google, and fb - we go with just a few smaller ads on more targeted platforms... and get 10x the results for 1% of the money.
Still nothing to brag about, but money on adwords is definitely money wasted
There're many RTB platforms (hundreds of them) specialized in different ad format and area. For example, some are good at mobile app ad, some are good at video ad, some are good at targeting user behavior. One common rule to perform well in your small-budget ad campaign is to maintain your own site-list (list of website relevant to your product). For example, if I wanna sell a video game, I'll target websites like gamestop and ign exclusively instead of wasting my money on google search ad or facebook. This might not work for big budget because you'll have trouble spending all the money.
Advertise to people who are already interested in your type of product in places they may be looking for something new. Games at Gamestop/IGN etc, specific subreddits, books at goodreads, camping/hiking stuff on hiking boards.
I think adwords is likely heavily dependent on what you are selling. For example trying to make money on a popular travel term is going to be impossible, but selling a niche long tail product with little competition and cheap cost per click might be fine.
Which is kind of scary given that most the major internet services (search, social media, news, etc.) are basing their entire business models around advertising. Would hate to see the state of the economy if that started to dry up.
By blocking all ads, because I am not going to buy anything from an ad anyhow, I'm not being counted towards your bill, which makes things cheaper for you and more pleasant for me.
Usually direct response marketing (like ads to buy a game) is paid per click, so you weren't getting people charged before you started ad blocking, when you weren't clicking on the ad anyways.
And as a beside, people typically don't do direct response marketing to engineers, because it's known they don't click on ads and they're better marketed to through referrals from other engineers and online content (like this article).
I'd love an easy option to only include ads on sites that I trust, or that do ads well, and some reliable metrics surrounding that. Then content producers could get some feedback on "ad acceptance rates" and create better user experiences.
Now that I think about it, one of the most obnoxious things about online ads isn't that they are eerily intelligent, but that they are still mostly dumb forms of broadcast.
It's real. I asked all my digital marketing friends for advice too. I made ~20 iterations, tried different pictures, headlines, targeting schemes to no avail.
There are def ways to make it work, but it's not an easy thing. If I were to try again, I'd make an audio-less video.
Getting started from 0 with ads on facebook is hard.
If you don't have good email lists, have the money to throw at ads to figure out your ad groups / demographics (just because purple fish people are your #1 customers doesn't mean they buy things off of facebook ads), and don't have a whole ecosystem (landing pages, cross platform re targeting, etc), its an uphill battle that even the pros can't always get working right.
Good on you for trying. Back when I ran ads, a common story from small clients was "I spent $50 - $200 and didn't get any sales, so I figured it wasn't for us" - At least you figured out it wasn't for you, or it wasn't for your budget/time scale.
Judging by the game, your target market is not the type of person who responds to a Facebook ad. I'm running tons of ads on FB, but my market is less sophisticated. I'm surprised by how many responses we get.
Just to throw in our experience (hardware product, UK market) we've tried facebook a few of times over the last 3 years.
The initial attempt was a massive fail, we wasted about £3K on facebook ads to generate about £300 in sales.
Following season we focussed on TV ads and generating lots of reviews from our existing happy customers. We then gave facebook another attempt at the end of the season and generated as much sales and traffic as all of the tv advertising for about £3k of facebook ads.
The primary difference was knowing who our customer is - which we learned from the TV ad customers, you can probably learn from your Kickstarter backers. For all of the TV generated sales we got reviews and sent out surveys to each customer. From this, we learned 1. What people loved about the product (which we could use is ad copy) and 2. Who they were and why they purchased.
This allowed us to create very targetted facebook ad campaigns and hence the improved ROI. Facebook is excellent at generating very cheap traffic but only when you get the audience dialed in.
About 4 years ago, we got fairly good response rates from Facebook advertising (for SaaS apps, rather than physical products), but nowadays, FB advertising is next to useless. The stats in the article pretty much reflect what we see these days. At most, we get 'Likes' on our app FB page, but pretty much NEVER get any click throughs or sign ups to our apps.
Our best advertising bang has for years been our blog: http://www.seliger.com/blog, in part because many of the topics we write about are also the kinds of search strings people interested in hiring us tend to use.
Are you very experienced with either? As someone who manages digital media for a living and has dealt with 8 figure budgets, I certainly don't feel that way. However I'm very aware of how expectations are often not properly set by either company.
In their quest to reduce the friction to people's wallets Google and FB in some ways portray it as clicking a few buttons, creating a couple ads, selecting some suggested targets and you'll make a ton of money right off the bat. And perhaps that used to work to some degree.
The reality is that professionals tend to change or disable most of the defaults because they don't perform well or have other issues. We then go in implementing tried and tested best practices, knowing full well performance will still suck initially and that we have a long, expensive road of testing and optimization before we have things dialed in.
It is a tough business challenge because to some degree it is like trying to cram something simplistic like Paint into a hugely technical and complex platform like Photoshop. You just wanted to draw a damn cat, but there are all these confusing menus and tool bars, these weird layer things, and before you know it you've wasted an afternoon and end up just paying someone to draw it for you before you waste more time.
A company I know well cough is built an app and pays about $7/download via Facebook ads. This company has tried many other options and while it has gotten more conversions using alternatives, the users have tended to be poorer in quality (much lower DAUs/MAUs). I have heard the average cost/download via Facebook is lower than $7 (maybe $5) for an app like this one, but I think it has been worth the money spent, and I would/will do it again. And yeah this company has spent quite a bit more than $1k on these ads.
Downloading a free App is a lower hurdle than buying a card game, so it doesn't surprise me that the author didn't see many conversions. I have read that if your customer acquisitions costs are less than or equal to the money you expect to make off of them during your first year with the customer (supposing a subscription model, not unlike a card game with expansion packs), then you are doing well. The author has seen that his customers have often become repeat customers, so it may be ok to expect that $17.76 is an ok price to pay per converted user, so long as you expect some larger percentage of them will come back for expansion packs.
Some notes: DUDE! it took me WAY TOO LONG to figure out where to buy your game! The link to the product is at THE VERY BOTTOM of your Medium article. PUT IT AT THE TOP WHERE YOU MENTION IT FOR THE FIRST TIME (sorry for yelling). Make it easy for people to find and buy your game!
Agreed. Tight-knit communities are by far the best way to market your product/service. Low volume, but high quality if you can pull it off. The catch is that you have to toe the line between being "that annoying marketing person" and someone who's genuinely trying to help out the community. If you aren't trying to help them out, then you'll find yourself being voted out of the tribe very quickly.
If you've spent $1000, got 20 clicks and 0 sales, then either your targeting or your ad or both are piss poor.
I have made quite a lot of money (and lost quite a lot in the beginning) advertising on Facebook ads in the past. Just because you have a lot of experience with Google Search PPC doesn't mean you'll have success with Facebook, and visa versa. It depends very much on the product, how broad or niche the appeal is, the price point, the approaches you've tried.
You need to know the target demographics of who your customer is, and Facebook is one of many cost effective avenues to reaching certain types of people. You need to be creative in creating great ad images, ad copy, a good landing page, and measuring actions that tie directly to increased revenue.
These are all basic common sense things, but I have yet to see someone's campaign that didn't have some obvious flaw that set them up for failure. There are a lot of ways to fail and only a few ways to succeed.
Yeah, I know there is a way to do it. I assume most people who are also just coming out of a Kickstarter will have a similar lack of experience with online marketing. I could be more clear about the purpose being to temper expectations.
What is creepy is that when my in-laws were visiting for the first time I had a American Express ad with Tina Fey congratulating me on meeting my in laws for the first time.
It's widely known that Facebook is worse than Google in terms of conversions. People go to search engines to find something, people go on to Facebook to browse Facebook. What Facebook offers over Adwords is fine-tuned demographic targeting. So it's good for brand awareness (think traditional TV ads) and products that require targeting very specific demographics where the few conversions are highly valuable(new CS grad hiring, women on dating websites).
It very much depends on your goal. Many advertisers, myself included would say "it depends on your goal." Search has some major limitations over paid social for things like branding campaigns. Even for direct response it is hardly black and white. I have FB campaigns that have performed better than some search campaigns.
We've spent $2300, reached 140,000 people (according to FB). 11,000 of those visited our website. We also have 7300 likes on our Facebook page which we post to every few days.
$2,300 on marketing is peanuts, so we believe is worth it to be able to directly contact 7,300 people who expressed interest in our business. These people are also liking and sharing our posts.
Not to everyone. Neither do all of the pages that you've liked over the years show up in your news feed.
Basically, the procedure is the following:
post is shown to a small minority
while a proportion of the people seeing it engages with your content:
show the content to more people
So, if the initial... let's say 200 people that see the post on your Facebook page are not engaging with it, the content wouldn't be spread further among people who liked your page. If they engage with it, the content will be spread further.
That small minority decides the future of your post. If you have non-genuine likes that are not interested in your content at all (as in, not engaging with it), but they see the post first, you're gonna have to spend money to promote posts.
You guys may be in a position to make Facebook Ads work, because of your existing customer list. If I recall correctly, setting up the appropriate demographic channels is way too hit or miss. It'll be an expensive education.
BUT, if you have an existing customer list (like yourselves), FB gives you an option to upload those existing customer emails and it will do some AI matching to find the appropriate customer demographic pools? From the tutorial I read, this was the only chance you'd have to get any sort of traction on your campaign right out of the gate.
Disclosure #1 : I've never run a Facebook ad campaign in my life just read several tutorials regarding running a successful campaign.
Disclosure #2: I don't remember where I read this information, but given the fact that FB knows everyone's interests (directly and indirectly from statuses and likes), their algorithmic assessment of who should see the ad could be worth trying.
I had success with Facebook with Pokemon Go, I don't believe it's easy reproducible on a lot of other things. I wrote everything down here : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12858993
Tldr; don't do Facebook ads if your not doing a hype and if don't want to give things away for free
If you only want useless likes locked in on Facebook, you should do go all on. Remember, you can't easy notify the people who liked your page even though you payed for them
You'd be surprised how your marketing strategies will fail when starting a business. Best, recent writeup is Clifford's below. Really shows the level of apathy and confusion you will experience. :)
I've had amazing results with Facebook ads. We usually turn 20$ into a couple of sales of 40$ items with high margins. I've got a new ad going up in 4 hours.
That being said, if the profit margin on the items wasn't so high it would be far worse. We're in a particularly good position that way. But on the other hand I haven't done alot of analytics or improvement on the ads either.
Yes. Same here. I've tried Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, Reddit Ads, BlogAds aimed at design websites, and a custom placement by a site itself (paid $300 for a top header ad (the best position) and got nothing from it.) Literally hundreds of dollars wasted and not a single sale. I was pissed.
People ignore ads. 1 year I was simply mentioned on DesignMilk.com and my calendar sold out. The following year I paid $300 to advertise at the top of DesignMilk.com and didn't get a single sale. That's what really made me realize advertising is highly unwanted.
When I ask around to other inventors and sellers of physical products, Advertising is just a waste (except if you're selling a high priced item that can easily make the money back on a few sales). It's a suckers game if you're like me, selling a low cost item at high volume. If the advertising worked for all these businesses they would keep doing it. They don't. They run a few campaigns, advertise for a bit, watch it fail, then leave, and the next sucker takes their place. Unless you're one of those big box stores that advertise every week. But you are not walmart or target. You do not make millions in revenue a day. You cannot afford to run full color catalog ads bundled with newspapers every single week.
Also, don't let flash sales fool you. Back when I sold my large format physical paper calendar on Fab.com (back when it was big, it went bankrupt and reorganized due to... spending too much on advertising and not enough revenue, ironic isn't it) I sold out in less than 1 month. All 300 units sold out at $15 each. When they reorganized I was literally ruined. They no longer took in calendars like mine. I was stuck selling on Amazon.com and Ebay.com and Etsy.com and sold just a few units.
But man was the journey worth it. I lost thousands but I learned enough to justify it.
It's pretty hard, and super expensive. One thing that really helped us is AdEspresso. Give it a few different pictures and blurbs, and it combines them in all possible ways and A/B tests all the combinations. Then you can pick the winners and refine them. Indispensable tool, even though we only got up to a 2% click-through rate (avg is 3-4%)
Plenty of companies have success. There are tons of digital marketers killing it on there. The level of targeting you can achieve is absurd. It's zero sum game where you compete against other advertisers though.
Because of this it seems incredibly obvious to me that it'll almost certainly be unprofitable until you've done a lot of work to optimise your campaign (as you're competing with bids against people who have optimised their campaigns) and also probably be incredibly unprofitable if you're not a full time professional digital marketer specialising in facebook ads (because that's who you're most likely competing against for eyeballs).
Yet I see average punters throwing tiny budgets around and failing at facebook used as evidence that facebook advertising is garbage on a regular basis.
Oh, I'm not trying to make the case that it's impossible. Just that it seems a lot easier than it is. Most people coming out of a Kickstarter wont have several thousand dollars to figure out how to say "This hoodie, created by a mom, is over 1,000,000 on Kickstarter".
$50 CPC is not unheard of before optimizing the ad content or ad targeting.
Keep in mind that Facebook ads are more like display ads than search ads - users don't necessarily have a specific intent when getting the impression, so they're less likely to give you a direct response.
In my experience, we're able to create a lot more engagement using Facebook, but you have to consider that we're a niche startup in Brazil (where CPC seems to be cheaper).
On the other hand, most of the users we got from Facebook were a kind of "freebie hunters". As soon as they saw it would be necessary to pay a monthly fee to use our services (It's an app! Am I really supposed to pay for this?), most of them disappeared.
In the end, as someone has already mentioned here, Facebook seems to be a really good place to advertise free stuff or products that can naturally trigger some emotional response (Look at this lovely products made by this grandma)... and maybe just them.
By tracking people that converted and then feeding that into Facebook's Lookalike Audience we were able to drop the cost per lead to about a third of the original cost over time (from $78 to $27). It beat everything else (TV, display ads, retargeting, SEM, etc), to the point where we only did that.
We've noticed that every time we stopped the ads, or changed the targeting parameters/audience, it would take a while for Facebook to get back to the same results.
p.s The lead cost was that high because we were selling $200k land + $500k houses from a small tropical country to US consumers that may have never even heard of that country.
I've seen quite a few Shopify store owners in a group on Facebook mentioning that they've had good results using Facebook ads.
I've only used Facebook ads to have a bit of fun and boost a picture of my cat[1]. He got a couple of likes after I'd spent about 50 cents, which pretty much achieved my goal.
It seems extortionately high. I've just started with some small ads for an ecommerce site I'm playing about with. Currently costing £0.34 per click, with a relevancy of 6.
This is optimising for sending visitors to my website though. If you focus on page likes or soemthing, then it's not likely you'll get very good off-site CTR
In my anecdotal experience, Facebook is really only good for the very top of the funnel. And even then it's sketchy. Creating awareness or piquing interest with your one sentence value prop (e.g "Never manage servers again!", "Write native iOS apps in COBOL!", etc.) seems to be the best use of it.
That's the ROI I'm seeing at some of my clients. That said, there is one that is having great success ($10/conversion, average conversion value $200 @ 40% margin) with it because of how they targeted their ads and what they're for (consumer products).
I bought a kickstarter after seeing it adverstised on Facebook. That is some anecdata at least.
I have to say, though, a lot of the stuff advertised on Facebook and Instagram seems kind of dodgy. Unless I am just being targeted for dodgy stuff by their algorithms.
I've actually had good experience with selling hugely discounted shoes through Facebook ads. But then our target market was older women who legitimately enjoyed sharing their love of our $9 shoes with their Facebook friends.
The terminology full-stack is meaningful to discern between an expert at one part of the stack and someone who knows how to set up and manage all parts of the stack. For example, consider the LAMP stack:
Linux
Apache
MySql
PHP
A Full-Stack developer is someone who knows enough Linux to set up an Apache server and MySql database, enough MySql to create a database, enough PHP to render a decent web page.
On the other hand, a frontend developer knows the gritty details about how to render a beautiful and performant webpage that works on IE6, iPhones on 2G and your 4k monitor.
Cute. Short, witty, and to the point, with humourous undertones, but maintaining the barbs of the insult, as the implications rapidly become clear.
However, such a quick, "fuck that guy, amirite?" type insult is so common that it's become boring, especially amongst programmers, who have gotten a lot of practice insulting each other over the internet in the past however-many decades: our culture has adjusted accordingly, and the bar has been raised on effective insults. You can tell what is an ineffective insult, because the recipient will immediately turn around and mock you. You know, like I'm doing now.
However the GP isn't trying to insult you. The GP is stating that most (non-idiot) people would interpret "full stack" to mean "all the software stuff"
This is simply a direct counter to your argument that "every non-idiot thinks full stack means everything since the stone age"
Yeah. It wasn't quite that. I was exaggerating for comedic affect. But if you say "full-stack" and don't follow it with "web," there's an obvious connotation. So I took it.
Also, "all the software stuff" still means down to assembler. So that'll be fun.
Yes, I know that's not what you meant, but why stop the fun now, just because I couldn't keep my terminology straight?
I think the other distinction there is that a "full stack developer" might have a comfortable understanding of how all these things work in quite a bit of detail.
The understanding does not mean that they want to take the time investment of recreating all that work from scratch.
For instance,
I understand branch prediction, cache lines and inter-processor synchronization. But I'm no kernel developer.
I know what the assembler does, and its goals. But I haven't made one, and any I made would be sub-optimal
.. This proceeds through compilers, operating systems and up to the web stack.
I mean, writing a renderer that fully implements "HTML 5" along with ALL relevant standards - that's a massive software effort. I barely understand it, but I understand enough to get the job done.
I know it sounds far-fetched, but if someone develops a technology that can rapidly grow a wood-like material out of atmospheric carbon in such a way that entire buildings can be grown in single digit years, we could start seeing countries fighting over who is using too much CO2 and consuming too little
I've been meaning to try and do an estimate related to this. Just how much CO2 could be pulled out of the air by _extensive_ farming of fast growing trees. We could find ways to use as much of the wood as possible (construction materials, etc.), and just sink the remaining wood in cold water where the carbon would stay locked away for 100+ years.
Then again, if my numbers are right, if humankind dedicated <1% of land used worldwide for food to growing trees and locking away the cellulose, we would cancel out worldwide CO2 emissions. Since most of that land is used as pasture, there is more than enough play to keep the world fed, and I could see up to 10% being tasked to this purpose , which seems doable in an emergency.
Have you accounted for moving the trees from where they grow to where they can be used? (E.g., milling, planing, curing.) That will take energy that likely offsets some of the benefits.
Likewise, moving the lumber or finished goods to consumers will also require some energy that might offset the carbon removed.
I initially thought it didn't look good when looking at the amount absorbed yearly per tree, but then was surprised by some estimates on how many trees you can fit per unit area. A more accurate estimate needs to be done though, different numbers I found put the final range at about an order of magnitude.
Also, most farming and stable forests are mostly carbon neutral. This would require continual seeding, harvesting and sequestration of the cellulose. Maybe it will be a good thing though that cellulose+lignins are so hard to breakdown.
1. Millions of people live their life
2. Academics put people into buckets in order to count them
3. Other academics group that data and label those people
4. Even more other academics come along and do more groupings then write a paper.
5. A newspaper writes an article with a catchy headline and an out-of-context image with arrows drawn on it to call your attention to one correlation but not others, then proceeds to use that data to make arguments that don't actually follow
At every step along the way, a biased researcher or newspaper makes assumptions, discards outliers, and labels individuals in such a way that if we focus on their chosen pivot, we see what they want us to see.
Longitudinal studies, machine learning, and more are all improvements on the current shaky process. I just hope they continue to catch on despite being tougher to do.
I agree with your take on newspapers: they try and capture the attention of a layman audience. As such, their work can be simplified to the point of impropriety from time to time.
I'm less inclined to agree with your opinion on academic research, however. Systems of peer review--and softer systems, like those of repute amongst colleagues--are in place for the express purpose of eliminating biases and errors across research works.
In the social sciences, there is a great amount of care that goes into ensuring that:
1. Data is handled properly
2. Future inquiries are sound
Whether or not that care happened in this body of work is up for debate.
I'll pass, but hopefully someone else can do this as a labor of love.