1) The author made a Facebook page for a fictional product that was rather obviously silly - downloading bagels - and talks about it as if it were a real product.
2) The FB ads campaign ran with an absolutely horrid targeting set:
> I chose the United States, the UK, Russia, India, Egypt, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. I narrowed it down slightly by targeting under 45-year-olds interested in cookery and consumer electronics, but was told that would still give me a potential audience of 112 million customers.
This is completely silly. Trying to target 112 million people means you won't be able to draw any sort of conclusion or get valid data - nor expect a meaningful response - without spending tens of thousands. If he wanted a response in the US or UK, he should have started there and focused on it to the exclusion of all else.
3) His statement "it seems that Facebook adverts can be very effective in generating interest in your business from certain countries but not in the US or the UK" is borne through no real testing or time. He spent less than $100 - you cannot draw any sort of conclusion from that information.
He got just enough data to write his article and jump on the fast moving "Facebook ads suck" train. If he did this for a living he'd be fired, if he was a small business man he'd learn his lesson quickly. The same as it's ever been with any ad medium, internet, periodical, etc..
Exactly. It's a news organization. You have to milk that trend while it's there and rack in those pageviews. This wasn't a scientific academic study, it was a marketing ploy with a pre-conceived result in mind. Honestly I might "like" it as a result sheer quirkiness, or as a result of curiosity it would inspire.
Your #1 is a good point. Since the only value of this "product" is that it's a joke, the number of "likes" he got in different countries could just be a reflection on how funny people from different cultures think "virtual bagels" are, and not an indication of any commercially significant behavior.
Or, users in the U.S. might just be so jaded from having seen too many joke products advertised on Facebook that they don't bother liking them anymore, while they may still be a novelty in Egypt.
Or rather than making tortured assumptions that Egyptians are especially tickled by VirtualBagel, you could use Occam's Razor. It is more likely that "Ahmed Ronaldo" is an indiscriminate clicker than that some obscure aspect of Arab history makes Virtual Bagels especially more funny to Egyptians than to Brits.
I agree, this entire article is a waste of time. How can you draw any kind of blanket conclusions from such a contrived experiment? At the very least talk to some actual businesses and see what their opinions are.
Depends on whether his data points were cherry picked. We don't know if they are or not, so we assume he jumped to conclusions. Maybe.
If his sample set, consisting solely of Ahmed Ronaldo, is representative of the rest of the people 'liking' his page, I'd say he has a point - and there's something fishy going on that warrants further investigation.
OTOH, if Ahmed is one of Facebook's 1.5% 'undesirable' users, then I'd say I agree with you, and that India and SA is just full of people who love virtual bagels.
I'm reminded of Neal Stephenson's book Anathem [1], which some people didn't like (compared to say Snow Crash or Cryptonomicon) but I really enjoyed. Apart from the mystical elements it raised some interesting points.
At one point it was talking about the Reticulum (Internet), botnet ecologies and how some of these would sublty modify information such that you couldn't really trust anything you read. I find this an intriguing and somewhat alarming idea.
Facebook was good early on because bots weren't sophisticated enough to create real-looking Facebook profiles so if you had a Facebook profile you had a person. Now they're better but still a human can pick a bot pretty easily.
But bots will only get better.
One idea that's been raised is the notion of trust. Usage patterns are analyzed to identify bot or bot-like behaviour. You see this in identifying sock or meat puppets on reddit, HN and other social news sites.
People have talked about the hordes of Twitter accounts used to make content appear more relevant than it is. This sort of thing is already happening.
But how do you pick out the bots when they're the majority and thus there is little to no statistical norm to compare them to real people?
At what point will bots start modifying Wikipedia articles and have other bots or, more likely, some stooges, approve those changes? What about establishing fake sites with wrong information and having them appear valid to search engines?
This will I believe be a big problem.
One particularly problematic aspect to this is that the site owners themselves, within reason, have little incentive to expose bots (or inactive accounts for that matter) because so much importance is placed on metrics like "# of active accounts".
This only becomes problematic if the user experience suffers beyond a certain threshold.
It's going to be interesting to see just how much of a problem this becomes and what we do to solve or at least mitigate it.
so much importance is placed on metrics like "# of active accounts".
Also known as asshole metrics (which are, are at most, 40% true). They only exist to manipulate you into thinking the company is more important than reality. Most companies will tell you "total registered users" but few will give "active users." If they do give you active users, then they'll count "active" as something silly like "we saw their cookie during the month" meaning they were just delivered some external asset passively.
Stop lying and make something valuable (except lies can keep companies in business much longer than most people realize).
Hellbanning [1] is a solution - let the bot think it's connecting to other users, but in reality it's completely invisible - even better when you address a small net of these - they're banned to the same hell so they can see each other and interact, but are all invisible to the greater populace.
Ultimately it is just the same problem as with digesting information created by humans. Humans also misinform, out of malice or because they don't know better. The solution is rationality, I suppose. You have to verify the claims that are being made. The bots of the future will just have to get better at that.
This problem isn't confined to Facebook alone. A while back we were getting ridiculous CPAs on Google Adwords of under 50c, but quickly realized that literally none of these were converting into paying customers. Notably, we were targeting English-speaking countries only, so I don't know why we were getting hits from India and Egypt and stuff.
After targeting US and Canada only, CPAs skyrocketed but each signup actually became worth something.
I'm confused. Who benefits from these click / like bots that seem to plague every advertising platform, besides the platform itself?
Did you have AdWords ads running on the "Content Network" (i.e. other random sites)? I was getting a bunch of click fraud on some Google ads a while back. Based on the referrers, it was pretty clearly someone who set up a bunch of sites and then was generating a ton of automated traffic to click on their ads and generate money. The bots even went so far as to fill out the contact form on our landing page once getting there (I guess to trick Google's conversion tracking script?).
The worst part is I submitted some of this data to Google and they basically said, don't worry we've already detected all the click fraud and filtered it out so you never were charged for it. Uh, ok. No way to prove or disprove that. But if you identified these bozos as fraudsters, why do they still have AdWords accounts weeks later?
"we were targeting English-speaking countries only, so I don't know why we were getting hits from India and Egypt and stuff"
Seriously? Seriously?
I mean... no, never mind. "Confused" doesn't even begin to describe it. Given that the US doesn't have an official language, India is more of an English speaking country than the US is.
Relax, no need for that. Obviously India is an English-speaking country, but when we targeted "English" speakers we expected a higher percentage of our traffic to come from Western sources like the US and Canada, instead of 95%+ from click farms in India. We found that wasn't the case, so we switched to country-specific targeting. Thanks for educating me, though.
Sorry, it's a bit of a knee-jerk reaction caused by the number of American sites that treat non-US visitors like it's a nuisance they even dare to visit, as if an English language .com site is an "Americans-only" sign.
(This is especially insulting if the site in question represents a company/brand that actually operates internationally.)
Also, English speakers are not limited to countries with English as an (un)official language. Just an example, LinkedIn had 3 million Dutch users before they introduced a Dutch language interface. I don't know what business you're in, but that's a lot of creditcards...
Possibly competitors of the advertiser [who can't afford PPC]?
Another thought: An advertiser could use a bot to click on ads for keywords they are targeting. If they could exhaust their competitors daily budget they could potentially get higher placement for less CPC [later in the day]. I'm thinking of Adwords here.
Maybe they are voting bots that keep liking random junk to not look suspicious when they all together like something the botnet owner decides that they all shall like.
It would look a bit weird if thousands of users always liked exactly the same thing and nothing else.
1. Facebook - obviously they benefit from higher CPMs in any country. I seriously doubt they would create fake profiles on their own system though (that would be fraud).
2. Like resellers/advertisers - A client comes to you and says they want tons of likes. While there are a lot of ways to work around this system, one obvious way is to generate fake profiles in countries where the CPMs are low, then target ads at your own bot army. You can sell the likes, generate the likes yourself, and profit. Otherwise you're waiting for quality people to like your page which as this article illustrates, is extremely costly. The bottom line: pay for cheap likes, receive cheap likes.
I should add that these malevolent actors in the system are beneficial in the short-term for Facebook (CPMs rise) but bad in the long-term. As genuine advertisers see their effective CPMs rise, the ROI decreases. This forces benevolent actors out...
We had the same experience. We were able to get a "like" for our page under 10 cents (In Indian market). Number of likes grew from 500 to 5000 in matter of days. But drilling bit more, it seemed like most of these people were having hundreds of likes. As a business owner at the end of the day it was hard to quantify value of these likes. We waited more, and started measuring engagement of these users for our subsequent wall updates on our pages. Results were disappointing. Engagement of people generated from "organic" likes was 10 times higher than the one generated from paid advertising. We also found that very few of those 5000 people ever engaged with our page in subsequent weeks.
Bottom line: We were happy to generate 5000+ likes with little money, and that helped us look like more legit and popular business. However, real value of generating business from these ads was minimal.
I agree it makes you look like a more popular business but does it make you feel more popular? I feel that growing a fan base organically helps you learn lessons and garner quality feedback for your product. Maybe some people who like your page wouldn't feel compelled to give you advice for your business because it appears that you have a winning strategy already with all your likes.
I wonder who created that Ahmed Ronaldo profile and why? I.e., paid social networking is nothing new, but liking random pages doesn't bring in any money by itself, so somebody has to pay for that for some reason. The only party that profits from fake likers is Facebook, but assuming Facebook pays these guys is kind of far fetched - if they did, that'd be outright fraud and possibly criminal. So I prefer not to assume that without evidence for it. Then who pays for it and why? What is the incentive to fake-like advertisers on facebook?
Many people believe social signals help increase their search engine rankings and/or conversion rates. Some of those people buy likes, shares, etc. for that reason.
> "What is the incentive to fake-like advertisers on facebook?"
Perhaps people who offer those social-seo services control thousands of robot-facebook accounts and they want their robots to seem like real, active users? It seems possible that they would automate some random activity (in this case liking virtual bagel's ad) while they're waiting around for orders.
As I say, paying for likes is nothing new, but in that case he didn't pay anybody but Facebook, that's what makes it confusing. Though your hypothesis is plausible - even though liking random non-related stuff would make one less like real person for me, it very well might make it more "active" for whatever algorithms are used by facebook or SEO types, and thus more valuable, at least in the eyes of SEO types.
What looks real to you doesn't determine the value of the profile's likes because the screening isn't done by people like you. A brand-new profile only liking one brand is very easy to filter...
"I completely disagree" is just code for "You're wrong"
I completely disagree with that statement :-D
"I disagree" is a statement of opinion -- I believe something different than you do. "You're wrong" is an assertion of fact -- your belief is incorrect. The former is much less of a direct challenge to the other person than the latter is.
I have to echo the sentiment of some others here. Facebook ads are not useless -- far from it. However it does seem that a lot of people are trying to game the system in overseas markets. My theory? The bots are coming from blackhat ad services like these: http://www.buyilikes.com/
Perhaps they have bot farms that try to drive up the likes of ANY ad targeted to those countries? I'm not sure, but the summary of the posts over the last few days seems to be that ads perform legitimately in the US and EU, and with some questions elsewhere.
Let me get this straight: the article author paid $10 for his page to "be liked" in Egypt (population estimate: 90 mil) and India (population estimate 1.2 billion) as he himself claims "a potential audience of 112 million customers" and then was surprised that he got total of 1600 "likes" from the given area in 24 hours?
Then he acts surprised!? What exactly did he expect?
As others also point: his page is a joke, somebody will always "like" the joke, maybe even recommend it to other friends!
From his target population, one of 70000 potential "eyes" "liked" the joke in 24 hours. So what?
The article kind of glossed over this, but the Click through rate of .55% is off the charts. It's _clearly_ fraud, based on having seen thousands of ad campaigns data. Anything over .1 is great, and over .2 you start looking for what you broke.
.55 is an Adops executive daydream.
(The .059% from UK visitors is about what you'd expect)
He paid $10 for area that included India and Egypt, for only one day, receiving 1600 likes in one day.
He paid additional $50 for smaller area that didn't have these countries for 3 days, receiving 1400 likes, average 350 per day.
So: 1600 likes from India and Egypt in one day: $10 == 0.6 cent per like.
350 likes without that area: $16 per day == 4.6 cent per like.
Where's the surprise? If he pays for cheaper likes, he gets the cheaper likes.
Did he expect to pay for cheap likes and get the expensive ones? Does such an expectation have any economic sense?
I still don't see how the size of the area matters. He's not showing it to everyone in the area, just ten bucks worth of them,
But his complaint isn't about the price per like. It's about the fact that likes per impression are ten times higher in certain countries. Can you explain that disparity?
The disparity you observe is already reflected in the prices he paid, as he presented it and as I calculate in the post you just replied. He paid different order of magnitude for different kinds of likes. That's how the market functions when it functions.
We can theorize all day "why" but we don't have any information about that. What he presents is only how much he paid and how much he received, and there everything seems consistent.
I really can't understand you here. Apparently you find it so amazingly obvious that India will click a like button ten times as much as the UK that you said "he acts surprised!?". Why is it so obvious to you that these likes are 'cheaper'? You certainly haven't given any reasons.
People are looking at the market doing something strange and your contribution is "the market functions, who cares".
Sure, I'm not very surprised that if the likes seem highly fraudulent the price per like is lower, but that's not the issue. The issue is these fraud-seeming levels in the first place!
>Why is it so obvious to you that these likes are 'cheaper'?
I was thinking the same thing. Maybe it's not so much that people in India click a like button ten times as much, but that more people in India get to see the ads.
I assume Facebook somehow reserves ad space for you, but since many more people advertise in the UK, they can only show the ad to the target audience every 1 out of 100 page views, while it might be 10 out of 100 in India.
If you advertise in India and the UK at the same time, Facebook will probably reserve a lot more slots in India, because that's cheaper for them. If they want to maximize their revenue, it would be smart to sell the sought-after UK slots to companies that can pay a lot. Indian likes are cheaper because more people want to advertise in the UK but there are fewer slots, so UK likes become more expensive.
The fact his experiment obtained is simply that there are cheaper and more expensive likes. You don't dispute that I hope? So it's obvious to me because of experiment of his. It would be strange if the prices didn't match the fact, which would mean that he was tricked. But they actually did. I support you if you are curious what produces the effects, I just claim that the article doesn't give any information about that and that from information he gives, everything fits -- the prices matched what he obtained.
Of course he's not claiming anything doesn't 'fit' in his data. That would require screwing up basic arithmetic about clicks. The author didn't claim to be tricked by facebook. He was surprised by the order of magnitude differences. Why don't you see that surprise as valid? And of course the article doesn't give the data to explain why, because the author doesn't know.
Even legitimate businesses are actually paying to be liked on facebook. I see a lot of ads on craigslist asking people to like their facebook page especially if they have lot of friends. I thought the whole point of like was that someone genuinely likes you/your business. Apparently, ppl are gaming fb.
You need 25 likes before you can get a branded page, plus no business wants their facebook page to look like a ghost town. People on fiverr have been capitalizing on this for a while at dirt cheap cost/like:
You get what you pay for -- the 'likes' you got from countries other than U.S. and UK were very cheap, so don't expect such crazy value in terms of brand awareness that turns into dollars. The reason 'likes' in U.S./UK are way more expensive is because it's competitive, that is, brands are willing to pay that much for 'likes' because over time they see they're getting something from it. The fact that your company is non-existent seems irrelevant. You created a funnel and some percentage of people who see the ad will convert, plain and simple.
Could be the time of day, day of week. It could also be the more recent movements of stock prices setting a context where this is more interesting to people (a number of articles on Facebook prices in just the last few days). Who knows?
More than likely. Still does highlight that its not just the news but also when you and as you say many prevailing aspects come into play. Like comedy timming is everything and that does seem to carry for many other aspects of life with regards to interaction. Fascinating though non the less.
If the point of the experiment was to determine whether Facebook ads are primarily clicked by real people (as opposed to "indiscriminate clickers"), the author should have used something so bland no one except bots would click on. I'd be interested in seeing what kind of users click on ads for "Moist Lint", for instance.
I have yet to see any good evidence that shows FB will be able to create an honestly sustainable revenue model.
I am sure the "pay for a less spammy ad riddled FB experience! Only $1.99 per month!" is in the near future. And I'd bet a fair number of users would pay for that.
I don't see anything there that would make me want to buy Facebook analytics services. I see an example of Facebook not being useless -- using advertised events to get real people (not bots) to show up somewhere and buy things.
We're moving towards a post marketing economy. Any marketer will tell you that. The old ways of marketing don't work anymore, and they certainly don't work on the Internet. People of the television generation are capable of filtering out marketing at an unprecedented level - the only marketing that works any more is strategically targetted marketing (a la Google) or consumer education campaigns.
Sponsorship has seen a resurgence in recent years. I know that P&G really likes the sponsorship model, but there are only so many things out there to sponsor.
Sponsorship is functionally brand awareness advertising, as opposed to conversion-oriented advertising. Sponsorship likens closer to the days of billboards and TV ads, when you either "felt the effects" or didn't, very qualitatively.
Why do you, and "any marketer," think we're headed away from conversion-oriented, highly quantitative models of advertising?
the thing is, and others will disagree with me, but I think that from the point of view of your average businessperson, I'm right- the thing is that the so-called quantitative, conversion-oriented methods of advertising are not so quantitative. I mean, a lot has been written on the 'last touch' or 'first touch' problem. And a lot has been done to mitigate that, but one of the first things you learn running a business is that if you don't understand something? you massively over pay for it. And I (and I think most business owners) don't understand how a last touch conversion tracking could tell me how that customer really heard about me, and more importantly, how I gained the credibility with that customer required for them to punch in their credit card.
Now, some people think they can compensate for that. But, for me? I don't understand how you could tell that a user learned about me from word of mouth (before they clicked on an adword that got them to my site and a signup.) - To me, figuring that out is so hard that I might as well just focus on the brand-building kind of advertising.
Now, a lot of this is because most people are willing to pay a premium for the 'quantitative' advertising. they are willing to pay extra for things they think they can track. This means that if I'm right (and who knows) then the brand-building advertising, that most people consider largely untrackable, is underpriced.
I mean, I'm not saying I'm right and you are wrong... just that there are a number of businesses that feel this way.
That's an interesting point, and I definitely think that sponsoring an event attended by your target audience is a big step up from TV or billboards.
Now this gets heady: "People are willing to pay a premium for things they can track." Perhaps advertising vectors which are easily tracked, thus optimized, yield more valuable per dollar spent. If this is the case, demand for this inventory (Adwords, etc) increases. You would expect it to become more expensive by forces of the market. This is why you don't see people lined up to fill billboard inventory, especially in the last 10 years.
It is a chicken-egg problem in some ways, but I think people are willing to pay more because their advertising/conversion math enables it, and that math is easier to back up with facts.
> but I think people are willing to pay more because their advertising/conversion math enables it, and that math is easier to back up with facts.
Yeah. This makes /absolute/ sense if you are actually tracking what you want to track. (e.g. I think that when I buy adwords, most of the conversions are from people that had a good chance of buying from me from the organic results; I believe that people only buy from me if they've heard of me before; if my brand reputation, in their mind, is good enough.)
My theory is that most trackable advertising that exists now does not really track as well as you think it does.
If I'm right, then trackable advertising is overvalued (because the actions that are tracked are only peripherally related to the buying decision.) - of course, right now most people disagree with me.
> they are willing to pay extra for things they think they can track.
> This means that if I'm right (and who knows) then the brand-building advertising,
> that most people consider largely untrackable, is underpriced.
I disagree. Online display advertising, which can be tracked effectively has had incredible downward pressure on prices as tracking has gotten better.
I think most advertising is highly overpriced (brand advertising especially) and as tracking gets better prices will drop.
Ad supported business models get harder and harder in that world.
I read your comment as: Brand building advertising is under priced because people think it can't be tracked.
My point was once it can be tracked well it will come to light that it's not very valuable. Because that's the pattern we've seen with online display.
But, as I reread your comment I realize that I'm thinking TV style mass broadcast advertising here, and if you mean branding advertising on online platforms then I agree with you that in that context it's under priced.
I'm mostly talking about offline brand building advertising. "Nobody is lining up to fill billboards" - I just bought some advertising on the checkout lane for the Safeway nearest google. (If that works, I think it will mostly work because it's so unusual. That, and the density of potential customers in the area.)
Really, I think sponsorship is an extremely effective way to build your brand; way more effective than billboards. I mean, if you can sponsor something that the people you sell to care deeply about. But, that's nearly impossible to track. My theory is that a customer might click on an adword (or organic search result) and sign up because they saw me at SCALE or something... but there is really no way for me to prove that.
That isn't so desirable for Facebook because Facebook has a strong interest in having its real users 'liking' many things. Something which real users have no real incentive to do. Anyway, a real bubblehead sitting there 'liking' thousands of things is a valuable thing for Facebook.
"But in running this non-existent firm I have learned quite a bit about the value of those "likes" prized by so many big brands, and the usefulness of Facebook's advertising."
Shouldn't he have said useLESSness not usefulness? It's pitifully useless, let's not be politically correct and say it's not that useful.
The author might not be aware that good bagels are not available everywhere in the world. If bagel delivery was available where I live, I might "like" the idea, too. I can not just walk around the corner and buy a good bagel.
if it's all about bots, why the US&UK CTR is 1/10th?
aren't US & UK markets more lucrative too to bots makers?
I suspect someone somewhere has CTR statistics for certain keywords on certain regions and kind of map it out. Bot makers may have ILLEGAL access and probably do it to avoid suspicion.
1) The author made a Facebook page for a fictional product that was rather obviously silly - downloading bagels - and talks about it as if it were a real product.
2) The FB ads campaign ran with an absolutely horrid targeting set:
> I chose the United States, the UK, Russia, India, Egypt, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. I narrowed it down slightly by targeting under 45-year-olds interested in cookery and consumer electronics, but was told that would still give me a potential audience of 112 million customers.
This is completely silly. Trying to target 112 million people means you won't be able to draw any sort of conclusion or get valid data - nor expect a meaningful response - without spending tens of thousands. If he wanted a response in the US or UK, he should have started there and focused on it to the exclusion of all else.
3) His statement "it seems that Facebook adverts can be very effective in generating interest in your business from certain countries but not in the US or the UK" is borne through no real testing or time. He spent less than $100 - you cannot draw any sort of conclusion from that information.