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Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

We stopped our (tiny) $1500 per month Facebook campaigns for exactly that reason. So scammy: we pay real money for a bunch of bots to “engage.” Until robots start buying our product, I won’t be buying ads where bots are the largest source of engagement.

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I regularly see comments like this about Facebook's ad program. Personally, it strikes me that there was no tracking of ROI in the first place -- and if you can't reliably track ROI, why were you spending $1500?

If you're spending $1500, but getting great ROI, then fake engagement would be no reason to stop the ads.

People are tracking ROI, and constantly testing new targeting parameters to keep eking out a few more points of ROI. A lot of Facebook Ad spend is experimental (especially at that low of a price). There used to be a time when you could get real engagement for pennies each and build up a following of real people based on a few ads then not have to spend anymore and go off your organic growth and audience.

Now the second you stop the ad spend your engagement drops to nothing.

What's wrong with even 99% robot engagement is 1% human engagement pays the bills?

People don't normally knowingly pay $1 for a penny's worth of value. Think of it like a bucket of apples. If I charge you a price based on 100 real apples and give you a bucket that only has one real apple in it that's basically fraud. Doesn't matter if that one apple is delicious.

However, since it's auction based, if you were getting real clicks, the cost would be significantly higher than $1. I'm not sure how it's a penny's worth of value, given that the price includes the market's best guess as to the value of the mix of valid/fraudulent traffic.

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