Comment by nolok | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nolok | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The results are also absolutely terrible.

There are a ton to criticize about google's adplatform (from user data handling to transparency to semi-monopoly to ...) but at the end of day if I make a proper well targeted campaign I get matching results.

Not all of them and there are some obvious false in there (ergo the need for transparency), but for every company who I have personnaly done the adwords campaign, as long as I disable the display network and make sure the campaign is well made, I get my bang for the buck.

On the other hand I'm still not sure why anyone who isn't scam or retargeting advertises on facebook, its "leads" are absolutely terrible in quality. I'm the kind who is willing to spend lots of time and a/b testing on my campaign (since at the end of the day it's the source of my money), but no matter what I do it costs me between 3 and 20 times more on facebook than on google to get the same number of end game sales.

It's a terrible ad network. When I dabbled in adult toys sales a while back I had to deal with adult networks ads and even THEY were better. Honestly it's impressive to me how bad it is.

(ads are purely textual and non retargeted, real products or services with great reviews)

>> It's a terrible ad network

It's a $70bn ad network. All that revenue comes from highly liquid ad budgets. It's naive to conclude that fb ads "don't work" from anecdote... Not working most of the time is the norm for advertising, but the scale comes from the cases where it does work.

You're of course right, and I guess every sentence in that post of mine should be prefixed by "in my opinion / for my usage".

I will be honest and say that the prefix was assumed to be understood without having to be written, but I understand how without it my statement could be seen as something else (and rather obviously wrong).

I read it as such and assume most reasonable people did as well. I personally think online discourse would be much less noise if the Principal of Charity were more widely applied, as opposed to wanton application of the Principal of You Are Trivially Wrong and I Will Prove It.

Fair enough.

A lot more than 70 billion dollars has been spent on things that not only don't work, but are impossible, even in theory.

I get the notion, but $70bn doesn't get spent on that many things... Maybe weapons projects.

Anyway... this is just not the case here. The advertisers that pour budgets into fb aren't suckers. They're highly roi-sensitive and data cognizant.

All advertising fails much of the time, but when it doesn't it scales.

The advertisers that pour budgets into fb aren't suckers. They're highly roi-sensitive and data cognizant.

How do you know? Facebook obviously carries ads from huge brands, but also has a very long tail of smaller businesses and other advertisers. While it's reasonable to assume that whoever is spending a few million here and there on behalf of some major retail enterprise is watching the numbers pretty closely, I see no reason to assume that a thousand small businesses who are spending a few thousand here and there are doing the same. It's also worth noting that several things Facebook has done in the past have prompted reports of Major Brand X pulling $Y million in ad spend, so apparently the people who do have the sophisticated ROI monitoring don't always like what they see.

I wonder if ‘Hyperloop the brand’ has crossed this milestone yet.

Nowhere close, but you gave me a chuckle.

Why a throwaway account? Let's hear some examples where millions of independent thinkers and analysts supported the things you talk about for over a decade.

That account dates from 2012 and has 8k+ karma.

Good context, thank you. It's an unusual name for an account that has so much karma.

Ignore the downvotes. dalbasal presented concrete facts and sound reasoning. Some people's dislike for Facebook as a company doesn't change the validity of his arguments.

dalbasal dislikes fb more than anyone. But, thinking that fb ads suck while a highly roi-motivated industry pours $70bn pa into it is ludicrous.

The traffic quality is amazing. Your results may vary. We all put up with FB's BS because their traffic is gold. Yes the lead gen feature isnt great but if you can't profit from FB traffic you are doing something wrong.

I'm not saying I can't profit, didn't say that at all.

I'm saying if I have a buck to put, it's worth several times more on adwords than on fb.

If you are traffic starved then sure fb could be usefull but I suspect the vast majority of small/medium business runs out of ad budget before they run out of adwords growth capabilities, and they value qualified leads much more than raw traffic.

Again OF COURSE it varies by business and I'm sure other people have the opposite experience, but mine has been clear cut and I shared it.

What is the price-point of what you sell? Do you sell a $20 product, a $200 product, a $2000 product? Google has gotten expensive, a bidding for adwords with a $20 product has never seemed like a good idea to me.

It obviously fluctuates but to take the most recent one I updated, for a ~300 euro sale point (shipping excluded), physical product, in France, contested market (not a mass market product, many small vendors, no clear leader but also no brand attachment) my cpa runs at about 25 euros.

I have never sold below 100$ product, I have for services but I was taking a loss for the first 6 months per customer to acquire a base.

My best performing campaign in an entirely different market (education) is for a 4000$ product/1 year service combo, cpa is at 150$ but basically one out of every 10 leads is a sale (cyclical depending on time of year so this is a "make bank for three month" thing).

OK that makes sense. For the small stuff FB might still be a better bet.

You shared it without enough nuance, and that turned it into misleading information for most people out there. The fact that you wrote a lengthy piece and gave yourself a lot of credit as a marketer only further exacerbated the negative learnings for anyone who read your first piece. I am glad you received an immediate rebuttal, which leads me to hope that not too many young entrepreneurs were led to turn their back on what's arguably one of the most important marketing channels, and for many companies the only viable one.

I disagree with your point but I want to answer one part in particular:

> gave yourself a lot of credit as a marketer

I in no way intended to do that. If I did, I apologize. I may be bad, or good, or decent, or terrible at it, I don't know. The point I was trying to make on that part of my original comment was simply: I do spend time on my campaign and A/B test difference, not as-in "I'm great", but as-in "I didn' just make my first campaign there in 5 minutes without trying to improve it or learn from my mistakes" because I think anecdotal evidences given from that point of view have no value at all.

So again, sorry if that is indeed what can be understood in what I wrote because that would be egoistical and wrong, but I genuinely don't believe that's what I wrote.

I absolutely did not have the same reaction you had to their post. The very first sentence could be read as a broad brush statement, but the rest of the post makes it clear it was based on their personal experience. If that wasn't understood, then either the full post wasn't read or reading comprehension isn't as strong with some readers (ESL could factor).

Could the explanation be that different ad platforms perform better for different products or services?

I've heard (no direct experience) that FB leads tend to be high-quality when one is advertising, e.g., mobile games monetized through in-game purchasing.

Probably yes.

For references my own ads have been looking for leads (not traffic, not subscription/registration), and the areas have been education, IT services, home help services and niche market retail sales (aka low sales but of several thousands per unit products).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com