Comment by dillondoyle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dillondoyle | Hacker News Reader

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I see this a lot but I find that it can't be true on the whole for many many.

We buy ads for political clients. On FB I could get a positive immediate roi for donations. Scaling huge is hard (i got one client to over $1 million last cycle for context). Admittedly but you could go a lot bigger if you look at ROI down the line with email donations.

And we're not alone. I don't think the many many direct to consumer brands would spend so much money on FB if they didn't get a positive ROI.

Maybe some PE or other funded brands are trying to grow over profit spending more than they make. But there are a ton that are profit seeking and get good value. FB is definitely an exception though unless you are an app install ad on mobile.

Where is the control for the experiment? What is the ROI on non-targeted ads?

There are a lot of ways to do it.

For us we make a donation page. The only links that go there are from FB ads. We also use different refcodes for different ad groups AND the FB pixel passing in purchase value which is really good at optimizing FB's delivery to highest ROAS

FB is very very very good at this

I feel like people who question it or like don't understand basic attribution should do some more research before denigrating

There are other non-direct measurement, FB for instance allows you to upload offline purchases. Definitely not as clean especially if you're hitting across different channels. But a basic A/B holdout test is pretty good in that case too.

Also re-reading I think I misunderstood half of your question.

For us personally we cannot get anywhere close to similar ROI from other platforms like Snap that attempt to be FB let alone contextual targeting.

It probably works better for app instal ads but otherwise it's.

The cookie based ecosystem also doesn't add a ton of value, some studies say between 5-15%.

It's Facebook and Amazon and Google's 1P data that don't rely on cookies.

Exactly. Not to mention that lots of people do lots of stupid stuff – so appealing to it's popularity doesn't tell us much either.

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