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Comment by damoncali | Hacker News Reader

You may be right, but the problem is that the number of businesses that can take advantage of "the proper way" to use Facebook for advertising is but a small percentage of those who are actually using Facebook for advertising (based on what I see, at least).

My friends that work at the big CPG companies and ad agencies tell me one story consistently about their interactions with Facebook (the company) - if it's not working, Facebook universally points their finger at the customer and says "You're doing it wrong". That can't end well. (Or maybe it can. Print ads are pretty awful as well.)

Can an ad platform that requires so much specialized marketing skill work at that scale? I tend to think "no". Facebook will wind up selling ads that don't work to people who don't know or care, just like the newspapers do. Look for Facebook's analytics to suck in the future once they come to grips with this.

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Thanks. To tell you the truth, Google Adwords is a lot more complicated than Facebook ads. With Google, you need to:

1. Work on keyword research. Long tail keywords. Negative keywords. If you only rely on keywords Google recommends, you're missing out on quite a bit.

2. Creating ad groups. You can't create an ad group with a 100 keywords in it. They have to be narrowly focused and shouldn't have more than a handful of keywords in each of them.

3. Focus on landing page quality. Create headlines dynamically based on the keywords.

4. Track ROI. And pause the ad groups and ads that result in negative ROI.

And this is only for the search network. Not the display network.

Compared to this, Facebook is pretty simple. But yes - Facebook needs to do a better job educating folks how to best use their ad platform.

Yellow page ad strategies work for Google because people already have buying intent when they run a search. Radio ad strategies work for Facebook. Its more suitable for brand building. If you are selling cars, and an average person buys a new car every 7 years - you won't see a lot of sales in the first 3-6 months. Facebook needs to educate on this.

The mechanics for AdWords are more complex for sure. But the concepts are much simpler.

AdWords: When people search for something, we'll show them your ad, which they'll click, and then buy something.

Facebook: At various times, we'll show people your ad. People will click on it, but the vast, vast majority won't buy. But you've just engaged with them. So you need a fan page and the right kind of content to put on it. If you do this right, you'll build brand loyalty and increase sales in the long run. Did we mention you can use Facebook ads to drive fans to your Facebook page?

Conceptually, Facebook is way more complicated, and less easily outsourced. You can hire an AdWords guy, throw money at him, and get results. With Facebook? Not so much. You can try to outsource it, but it's expensive, and everyone will tell you "you're doing it wrong" (because you are), which is becoming a very common theme with Facebook ads.

If everyone is "doing it wrong", does "it" really work?

When selling AdWords, the most common objection I get is "nobody clicks those links". That is, of course, extremely easy to overcome.

When talking about Facebook, the first question is, "what's a fan page, and where are these ads? Can you just do it all for me?" They usually haven't got a clue where to start, and their first instinct is to pass it off to someone else so they don't have to think about it. There's a market opportunity there, but it looks a lot more like traditional media advertisements (low effectiveness, opaque results) than online ads.

This sounds like a problem of the people buying the ads understanding how search works, but not understanding how Facebook works. I think this will work itself out in time. Was this a problem with search advertising when most people didn't understand search?

Facebook needs to educate these people if it wants to be more effective, but it seems odd that they should have to. Does this happen in other forms of media? I can't imagine a TV network holding an advertiser's hand as much as some people want Facebook to. Maybe I'm expecting too much of these advertisers, like knowing the medium they plan to advertise on.

Maybe I'm expecting too much of these advertisers, like knowing the medium they plan to advertise on.

In my experience, you are. Most just want to pay money and have customers walk though the door. They don't care about marketing, media, or the intricacies of intent, social proof or anything else.

AdWords almost works this way. Facebook very much doesn't.

The bottom line is that the advertisers don't know or care how it all works. I've witnessed this at tiny mom and pops all the way to Fortune 500 companies. Frankly, I'm shocked that GM noticed that they weren't making money off Facebook ads - that puts them ahead of their peers in a substantial way. You'd be shocked by how much money is wasted - straight up thrown away - by big companies on Facebook.

I agree with your last statement. I don't think people on Facebook are looking to buy anything and hence, why it hasn't really been successful. People on Facebook go to have fun and interact with their friends - not buy stuff.

But if they're having fun with friends, and see display ads for Coke (or GM), then the brand gets associated with their lives.

This points to Facebook as a marketing platform, whereas Google is a sales platform.

True. But from a business perspective, how can Coke or GM quantify whatever they get back from that particular user though? At this point, I don't think they can unless they can tie in a whole bunch of other data which would probably raise privacy flags.

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