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cynicalpeace

I wonder how much of Meta and other social media ad revenue is based on bot activity.

You can setup a campaign where you pay for comments and you're actually paying Meta to show your ad to a bunch of bots.

Does anyone have more resources/inside info that confirms/denies this suspicion?

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I do - I think the effect on Meta’s ad revenue is nil.

Advertisers measure ad campaigns by ROAS (return on ad spend). This is driven by actual dollars spent, cutting out all bots right away.

Clicks / views / comments are irrelevant except as far as getting the ad to show for actual buyers.

I've advertised quite a bit on Meta, and also hired people to do it for me. ROAS, for me, is the most important metric, but it's not the only metric people look at. Speaking from experience, plenty of people like to look at and optimize other metrics.

For interest’s sake, what other metrics do you find most valuable?

> You can setup a campaign where you pay for comments

You cannot setup a campaign where you pay for comments (https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1438417719786914#). But maybe you mean other user generated content like messages. You ought to be able to figure out pretty quickly if those are authentic.

Do you care if they are authentic? Probably not. You are in the business of getting clicks on an ad. Your client has to worry about actually converting that to product sales. Thats their problem and not yours as the ad firm.

Meta and ad agencies are definitely incentivized that your ads convert and that engagement is authentic. Otherwise why deal with them at all? SMBs are like 40% of Meta's revenues, the entire world finds the product valuable. It is a little glib to try to make the contrarian case on conversion.

The toxic part of their incentives is that they want businesses to commit large budgets on campaigns whose performance you can measure with very little money spent and very little data.

Yes definitely. But then that last sentence sorta leads to the first question you had- why deal with them at all?

I think it's because despite that toxicity it still seems to be the best ad platform in town. Haven't seen anybody suggest a better alternative. Feels almost monopolistic.

I've heard it said that Meta prioritizes like this:

1. Users 2. Meta 3. Advertisers

I have a feeling it's actually:

1. Meta 2. Users 3. Advertisers

But in the end, advertisers always end up on the bottom. Especially since advertisers need Meta more than Meta needs any one of them.

My bad, I guess I was thinking of engagement campaigns and yes messaging campaigns

Facebook has become full of generic name accounts posting generic AI generated content. Despite all flagging it is incessant, which tells me it’s likely sanction or even created by the company to fill content gaps. I’d say 30-50% or content that shows for me is suspicious.

I often wonder this as well. Would love to have more insight into that

If people are paying lets say these morally questionable companies like meta ad campaigns, they deserve what they get. I don't want to condone any criminal behavior, but this whole business of people's mass manipulation is vastly immoral bunch of white (or not so white) lies.

Who do you suggest as an alternative for paid ads?

Building relationships with clients, same as it ever was. There are companies today that have been selling for example very specific machined parts for 100 years. You have never heard of them. They don’t advertise on facebook. Yet they bring in enough work to stay in business without these paid campaigns. The secret sauce? The rolodex and actually calling potential clients directly.

This answer is a good answer for some companies, but for other companies it's very hand-wavy. Paid ads have value and you can make a pretty penny even on Meta (actually, especially on Meta compared to others) if you do it right.

Still curious about alternatives for paid ads

Sure you can make penny, you can do a lot of pennies on various amoral businesses, often the deeper this shit goes the more gold is in it.

I call it amoral, nobody even trying to object it since we all know reality, and I stand by it. It slowly but surely destroys future of our kids and makes it bleaker, and objectively worse. Maybe not massively (and maybe yes, I don't know and neither do you), and its hard to pinpoint a single actor, so lets point it in ad business.

But I guess as long as you have your 'pretty penny' thats all you care about? I don't expect much sympathy on a forum where better half of participants work for the worst offenders, 'pretty penny' it is as we all know, but curious about a single good argument about that pesky morality.

That response was not to your comment, but a different comment.

I don't see why advertising is particularly moral or immoral. Depends on the platform, content, product, etc. Which is why I asked you for suggestions about other ad platforms.

Advertising is amoral because it’s end game is always sacrificing things humans generally regard as valuable—our attention, leisure time, savings—for shareholder revenue. Advertising always has an incentive to increase revenue by being ever more invasive, corrupting anything it touches. As it goes, it shifts our perception of normal—just imagine asking someone from the 1920ies whether they’re okay with ads blasting from gas station pumps, elevators, or toilets. Or if they would be okay with someone watching your every move and deduct what they could offer you when you’re exhausted or miserable and easy prey. Advertisers have convinced us this is normal. It’s not. And it will only ever get worse.

1920s had advertisements. I’m not saying all ads are good (“it depends”) but also don’t see the case that all ads are inherently bad. Seems very ideological

What?

How do you meet these clients in the first place?

How do you get them to answer their phone?

How do you get word-of-mouth if you’re just starting out?

Edit: reduced level of snark

Usually they cold call or email with prices/quotes/offers(see my previous comment to parent), and somehow they harvest of buy the contacts of businesses and employees.

I sometimes suspect that, there are some ways to collect these from linkedin or the business card printers sell the contact info in black(due to strict data privacy act in EU). Because only two places my work email & work phone number being available are at the business card printer and linkedin(we need to use work email to access some elearning things, don’t ask).

Well, about that thing. Some of our local companies in machining and other things somehow buy private emails and phone numbers. While I work at a place that do not directly need such services, my spam box and my work phone(mobile) blocklist is full of services calling me to offer their latest price and if I can forward them to my boss or whatever. So, either online ads or other forms of spamming.

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