Reader beware. Don't take unsubstantiated claims (such as this article) as fact.<p>As someone who spends five figures daily on FB, I saw no such drop in performance -- nor have other advertisers I've been in touch with.<p>Performance on FB (especially at low volumes) is highly volatile on a day-over-day basis. So, at any time, there will always be a subset of advertisers who think "CPA's are skyrocketing". And, it's easy to draw the conclusion that the pattern is platform-wide.<p>The "accelerated delivery" that Facebook quoted in its response only applied to the remainder of the day that the outage took place -- not future days as the article suggests.
When you setup a facebook ad, you literally say to them: spend $100 per day.<p>Then Facebook has a 6 hour outage. Facebook can then show more ads to users per time on Facebook, to get to the $100 per day. Or it can only spend $75 that day.<p>I imagine some advertisers will prefer the first option, some the second. Facebook's machine learning algorithms will do something.<p>But I don't see the massively malicious intent here. Most likely this isn't even a human decision. The algorithms just know then have to spend $100 per day.<p>Fine, if there really are 50% less conversions, that's an issue, but frankly 6 hours won't really matter.
This doesn't seem _that_ strange. In online advertising, there are the concepts of pacing (to ensure the ad campaign delivers somewhat evenly over the lifespan - not because there's any evidence that it improves performance, but because the advertiser would feel miffed if you spent all the budget in the first day of their month long campaign), and frequency capping (attempting not to show the same ad to the same person too many times - clearer benefits to performance here).<p>Both of these will limit the rate at which an ad spends money. If it doesn't get shown for a long period of time, both of these factors get reduced, and the ad can get selected more aggressively, particularly if you are a higher bidder than the ads that would have got chosen in your absence.
This is too stupid to be true. For a 6-hour outage to significantly increase the ad frequency (and lower the conversion rate) you should pressure the system to recover the outage in a day or two; do they really need it? We're not even at the end of the month...
Is it not possible the ads are being shown to more people than usual due to greater usage of Facebook properties immediately following it coming back online?<p>I can’t find anything that indicates individuals are seeing more ads than usual as a result of the outage, besides the anecdote of the one agency in the article (but maybe the lower conversion rates can be explained by some other factors)
We all hate facebook. Ok. No problema.<p>But Facebook is actually trying to help its costumers recover the money lost during the outage.<p>US$ 60 million? Pff. Just ask every executive to skip one executive jet travel per week and they recover that in a month or less.
Facebook is the same company that has allowed a bunch of scam artists to advertise a $1500 ice machine for $30 (which is their S&H cost) while using another company's name in their ads. I can't remember the last time I got on facebook and saw a useful ad that wasn't either a scam or completely irrelevant.
This sounds like straight-up fraud to me. They promised one thing, and now, after an outage that was their own fault, they are intentionally warping and devaluing the nature of the advertising product they sold to customers, so that instead of Facebook deservedly absorbing that loss, customers will absorb it, instead.
While shady on Facebook's part, it does match the general shadiness of Facebook ads.<p>It is legit hard to find ads which are not a scam in some way.
Are we post honor? I have this magical machine that makes me, what ten million dollars an hour? After many years of constant service, one of my employees messes up and it goes down for a few hours. Rather then eating the loss, that isn't much of loss since my margins are as wide as the grand canyon, I crank the machine up so it runs faster and produces a inferior quality product.<p>Did Veruca Salt grow up and get a job at Facebook?