We were successfully running retargeting ads on Facebook by uploading our customers email addresses. We were getting lots of conversions cheaply. Initially CPM was $1.70, then a few months later it was $4, now 6 months later it's $9. At this point it became unviable.<p>I spoke to our account manager at Facebook and he confirmed my suspicions. Every time one of our customers converts though our ads, Facebook assigns a high value to that user, since that user purchased something through a FB ad. So now I have more competition to get in front of our existing customer from our competition who our customer is not interested in. FUCK THAT. Moral of the story DO NOT tell Facebook about conversions from your existing customers. Keep that info to yourself.
Man, this is intuitively and empirically so true. I'm not sure who would be surprised by this study, though some may point to specific exceptions.<p>But, there are a number of reasons this is obvious, not the least of which is that people go to Facebook to socialize, not befriend companies.<p>So, it always felt like a ruse that brands should encourage their customers to engage on Facebook's turf, as it always seemed that it accrued much more value to Facebook than to the brands. Why do I want someone else owning or even inserted between that relationship with my customers?<p>Yet companies (regrettably, including my own), would even hold contests, etc., effectively paying to get more likes from customers they already had! Then, Facebook pulled their master-stroke of ratcheting down the reach to all of those fans unless the company paid for it. It really was like some kind of racket or "minor extortion".<p>Remarkably, they also really began to push the idea of paying them even more to get more fans.<p>So, send you my current customers by converting them to fans, advertise with you to get more fans, then pay you again to advertise to reach all of them? No thanks. I'd rather get a good old-fashioned email address.<p>I look at their ad numbers and I just don't get it.
<a href="http://stratechery.com/2014/dependent-digital-whales/" rel="nofollow">http://stratechery.com/2014/dependent-digital-whales/</a><p><i>"These ad units are largely purchased by free-to-play game publishers such as King (maker of Candy Crush Saga) and Big Fish Games, which leverage Facebook’s incredible demographic data to target the small percentage of players who will spend hundreds of dollars on in-app purchases.”<p>.. So to recount, Facebook is going gangbusters because of ads for free-to-play games, developers are excited about the chance to cash in via Facebook ads, Google and Twitter are trying to mimic Facebook’s success, and Google and especially Apple are hanging their app store hats on the amount of revenue generated by in-app purchases.<p>In other words, billions of dollars in cold hard cash, and 20x that in valuations are ultimately dependent on a relatively small number of people who just can’t stop playing Candy Crush Saga.</i>"<p>Many of whom are women, their purchases leveraged up into Valley value. How is that for irony?
Facebook mobile ads are pure crap. Here is a proof if anyone needs one:
<a href="http://forums.makingmoneywithandroid.com/income-reports/16351-expense-report-wordsearch-hero-5.html#post91053" rel="nofollow">http://forums.makingmoneywithandroid.com/income-reports/1635...</a><p>Most installs from Facebook Mobile ads never even open the app once (Yes even Once).<p>If you read the post from the same guy, you will notice he actually targeted to People who play word games on mobile.
The idea of a "social relationship" with a brand was always pretty silly, I think.<p>But Twitter is a good tool for PR (because every blogger and reporter uses it), and Facebook can be an efficient content distribution channel.<p>I think brands have a hard time on social media when they have nothing interesting to say. "Like my page" or "download my app" or "tell us how much you love your toilet paper" are not interesting, and Facebook is doing the right thing to hide that crap from more feeds.<p>But if you can create good content, you can spend money very efficiently on social media. You just need to boost it a bit over the noise floor, and then folks will share and comment to spread it farther.
That's because those companies are doing it wrong. They view social as yet another mass marketing channel, one where you spam, convert, etc, and the use the same Google Analytics/Google Ads type of approach to CPM and 'conversion'.<p>What they are missing entirely is that, unlike the traditional web marketing world of clicks and IP addresses, social media gives you an opportunity to understand your target audience, see what interests them, what influences them - and lets you interact with them.<p>Once you truly know the audience, it opens up whole new opportunities for marketing (subtle product placement, indirect promotion via influencers etc) - which almost nobody is doing effectively right now.<p>What we see instead is the same tired web banner concept, clumsily applied to FB or Twitter, and we're getting inundated by ads (that annoying DOMO 'are you still using Excel for your data?' ad comes to mind) - no wonder they are not seeing any ROI.
An important distinction: the waste in this case is on "organic" non-paid interactions with users on the social networks.<p>For Facebook, this means getting "Likes" on your dedicated Facebook Page (aka <a href="https://facebook.com/your_brand_name" rel="nofollow">https://facebook.com/your_brand_name</a>) for Twitter I'm presuming it's followers of @brandname.<p>This is separate from the actual paid advertising that the platforms offer - which is likely far more effective, targeted and profitable than say a magazine or newspaper ad.<p>Running a nail salon and want to reach women 18-45 who live in your city? Facebook lets you target that exactly and clicks to the ads just go to your website.
We stopped advertising on Facebook. The whole thing is a big scam. Not only do I have to pay to get people to my pages, I have to pay again and again and again every time I need to reach those who liked my pages. I have no way to reach all of my page members without paying FB dearly for every single post. Then there's the issue of FB ratcheting up your cost for those who actually respond to your message. And, of course, then there's the lovely fake/unresponsive likes problem. Nah, it's a big mess. Don't need them. I'll wait until they hire some grown-ups who can relate to real people and understand how honest and serious people do business in the real world.
Facebook blew away earnings this summer citing "mobile ads" as the reason for growth. Instagram had its first ad ever a few weeks prior to the earnings release, which had hundreds of thousands of comments. I can't help but feel Facebook was being misleading when they cited "mobile ads" for the revenue spike. Merchants had renewed faith in the platform thus resulting in a positive feedback cycle(merchants come back/signup -> more revenue -> revenue jumps again -> repeat). I think a break down of their mobile ad revenue would tell a much different story than the one they were trying to promote
Sure. If you think you're reaching half a billion people, you're deceiving yourself (and/or falling for Facebook's deceptions, which, as an advertiser, you ought to know better than to have done) — it's a great place to put your information publicly and communicate with interested people instantly and directly. Wonderful tool for that purpose and used well by savvy brands that way today. But for actual advertising? Good god! A hole for money.
Our company successfully manages multiple Facebook and Twitter campaigns. Not only do we post on social media, but we also pull that content into website feeds with api's. This ensures visitors to the site see the latest social media posts. This, in conjunction with paid and targeted ads, produces a high level of customer interaction.<p>Just posting on Facebook/Twitter without purchasing ads and leveraging the content off/network won't produce favorable results.
Interested to hear the Hacker community's take on this.<p>We've been forecasting this for 2 years and agree with Nate Elliott : "As a result, marketers hoping to interact with consumers online might be better off investing in social features that exist on their own websites, or in smaller, more niche social networks, Mr. Elliott said."<p>That's why we built Hull in the first place.<p>Now this subject is this 15min's subject. What does the Hacker community think of this specific idea?
For the record, when people talk about "Brands" on Facebook, we're not talking about janky startups. We're talking about big old companies that blow >10 Million dollars in ad buys.
I found out this very early, a few years ago when their ad platform was barely launching for everyone. I had a digital magazine and overall it seemed like a good deal, send me people interested in music from these countries at very low CPCs, nice. In total, I may have spent around $1200 USD over a month for a little more than 100 subscribers; needless to say I felt scammed. When trying to figure out what happened (w/ Google Analytics, my own event tracking code and even a few apache logs) I found out very interesting stuff, like that 99% of those clicks were people who didn't stay for more than a second on my webpage, like in: they didn't even wait for the page to load completely... weird.<p>Just for the record, my ads were not clickbaity and were targeted fine, and my magazine didn't suck (IMO at least heh), so if someone clicked on my ad I would pretty much expect it to stay in the page and have at least a look at the cover of the current issue.<p>Why did I burn $1200 if the ads weren't working from the start? I wish I had figured that out earlier and spend that money on a fancy chair or whatever instead... The thing is that I was only looking at my daily visitors and believed that everything was fine, it was until the end of the month (where I always made some kind of audit thing to see if I was growing or not) where I noticed that the number of new subscribers had remained the same even though FB ads were active all time.<p>Since then, the only advice I give to friends and clients is "stay away from Facebook ads, it's not what you think they are". And on a small side note, I tried a lot of advertisers at that time and the best experience I had was with StumbleUpon, their referrals converted to subscribers at an incredible ratio (like >50%!!!) and on top of that they drove some extra organic growth even a few months after then campaign was finished, respect for them.
Don't think Facebook offers relationships at all - just an endless stream of adverts and selfies. Like watching TV with all the programmes removed.<p>Anyway, it's all going to be totally different with smartwatches...