Media buyer: Facebook updates have ‘wrecked the ad platform on the backend’

I used to own a large APAC agency. We had six figures in Facebook going through us every month. Issues like ad accounts being blocked, poor performance, etc received no feedback or conversation. Google over time assigned an account manager and improved support but Facebook was always awful. In one instance email went to Sheryl Sandberg, reply to which got forwarded down to 6 people who eventually gave us a 'this is policy' answer. I often advice founders to find friends who work there to get their issues resolved - because there is no formal sensible way to get it done.

Its terrible, i cant even make the simple ads with the wizard anymore because at the last step there are JS errors in the console, in every browser. Support doesnt know what js errors are. nightmare.

"I'm looking at my sympathy-o-meter and the needle's barely moving".

Putting away all the evilness about Facebook away, why would they shoot themselves in their own foot? Even from a completely evil company perspective, advertising is the biggest revenue generating aspect of their whole ecosystem, what incentive do they have to cripple it (and at least, not immediately react to it)?

Facebook has the worst platform in the world. It&#x27;s normal to get 6 support reps in a row ask you the same identical question you&#x27;ve already answered 5 times in a single thread they can scroll up to read. Each time you reply, a new rep is assigned the ticket, and they want to maximize throughput so they just use a canned response instead of dealing with the issue. But this is normal. They also ban you by default, assuming, I think, that people who aren&#x27;t legit won&#x27;t appeal, so legitimate merchants need to appeal to bans multiples times just to begin buying ads. They also restrict your account so you can&#x27;t do anything, but they leave the ads running and keep billing you. This bankrupts people who can&#x27;t pause their unprofitable campaigns. My business partner was being billed ten grand daily via a banned&#x2F;restricted account for weeks on end.<p>But this is the game. I&#x27;ve spent millions of dollars on G&#x2F;FB&#x2F;etc and that&#x27;s just how it goes.

Any time Facebook&#x27;s UI is insulted, it&#x27;s common to see the defence that it&#x27;s a feature, not a bug, because clearly it works or a competitor would replace them. That time spent improving it is time wasted, because it doesn&#x27;t make money. I see this as proof that a highly-scalable market doesn&#x27;t optimise for good, it optimises for good-enough, and there&#x27;s a lot of potential revenue lost between good and good-enough.

It&#x27;s really sad how the most well-payed engineers and designers are spending the best years of their lives working on this hostile platform. I&#x27;m so tired of being treated like garbage by these companies, I just hope there is some tipping point, a straw that finally breaks the camels back, that leads to their downfall.

I couldn&#x27;t read the article, on the monitor of the ancient workstation I am using, the article is impossible to read, seemly they assumed everyone by now would have 1080p monitors or something, the site has a giant fixed menubar on the top, and a even bigger &quot;subscribe me&quot; bar on the bottom, and these almost touch on my screen, leaving like 3 lines of readable text on the middle... It is just silly.<p>EDIT: for a while this reached 10 points, now it is at 2... makes me wonder, what I wrote so horribly wrong that deserves all these downvotes?

I&#x27;ve worked with FB Business Manager since early 2014 and it has always been bad: slow, requires constant refreshing, and is extremely complex.<p>For comparison, AdEspresso is not nearly as complex but hugely more productive for doing split testing in Facebook campaigns. You build your ads on their interface and they submit via API.

The biggest problem I have is the randomness of targeting desktop only. The option is only visible in one of the many flows that I can never remember how to find. Once you manage to actually enable it it randomly reverts back to also targeting mobile. My theory is that it does it when you edit some other parameter of the ad since the edit form is part of the flow where you don&#x27;t have the option.

Facebook is terribly buggy and also has google-level customer service (none)

It’s not often that you come across an article that seems designed purely to engender schadenfreude, but this fits the bill nicely.<p>In a slightly more serious tone, the interviewee pulls out the old “won’t someone think of the small businesses?” line at the end. Is there any evidence that this is true? Is is primarily small businesses that are hurt with this kind of instability?

Here is the crazy part about Facebook Ad Manager. It had a targeting option called &quot;React (Javascript Library)&quot; in Additional interests. That has been removed since last month. But Angular and other frameworks still exist as a targeting option. It is crazy because React is a Facebook product. I literally have no idea why they deprecated their own product&#x27;s targeting option. And as usual, if you ask anything from support, you get back canned replies. If you are in the drop-shipping world you&#x27;ll know the daily gripes drop-shippers have with Facebook Ads. Like is said in the article, the first few days are decent and then it tanks completely. Someone at Facebook who knows what they are doing needs to get Facebook Ads under control. It was working fine until all these changes wrecked the platform!

These kinds of posts always leave me wondering &quot;what are they selling and for how much?&quot; If you&#x27;re selling a $12 ebook does Google work for you? Does Facebook? I feel like none of these platforms work very well for small-ticket items but Facebook seems to allow a lower-cost entry IMHO.

Using the FB Ads platform is a continuing fucking disgrace. I hate it. I cannot believe it’s their core money maker and still such a shit show to use.

&quot;Facebook is more concerned about making the platform look good than how it actually performs&quot;<p>This has been a universal problem that I&#x27;ve observed in most tech companies i&#x27;ve worked with. Hyper-focus on the optics and less on the content &#x2F; results.<p>I dont know if its a by product of giving front end design equal &#x2F; greater weight than back end design &#x2F; analytics or something more systematic like the apple design influence. Maybe both. Eitherway seems like websites are getting easier to look at, more clever, and less useful all across the board.

I wonder if Facebook has done some good support&#x2F;bad support A&#x2F;B tests.<p>Maybe customers receiving bad support spend just as much, or possibly even more, than those receiving good support.

That&#x27;s an interesting read, and it shows how buggy so much of the software is.<p>It also shows how developers rank the priorities of bug fixes.<p>I&#x27;m an Xcode user.<p>That means that I experience <i>lots</i> of bugs; some, pretty damn nasty. I tend to only report the ones I consider serious, but I find it a bit depressing that so many of them seem to remain untouched.<p>That&#x27;s because Apple assumes that I have a much higher tolerance for bugs than the vast majority of their users.<p>They&#x27;re right. I keep using Xcode, despite the bugs. I&#x27;m not a fan of other IDEs, and my experience with them, is that they are every bit as buggy as Xcode, except that they also run slower.<p>But user interface (and security) bugs in the general operating systems get high priority.<p>I suspect the same goes for Facebook. They know that they are the only game in town, and that marketers will tolerate a much buggier experience than users.<p>I would like to see software quality rise all over. Speaking only for myself, I spend a great deal of time refining the interface for administrative functionality, and have a standard policy of &quot;Don&#x27;t move on to the next item until you believe this one is 100% bug-free, and completely usable.&quot;, even if it means delaying, or even reversing, progress of the project.<p>That&#x27;s not a popular stance, but it does tend to result in pretty high-quality software. I&#x27;m writing a social media app, right now, and this philosophy has paid off in a big way. It does mean that the team needs to wait longer for some functionality, but the app is constantly in a state, where they can simply hand it to potential investors, and not worry about them encountering highly embarrassing bugs. I&#x27;m hoping that the end result will be a real joy to use.

It boggles my mind how other companies, and people who resort to ad platforms like this, still use these tools given how those ad platforms treat them (no or very poor human support). I find their behaviour so unbelievably disrespectful.<p>What other alternatives are there?

The Ad industry has itself to blame. I tried FB Ad when they were new, and it was so terrible in every direction I stopped using the platform, entirely. If the advertisers would simply say &quot;no&quot;, FB would be forced to improve.

I recently connected my online store to facebook (for ads, selling on facebook, etc.) and the whole process was a such a mess. Multiple confusing business UIs that you only get between by magic clicks or knowing the URL. Then they don&#x27;t tie together or tied to the personal account instead of the business page or some other random insanity. The initial UI is clean and simple but then there&#x27;s a cliff when you try to do anything more complicated. Then again when I tried to place ads on Twitter it wouldn&#x27;t show me my tweets in the list so I couldn&#x27;t promote them.

The ad platform &#x2F; business manager has always felt like several systems and products bolted together (which it probably is). There&#x27;s too much legacy crap poking through and breaking things. I find understanding what&#x27;s going on a struggle if I&#x27;m not using it day-to-day<p>Even doing a simple Instagram promotion in the App has to jump through the FB app for authentication which can hang and show me a blank screen.

This is why I own Facebook Stock.<p>They have so many profit and revenue levers, this is another example of one.<p>So many companies would pay for ironclad API access and relationship.<p>I believe that the lack of transparency around their APIs is by design for political reasons not a lack of engineering know how issues or ignorance issues.

Some of the article could have used another read-through: &quot;...made it more difficult for buyers to roll out new campaigns easily&quot;. If it&#x27;s now more difficult to do it easily, how is it in the end?

&gt; Facebook is more worried about making [the platform] look good, like a Fisher Price toy, than how the [ad] platform actually performs.<p>They make it sound like a bad thing but pretty sure it&#x27;s not true anyway. If Facebook saw that their ads performed the best with Comic Sans they would go with it and any design changes they make are surely done to increase ad revenue.

Lol everyone in here is such a baby...We spend $500k a day on FB with great support; platform rarely breaks for us as we get features later.<p>If you&#x27;re spend $100-1000 a day you get tests and early UI&#x2F;UX. Spend more get out of the baby support tiers. Someone has to the best test bed.. might as well be the smallest clients.

around May(?) i noticed facbook pushed out an update and i had to keep my facebook browser tabs closed or my video games would be super laggy

As a former user: good.

Meta, but... 10 points, posted 13 minutes ago and number 1 on the front page?

And yet, they keep spending money... This is a problem. The fact that they offer no service, no communication, so resolutions and yet buyers are still dumping 100&#x27;s of thousands a month because, they dont have any other options...<p>Can you name any other business that could function like this? Health care is the only ones that come to mind...