DivByZero

Lol ... it's Content Marketing :)

Thanks for the comment. Great considerations.

Totally agree that overall Facebook Ads is great for demand generation while Google Adwords is much better for demand fulfillment. Also you're right on the attribution model, Facebook clearly attribute to itself every conversion from people who clicked the ad no matter of the last click.

In the future I'll try to make a followup post playing with GA various attribution models and checking how they change the data!

I don't, I've written in the post I envy them for the great outcome they had out of $50 spent in Fb Ads ... that's what marketing is all about, getting the most out of your time/money :)

Sorry that what the post remember you of. Was not the intention.

I'm the first to say that Facebook Ads don't work for everyone. And in advertising you should immediately stop spending on anything that don't have a positive ROI.

Still before stopping you should learn a bit how to use the platform and give it a fair try.

Then if it does not work ... stop it immediately and move on testing another channel :)

Never claimed to be better :)

But if you like to bash something based on data, at least let's do it with some reasonable data set

This is partially true ... but still promoting a b2b service on FB is always tough ... I see many of our customers with b2c products getting crazy conversion rates and spending more and more.

Agreed but doesn't this apply to every Advertising platform? Are you going to get much better results if you spend $50 with no expertise on Google AdWords or display advertising ?

Would be really interesting to know how much the long tail account for :) But guess we'll never know!

For sure both Facebook and Google should do a better job training users with 0 expertise to better use their platform. I don't think in the long term they have much space to grow more in the enterprise, SMBs, the long tail are the segment where the future growth is ... and if they loose them after the first $50 it will be tough!

That's true but actually Facebook now try to charge for CPM not clicks so that soften the problem, and still, you should check your CPA ... if that makes sense some fake clicks are acceptable.

Thanks :) Yep ... I wrote it exactly out of frustration for reading post after post here on HN bashing Fb Ads because of Fake clicks ... people should stop caring about clicks and focus on real metrics. Then a platform may not be a good fit for you, but still you cannot know if you test with a $50 budget

I'd love to hear what the HN crowd think about my comments on FB Ads after so many stories trending bashing Fb Ads :)

How fake clicks that don't generate business results would improve Facebook reputation as an effective advertiser ?

Actually every time these posts comes out (once a week lately) Facebook reputation is hurt.

Of course I'm not saying that it's extremely frustrating both to have click fraud and having little data from Facebook to better understand what's going on. I totally agree with that.

However: 1) I don't think Facebook would be so stupid to intentionally fraud on clicks ... the damage could be much bigger than the gain. I'm pretty sure this is mainly due to click farm, bots and so on.

2) I don't care about the click fraud. I don't advertise to get clicks. I advertise to get customers. As long as the overall CPA I get from Facebook is lower than AdWords I'll keep advertising on Facebook.

Screw the cpc and the fake clicks :) they exist, nothing you can do about it, live with it.

The only thing you should consider to get to any conclusion is the overall CPA.

Facebook is a different beast from AdWords, you cannot simply target people searching for "Online budgeting tool". You have to find a good demographic and that requires lot's of testing. From that point of view $50 is actually meaningless.

Yeah ... he can say that Facebook is charging him for fake clicks ... that's an old news :)