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 :)

The article raises some great points and it's very frustrating to read these articles as the founder of a Facebook Ads Optimization tool aimed at SMBs (AdEspresso - http://adespresso.com - Shameless plug :P).

I'm not going to say that copy was not good or that the number Facebook tracks are correct. I find the copy of the ad used pretty good overall. However I've some consideration about it:

- I totally agree that Facebook must improve its tracking and must do more to prevent clicks fraud ... a problem which is still very relevant

- Lot's of Facebook Ads traffic comes from mobile nowadays. This can be good or bad. If you're promoting a website and aiming at conversions on a non mobile-friendly website you MUST disable mobile targeting.

- Overall $50 budget is not enough to get to any relevant conclusion.

- On a product like this (budgeting, finance, etc.) it's critical to find a very good audience to target. I'd suggest using a lot custom audiences.

- Facebook Ads bounce rate & overall quality is very often lower than Google, Yahoo & Bing, this is implicit in the nature of the platform. On Google you're getting traffic from people who are actively searching for a keyword strictly related to your product. On Facebook you're targeting people based on demographic profile and a vague interest. However Facebook is very often much cheaper than Google.

- CPC & CTR are meaningless metrics. You should always have conversion tracking and measure the overall CPA to acquire a customer. Click frauds, wrong reportings etc. ... they exists. You cannot do anything about it. You should not give a crap about it. Just check your Cost to acquire a customer and see if it makes sense.

- Sometime for some markets Facebook Ads for direct conversions simply don't work. Create valuable content like eBooks, webinars etc. to get cheaper leads and then close the sales funnel with targeted emails.

My 2 cents, hope it's useful for someone :)

Yep, that was the first thing I checked as well, actually broadcast.com is by far the most expensive acquisition.

There's probably a bug in the visualization library getting the thousands coma as a decimal separator, too bad :)

It may work ... and if you just want 200k fans no matter what you don't even need Facebook Ads, you can go directly to the like farms and get them for much cheaper.

But then how will he explain his investors that his 200k "Fans" are generating 0 revenues ? :)

I agree on this point that with Facebook training you should have at least some experience but I guess he didn't learn that much :)

$6/400k is like a medium sized agency monthly budget. It's not something you learn to manage in 1 or 2 days training.

You never scale a campaign to that level until you've done weeks if not months of testing and fine tuning with every possible ad's creatives and demographic audience. Starting at $100k/days means whatever goes wrong it's already too late to fix it ... you don't have the time to do any serious testing and optimization.

Moreove it's not that easy to spend $100k/day in canada ... I deal with many Startups and Brands that get Facebook Ads right and their usual problem is they've found the right mix ads/audience to have a very good ROI but they cannot scale it to spend those amounts.

Spending $100k per days probably means that he was targeting the whole canada. Whitout any specific targeting on interests, demographic informations etc. If that's the case and he was getting 150k clicks per day out of a $100k budget he should be pretty happy :)

Reading this story honestly I would summarize it like this: "User don't know anything about Facebook Ads. Decide to test them. Test with $400k in 4 days. Totally waste his money".

Facebook is not perfect ... and click fraud is a huge problem. This does not means that Fb Ads does not work or return a negative ROI. You simply need to know the medium you are advertising on and use it wisely.

Thanks god we live in 2014 ... we can track everything ... real things like sales, leads, subscriptions. WHY people keep advertising to go after vanity metrics such as Number of likes or clicks. Who cares about the clicks.

Part of them are fake? Sure! Facebook should do more? Sure! Can you still earn money tracking you Facebook Ads overall Cost per sale instead of the cpc? Damn sure!

The motive is that with these farms they then sell dumb users "100.000" likes for 10$ ... and people actually buy them.

Nowadays I receive more FbLikes spam than Viagra's

The best way would be to have access to Facebook Ads API. That would make everything really simple.

However keep in mind that you could only get a generail indication of the price through time for your given target. The real CPC Facebook apply to your ads change every minute and it's highly influenced by the quality of your ad.

The better your CTR is, the lower the CPC goes. Another factor that influence the CPC is how wide is your target. Usually targeting a small segment is more expensive than a broad target.

Anyhow, you can probably gather some useful data on CPC for your market from Optimal Social: http://www.optimalsocial.com/

It really depends on your goals. You can't compare conversion rates of a link to the homepage with a link to a blog post. Bounce rate on blog posts is always higher and the ppv is usually never over 1.5.

However when comparing HN to TC you should not just look at the raw numbers but also at what comes with it. On HN if you're selling something on target, you'll get lots of advice and and feedback, Something you're unluckly to get on TC. TC gives you credibility, it's a logo to put on your website's "Featured on" box and it helps you selling your product and doing fundraising.

Hi Guys, we'd like a little help from HN :) this is basicly our first blog post after going live with the new website last week at TechCrunch Italy.

I'd really like to have your feedback on the communication tone and content ... is it righr, interesting ? Is it too informal ?

Being based in Italy finding the right balance when blogging in english is not very easy so any help and suggestion would be really appreciated !

Of course :)

I think it would be impossible for a new blog to compete with TC/VB/etc. without serious funding.

Sarah did a terrific job at TC and I think she's worth some trust. Moreover since AOL mess TC has become so boring to read ... full of "Company X launch product Y" stories without any wit or insight ...

Personally I don't care who's funding her, I'm confident she'll create a great, trustable blog ... after all trust is the main value for a tech blog and she knows it. Moreover i'm glad to see Paul Carr, MG & Arrington back blogging :)

That was my first comment on HN ... glad it was useful :)

Nice project but don't think I would use it in our enviroment for two reason:

1) It require code changes ... could be done when you're starting from scratch but nearly impossible for existing projects with really large code base. Moreover most PHP frameworks already provide similar functionality with deeper integration and better reporting.

2) This is the real dealbraker: having to add code manually means that eaither you go crazy and add profiling everywhere or it wont really help you because you'll add profiling only in the most obvious slowdown point and you'll discover what you already knew. But you'll probably loose hidden bottleneck in place you could not easily guess.

PayPal is the quickest solution, not the best one ! Moreover most advanced features to integrate payment directly on your web site are available un US/AU/CA/UK only.

We recently had the same problem, mainly for recurrent billing, and the overall scenario is quite depressing in Europe.

The process of being accepted and setting up a payment gateway and merchant account is very long and require tons of documentation. We checked recurly, chargify and cheddargetter. All of them have some EU partners but they rates are often very high and responses are slow.

After two weeks of investigation right now I would suggest you cheddargetter (https://cheddargetter.com/). You'll still have to go through lot's of papers and bureucracy but at least their support (both from them and from their EU partners) is very quick. We set up an account, opened a ticket to be helped setting up merchant account and within 3 hours we've been helped and immidiately contacted by their european partner to set up our merchant account.

However, if you're not looking for recurrent billing, there could be more convenient local solution in your country provided directly by banks. Another respected solution in Europe is Ogone. We used them for a couple of our clients and they're at least decent :)