HN user
Where? Germany? In France I don't know what is the regulation but still many places will ask for minimum charges, sometimes around 10€.
In the UK I sometimes pay for a single Banana by card, 50p (0.6€).
When I do, I wonder if the highest carbon footprint was from the payment processing or the banana processing!
It's part of the onboarding of any Facebook Ads user (i.e., advertiser) to implement the Facebook Pixel on their site.
Without it you're not going to achieve much on Facebook as you need to feedback their system when a particular ad had an impact so that they can model the ad delivery accordingly and get you more converting users. Whatever your conversion is (viewing a page, registering, purchasing).
What this highlights is that it is damn simple to be a poor developer yet achieve a particular goal. You can brute force your way towards that goal, ignoring any sort of costly 'useless' security, usability or user privacy aspects. Even more so if you're a criminal. GDPR|CCPA < INTERPOL!
This is never going to end. This is true for criminal orgs but also legit businesses that despite regulations will mostly prioritize features to their customers over less tangible/monetizable value like hardened infrastructure and updated software.
Maybe I'm wrong and this cluster was left exposed for another reason, though.
This article is brushing a lot of stuff very fast. In reality there is much more to it:
1. You don't need to visit Facebook properties for them to link your activity to you. Unless you're a brand new user and they have never finger printed you...
2. Referrer might be in the pixel tracker, but there is way more to that, including product IDs, product costs, your stage in the funnel (have you Added to Cart but not Purchased?), product category, etc.
3. Everytime a Facebook owned property (or piece of: Like button, FB connect) is 'used' by a device you use, then you can be sure the relation between you and that Pixel call is made (ahem, improved).
Install the Chrome Extension Facebook Pixel Helper, and check what happens when you use an ecom site. You'll be amazed to see what is shared with Facebook (no PII though).
Yes indeed. And reset your GAID when you want and know how to do it. But my point is that such a behavior will be forced by the OS rather than offered as a choice.
It's what is happening with Safari (and the other browsers). First, knowledgeable users are empowered to make a decision, then, that decision is rolled out automatically to the masses. E.g., https.
Related. The next big change for privacy and ad targeting is the removal of the IDFA by Apple and the GAID by Google. Removal or aggressive randomization, but there is no way those IDs remain as persistent as currently.
It's a matter of months, maybe a couple of years.
When this happens, what is happening with Safari now will look like a minor issue.
How are we even surprised. They are the Theranos of AR. They pushed the 'fake it until you make it' mantra a bit far, and now reality is biting hard.
Hopefully they will still trigger a revolution of some sort... but this was predictable.
The real question is who invested, and why? Even though being an investor doesn't mean being smart at it, it's still a signal that those guys are/were onto something and needed the cash to accelerate/deploy. $3.5M for such a small remote team though... I'm not running the numbers but they were cash burning big time, for a long time.
They nailed it.
Maybe a bit too much? The entire SaaS industry will have to come up with new, better BS to sell now!
This is such a good news for tumblr. It's sad that key internet services like del.icio.us, tumblr, and I'm sure others got destroyed be Yahoo! But, it's good to see that some managed to stay alive and might have another life after having been Yahoo!'d
From what I remember this was in the original specs [1]. If people don't check specs how can we expect society to work?
[1]https://www.theverge.com/2015/6/23/8830977/google-photos-sec...
At last a comment mentioning alternatives.
Jira is the primary target of the article when it probably should be how people run agile projects, and how organizations tend to struggle findind the most efficient (software development) processes to reach their business goals.
This article could have been written for any similar Jira direct / indirect competitors like you mentioned, and the like of Asana, Trello (Atlassian), Aha, plain old Word, Excel and so many others.
But it wasn't, because it's just easier to pick the elephant in the room and have a go at what remains a great tool when used wisely. Kind of like pen and paper, after all.
I think everyone starts like that.
Then, clients that help keeping lights on start asking for this and that.
And suddenly you end up providing a service with user level insights, cross-device tracking and advanced behavioral segments powered by ML because why not.
GA was simple, before.
Location based ads are a really tough nut to crack. If Snap wants to exist in the ad tech business going this route they will have to become bigger than Facebook or they will just fail. There is no interest in driving 3 persons to a store and no one will want to do it, especially agencies, because it's an enormous pain to setup and micro manage. Also, far less spend than video views or other les restrictive objectives. So if this is Snap strategy, good luck to them especially outside of the US and big Snapchat cities like London or Paris.
Zenly has definitely an amazing team, but I don't think their tech is that valuable, at least it's not a valid shield against what Facebook could come up with if they feel they should.
Then, they will try to - let's say - organize an event and will realise Facebook might not be fun, but damn useful to do this kind of stuff. Snapchat is not a social network, it's just a camera app. It's just a feature easily cloned by Facebook, and Facebook will end up winning just because of the network effect they can count on globally, and across nearly all demographics.
Don't buy.
So many people using online advertising tools face similar issues. As many said here, setting the right success metrics + using the right tools to measure them is key for a Facebook Ads campaign to work well.
The first thing to understand is how different Facebook metrics are from your metrics.
Clicks on Facebook Ads are not visits, for instance, and the drop-off you're seeing is just normal.
Then, Facebook allows to track many events that can help you acquire the right people, including the one who stick, whether your product is B2B or C. There are 1.7bn people on Facebook, meaning getting the right ones is more than possible.
Experience is key, I work in the field and I can already tell you that your ad and bidding options were probably not good enough to get the right users. You basically asked Facebook to drive traffic to your website, never to generate long lasting customers... so to me, Facebook did what you asked for.
If you want to be successful on Facebook, you must use their Pixel, and optimize towards events that define success for you.
Place the Pixel on your site now, even if you don't plan to buy ads on Facebook right away. Set some standard events on key pages (e.g. purchasing a subscription or similar). This will help you for the next time, as you will be able to create lookalike audiences based on your best users. This audience, ANDed with some interests will allow you to target your ads to the right people. Combining this with a good ad, and a good bidding option (e.g. oCPM optimized towards subscriptions) will probably lead you to posting much better results on your blog next time.
Lookalike Audiences: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/164749007013531
oCPM: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/494633817315490