I've spent a good amount of money on Facebook ads in Asia (>$300k) and while there may be some fraud, there's definitely a completely different pattern of Facebook use in some countries. I think what you're observing is cultural differences in Facebook use, not fraud.
It's incredibly hard to get people to like or engage with your posts in Korea/Japan unless you have a ton of social proof already. This is definitely a cultural aspect as no one wants to be the first or one of just a few to engage with the post. In general, I've found these two countries to be more expensive than the US for getting likes even though it's about 1/3 the cost for getting post clicks.
Meanwhile, in Indonesia/Vietnam/Philippines it's incredibly easy as many people just "Like" everything in their feed as they scroll down. I've talked to several people from these countries about Facebook usage and they say it's their way of marking that they've seen a post. It's funny but I frequently get more likes than clicks on my posts that I run in these countries. Some may be fraud, but after seeing how people actually use Facebook in these countries I'm inclined to believe it's legit.
One of the hacks that works well for me is to take something I want to run as an ad in Korea or Japan and run it in Indonesia first. $2 for a post engagement campaign will get me around 500 likes. That seems to be enough to tip the scale in Korea/Japan and get them to start liking it en masse as well. It's crazy but my like rate goes up around 30x in Korea when I use this strategy of pre-seeding likes.
Anyways, going back to this author's post, the Facebook algorithm seems to be trained to follow what works and gets you the cheapest engagement rate. This is why I never ever run a single ad set with multiple countries and interests as it will just all end up saturated on the one that starts out working best. You should be running separate ad-sets for each country/interest, doing it any other way is a COMPLETE WASTE. Do not run Facebook ads like this.
Furthermore, these really don't look like spam accounts. These look like real Southeast Asian FB accounts. Most of my friends in that part of the world have very similar looking Facebook accounts with a shit ton of random friends/likes.
One of the hacks that works well for me is to take something I want to run as an ad in Korea or Japan and run it in Indonesia first. $2 for a post engagement campaign will get me around 500 likes. That seems to be enough to tip the scale in Korea/Japan and get them to start liking it en masse as well. It's crazy but my like rate goes up around 30x in Korea when I use this strategy of pre-seeding likes.
Interesting that, if we accept the click-farm premise of the article, your hack puts the farms in your service to get the initial likes, and then drive the kind of engagement you are actually seeking (in the crowd-influenced countries like Japan/Korea)...
In an environment like this, where the "likes" themselves are suspect, what counts as a success story for FB promotion for the work that you do?
I focus mainly on driving clicks to both content and eCommerce. The actual likes and comments on a post don't really matter much to me but it does help for increasing the CTR
- Re: cultural differences in Facebook use, not fraud.
Plausible. Based on this and the previous ads I've run in E/SE Asia, though, I'm still under the believe that something is askew.
Re: Japan/Korea
- Yes, collectivist culture, conservative buying habits (e.g. not wanting to be first mover, etc.) can very well translate to FB activities.
Re: VN, etc
- Agreed, they play faster and looser there with their likes and friending.
Re: Your hack
- It's buried at the bottom of the Updates section, but I did do something very similar. As it was becoming clear to me that the VNese engagement was garbage, I figured that I still might be able to leverage that to get more conservative places like Japan and Korea to jump on board. No dice. This might have to do with how much budget I was contributing (another topic I talk about in the post).
Re: Per-country ad sets.
- Again, I did this.
I ran a boost targeting JP/VN/KR, got 100% engagement from VN. Revised the target set to focus just on Japan, crickets, and that's even AFTER there were already 300 likes for that boost, which falls in line with your hack. Ok, not crickets...I got three likes, one Japanese...and then one Cambodian and one Filipino, both living in their respective countries.
Re: Doesn't look like spam accounts.
- They look spammy or garbage to me. 18yr old girl from one of the small province towns in VN has 3,000 or 4,000 friends? Could be explained away as just cultural differences, or it could be complete garbage.
Another traveler with a lot of VN female friends on Facebook checking in, those accounts don't look very odd for the region. It's not uncommon to have a girl have to remove friends to add you. I've never really asked them why they have so many friends ... sorry.
The practice of creating accounts on a site and making "real" seeming posts for a long time so that when you want to flip the switch and use them for something corporate, they look like they have a background and aren't flagged for being 1 day old accounts with 1 corporate post.
this is very common on sites like reddit and it's even used by intelligence agencies [1]. Politicians or firms can hire companies to sway public opinion [2], check their clients [3]
pretty easy to programme a bot that acts like a teenage girl.
* parse magazine
* foreach ad/article
* capture image (sources: google images, tubmblr, #tag)
* Post article to FB feed
When idle;
* every 30mins wakeup
* search through network, like (rand * (TotalPosts * 1/3 * 1/8))
* like all sponsored posts
I just got back from VN after a 2 month stay. Culturally, the people there really like liking and growing their social network. I was shocked at how active many of the people I met while traveling there were active on Facebook. People, that I knew spoke 0 english, would like many of my text only English posts.
I took a photo of one girl in a costume and she posted it on Facebook. One day later, she had over 600 likes. Based off of these experiences, I think 90% of Facebook liking is done by VN girls lol.
She had tagged me as the photographer, and suddenly I got about 20 friend requests.
I would not be surprised at all that these are real girls clicking on your ads.
TL;DR: Based on my experiences of living in VN, I think those likes were done by social-media crazed vietnamese.
Agreed, depending on what VNese city you're in, FB use in VN and the US differ dramatically. When I was in HCMC, generally speaking people use FB in the same manner that we're familiar with. When I visited a much smaller province about 2hrs away, those who I met during the week there were VERY eager to friend foreigners (since foreigners in their city were so few and far between compared to the big cities), and likewise they were very active on FB, liking everything and everyone.
Gresham's Law is at play here. If you advertise for likes, guess what? You'll get likes! If you want a different kind of "engagement", you have to make sure that's what you measure.
Be careful with Facebook advertising. If you're not, you'll waste a lot of money very quickly.
Some guidelines:
1) Change your targeting to reduce fraud clicks. As an example, you can choose to target only users of your audience who use Gmail. In the U.S. at least, this works because Google makes it very difficult to set up fake accounts in mass due to phone verification. There are many other targeting options as well that will significantly reduce fraud.
2) Always use the hack mentioned by adambratt. Your posts will show much more ROI when there is social proof.
3) Focus on post quality and virality. Posts that have low interactions are just going to be difficult to show any sort of ROI. The power of Facebook is when you combine the organic WITH the paid reach. The paid helps you initially get in front of the appropriate audience, and then when your post is shared and liked it will organically show up in the newsfeed of their friends and followers. This is where the the true power of Facebook advertising lies.
Now personally, I've seen much more ROI with Google than with Facebook. Search/purchase intent is the differentiator: visitors are coming to your site with a goal in mind. With Facebook ads, however, I've run campaigns where 70% or more of the incoming traffic bounces within a few seconds. In my experience it's much more difficult to get quality traffic from FB, but far from impossible.
Thanks for chiming in. A few comments regarding your guidelines.
1) Change your targeting to reduce fraud clicks.
- I did, and I actually had M, the Facebook Global Marketing Specialist, comment that my targeting was solid. If this becomes a game of guess-and-check, then that's borderline gambling. I had a pretty specific target group, and that got me nowhere.
Also, whenever FB responds with "you need to improve your targeting," I interpret that as "stop sucking, and then you'll be awesome."
2) Always use the hack mentioned by adambratt.
- I incidentally tried that with one of my previous ads. No luck. Try try again?
3) Focus on post quality and virality.
- This sounds like a bit of 1 and 2 put together. Again, when FB gave me this canned response, it started to sound like "stop sucking, and then you'll be awesome." My messaging was both clean and direct. Even for the Japan market (with specific targeting), I wrote IN JAPANESE "whether your on the train, at home, or in school, listen to my podcast to help you improve your English listening skills." Again, nada.
Do you have any specific anecdotes with your own business and FB advertising that you could share?
Thanks for mentioning Google, I'll research it to see how it could help me.
Hi, unfortunately I've stopped Facebook advertising altogether and have not been active in it for a while. The key takeaway I learned with marketing/advertising is that its equally an art as it is a science. It's a different mindset than what I'm used to (you could say I'm a programmer). This combination of art and science is what makes marketing effectively on platforms like FB so difficult.
I can understand your frustration with FB. I was just as frustrated when I dove in. Good luck to you.
PS: It absolutely is very close to borderline gambling / borderline day-trading. However it's NOT, and that minute difference is where the arbitrage can be found. Cheers!
Indeed, but the fact that this problem persists raises a few questions, not limited to:
1) WHY does this problem still exist, considering all of the resources at FB's disposal?
2) Where do these click/like farms come from, and what's in it for them?
3) Why does FB only do sweeps annually? Why not daily?
As you might've read in the Updates section of the post, I came to the conclusion that these click/like farms, although not supported by FB, are still a pleasant surprise for FB, as FB vis-a-vis these farms TRICK unsuspecting low budget ad buyers into thinking that they're still getting something for their money.
In other words:
* Big corp with multimillion dollar ad budget = we put your ad in front of your desired audience, and you get lots of quality engagement.
* Those with smaller ad budgets = we put your ad in front of garbage accounts, and you get garbage engagement. It's still engagement, though, so be happy about that.
That, or (and prep your tin foil hats for this one) one of FB's business models is to covertly financially support these click/like farms so that they encourage ad buyers like myself to keep spending $5 here and $10 there on advertising with the belief that it's actually working for them.
I don't know the answer to 1 or 3 because I'm not a FB insider, but I can answer #2 for you:
> 2) Where do these click/like farms come from, and what's in it for them?
All you have to do is go on Fiverr and see people advertising Facebook likes for $5. The bots like a bunch of other pages and posts to simulate "real human activity", then the sellers direct all the bots to "like" a page that their client paid them to like. Rinse and repeat.
And in order for these fake accounts not to look "too" suspicious, they have general activity like clicking on ads and other things on these accounts. Most newsfeeds of real people are not very public, so all these accounts are left with is clicking on public newsfeeds (of celebrities, etc) and clicking on ads. Boom - account is not "abandoned" anymore.
Because this guy is obviously not a click-farm customer, and Facebook is presumably not paying them to click, either. They're just spam clicking the "boosted" posts Facebook puts in front of them to seem more legitimate?
The parent is saying that these clickfarm accounts are randomly liking stuff so as to look like normal users. If a group of 10,000 accounts only like things from 5 different pages, the farming would be easy to detect.
>WHY does this problem still exist, considering all of the resources at FB's disposal?
It might have long-term implications on their actual business, as people learn that the advertising isn't worth it but no one likes to think about that. They'd rather focus on "more important" long-term things, like VR and confined internet in second world countries.
In the short-term there is no incentive to solve the problem. Facebook has been boasting about membership usage since day one, when anyone who has experience with the ecosystem (ads or apps) knows that these fake accounts are a massive issue. But they allow Facebook to say, "1 billion people* use us every day!"
It's clear from the responses you received that it's nothing but lip service about doing something regarding fake accounts.
It's a harder problem than it seems to be as many real Facebook users behave similarly to spammers. If you take some action that affects 0.1% of users, you piss off over a million users.
Also, nobody is screaming about this, and they make money off of it, so I doubt the motivation is there.
Running ads is difficult. There's clearly people spending huge amounts of money through online advertising and this happens because they are able to get results (understanding what works and what doesn't work on each platform).
Once they figure out how to get the results they need, they can put a dollar into Facebook and get more than a dollar out. Then they just turn the budget knob to 11.
Point is, those who make posts saying that Facebook is scamming people are just dipping their toes into advertising and will more than likely fail at first. Advertising online takes some investment to find out what works for your situation.
Maybe you have to practice and experiment to learn advertising channels. Or one of the other 30 variables that could have gone wrong here?
As far as I've seen every ad channel has spammy/scammy/bot like engagements but as long as they are factored into the cost its OK. Google search this same idea applied to every ad network.
Mis alignment of goal, ad channel and creative here, not a shitty platform.
The parts I didn't include in the post due to length were the previous ads (boosted posts, promote page, etc) I created and paid for before this very last one that I wrote about on my blog.
Those previous ads raised enough red flags for me to pay very close attention to my last one. That's not to say that I didn't pay close attention to the others; I was tracking data and seeing how well Japan-only targeted ads (that included both Japanese and English language) performed against Vietnam-only targeted ads, and how well those two performed against ads that targeted Japan, Vietnam, and Korea all at the same time.
The data collected and differences among the three were enough for me to conclude that something foul was afoot.
Sure, there may be 30 other variables that could've gone wrong here. However, M's verbal (via phone) approval of how I created my ad and crafted my targeting and the consistently large amounts of garbage accounts from VN leads me to believe that this entire thing was a waste.
Furthermore, again, FB makes it so easy for new FB page owners to believe that they can drop $5 here and $10 there to promote anything--a post, their page, and even their website. I gather that FB WANTS these page owners to pay these small amounts 30 times to play trial-and-error, even though doing so still only puts these page owners 1) up against larger budgets, and 2) in front of garbage accounts that are only cleaned up once a year in FB's annual sweep.
agreed. I think the OP would be shocked to learn about the insane practices you have to deal with buying from 'less reputable' types of ad networks. think popunders, banners, full page take overs, etc.
Think buying traffic which you know is 90% accidental, or buying traffic where 100% of the audience does not want to see your ad. Or even ads that literally disrupt user experience.
There are people buying these ads for a profitable purpose and making buckets of money.
In my experience, literally ANY CPC based platform can be profitable.
The only time i've seen advertising never work is in the banner / media buying industry, but that's just my personal experience. It wouldn't be a billion dollar industry unless a few people were making it work for themselves.
Indeed. I actually included (with links and credit) both of Veritasium's videos in the post.
The rest of my post explains in detail my own experience with this problem, including data, screenshots, and my own email correspondence with Facebook's Global Marketing Specialists.
Indeed, especially in this age when even authentic likes are arguably almost useless - any post on Facebook nowadays seems to need boosting to reach more than a negligible fraction of a page's likes.
But it's definitely worse when the likes aren't even authentic. Boosting posts to reach fake likes is a total waste of money, on top of the original waste to procure such likes.
Something looks fishy, but the author has some unreasonable expectations.
Specifically, if FB is optimizing for click through rate, you cannot expect an even distribution across the demographics. You aren't paying enough to saturate all channels, so you should expect to be mainly shown to whichever segment converts best for your ad.
What were the expectations you took away from my post?
"cannot expect an even distribution across the demographics"
- I mentioned that if there were even a modicum of distribution. I was driving home the idea that 1) if we assume a tiny level of distribution across the three geographies, then I should see something from JP and KR. But, that didn't happen; and 2) if targeting multiple geos is, in fact, ineffective, then the option to target multiple geos shouldn't even been an option if FB really wanted people to be successful with their ads. Furthermore, I actually DID target a single geo, and even THAT didn't work.
"You aren't paying enough to saturate all channel"
- NOW you've gotten to one of the main cruxes of my post. As I wrote on the post an in a few replies below.
The point I want to drive home is that there is a segment of the population doing business online and, for better or worse, including FB as part of their ad strategy. FB knows this and makes the entire ad process CHEAP and EASY, knowing full well that these ad buyers are going to receive crap for engagement. FB makes it so easy for new FB page owners to believe that they can drop $5 here and $10 there to promote anything--a post, their page, and even their website. I gather that FB WANTS these page owners to pay these small amounts 30 times to play trial-and-error, even though doing so still only puts these page owners 1) up against larger budgets, and 2) in front of garbage accounts that are only cleaned up once a year in FB's annual sweep.
If it's a matter of paying enough, then why bother encouraging people to pay $5 here and $10 there to promote knowing that it'll be a waste?
More importantly to me is how does the agent "M" have 6,000 friends when the limit is 5,000? And why the hell does FB still keep a limit like that for accounts that are phone-verified and known to be real etc...
FB, it is time to raise the friend limit! I have heard of many complaints from people with max friends that they have to delete someone to add a new friend, kind of messed up!
I think 5,000 friends is the messed up part, not the limit. Humans can't process that many friendships. Why not just have a page if you're blasting out to that many people?
I have tried using Facebook Ads in Israel on several occasions, strictly targeting to a very specific demographic: Lives in Israel, knows Hebrew, knows English, Age: 18-35, Interests: various technology buzzwords.
Each time I got a (very) large amount of likes from Palestinian and other Arabs who most definitely don't know Hebrew, or English, or interested in tech. Most of their profiles have thousands of friends, and everything is written in Arabic and not English/Hebrew.
For the last 4 years I tried putting small amounts of money to see if the situation has changed, and each time the result was very similar.
I didn't go and talked to Facebook support about it, since that would be a waste of my time imho, and not do any good. The support engineers with canned responses most probably cannot do anything to change the situation, or even if they have ideas for improvement those would be drowned in the huge FB ocean of outsourced employees.
Part and parcel of me writing this post was to speak up about this on behalf of other folks who seemed to have experienced the same exact issue of wasting their own ad money trying to increase visibility through Facebook.
FB makes reaching out to their support a pain in the ass. Since I was somehow able to get in touch with someone, and I collected what I felt was decent evidence that this is happening, and I was actually able to show that evidence to them, I figured it'd be worth putting something online as an additional warning to others not to bother advertising on FB, and, more importantly, speak up and call FB out on this mess.
>Each time I got a (very) large amount of likes from Palestinian and other Arabs who most definitely don't know Hebrew //
Isn't that fraud on behalf of Facebook. You're paying them to present the ads to people who have characteristic A, but they instead show them to other people and charge you as if they'd done what you asked? Or are all those people saying in their profiles that they speak Hebrew? [Which makes it just people lying and not fraud at all].
Maybe FB thinks they speak Hebrew because they liked lots of other Hebrew language posts too. Could be a vicious cycle. These like-trigger-happy Arabs probably drown out the real Israelis simply because they like more posts.
Is it possible to use high friend count as a negative targeting option to weed out the fakes? Last time I looked at the FB ads interface I couldn't see it there.
Honestly I don't think that the high friend count would be a good parameter to tell fake accounts from real ones, even though the linked article seems to suggest so.
There are many other comments in this thread along the same lines, let me just say that, based on my experience (e.g. my, nieces and many of their friends), it is not uncommon for teenagers in some geographical areas to have more than 3000 friends.
Even if the accounts behind the likes are 'fake', isn't the page/brand still getting exposure mindshare? Namely, real users will see that your brand has N likes, where N is hopefully a number that resonates with real people who'd be interested in your content. It creates an aura of legitimacy in their minds, which says 'someone else also likes this'.
There is a thriving, if questionable, market in fake Twitter followers, for example. People wouldn't buy fake followers if it weren't effective.
The Veritasium videos on my post provide a decent counterpoint to the idea that there's a potential "credibility" upside of having a bunch of fake accounts like your page.
For example, let's say you have a mix of 90% fake likes, and 10% real/organic likes, presumable because they saw your page, saw all of the likes, and thought, "I want to be in on this."
Now, let's say that I post something, and chances are that it's only going to be seen by 100 people. This means that whatever I post will be put in front of 90 garbage accounts and in front of only 10 people who I actually want to target. Unfortunately I can't target based on fake vs. organic accounts.
If I want to increase that 10ppl number, then I'll have to pay more to increase the visibility across the entire population. Let's say I pay $10 to get 200 people to see what I've posted, then 180 fake accounts see it, and only 20 real/organic people see it.
Unsuspecting businesses of any kind, and especially small ones, can't afford to waste money on this kind of mess.
I appreciate your explanation. Let's go with your numbers, and say 90% of likes are bots, while 10% are real. You're getting much less value from your ad spend than you would if 100% of the likes were real, but so is everyone else who's running ads.
Meanwhile, the 10% real people have friends who could potentially like your brand organically as they see it in their feed. These second-degree-of-separation people, who have not seen your ad, will first be exposed to your brand through their friends' likes. You're building mindshare, however minor. In the small chance they decide to check out your page, having a believable number of likes already on your page is beneficial in winning their attention -- and interaction. The post that talks about 'bootstrapping' your likes with SE Asian users who are more like-prone to entice the Japanese/Korean likes is making the same point.
There is no doubt that bot-likes are much less useful than real-person likes, but they're not useless.
You raise a completely fair point, and conceptually I agree with you.
Again, this entire example rests on the assumption that bots DO exist, which it sounds like they do based on everyone's comments so far.
The point I want to drive home is that there is a segment of the population doing business online and, for better or worse, including FB as part of their ad strategy. FB knows this and makes the entire ad BUYING process cheap and easy, knowing FULL well that these ad buyers are going to receive crap for engagement.
Before confirming my purchase, if FB gave me a warning saying something along the lines of "based on your targeting and how much you're paying for this ad, about 10% of your engagement will be from real people," then at the very least FB has both acknowledged the risk and done something to manage my expectations. Perhaps we wouldn't even been having this exchange.
But, FB doesn't. They keep quiet about this, allowing the farms to exist to make it seem as those unsuspecting business owners are actually getting what they paid for. That's the scam in all of this.
I replied above in another person's comment that it is no longer out of the real of possibility that one of FB's business models is to covertly financially support these click/like farms so that they encourage ad buyers like myself to keep spending $5 here and $10 there on advertising with the belief that it's actually working for them.
Pay some group of kids $100 in VN ($100 goes a LONG way there) to create and manage garbage accounts, and then like the smallest and newest of FB pages that pay the $5 or $10 to advertise so as to make it seem as though that person's ad is successful.
On a side note, isn't it strange that these farms seem to come from developing countries/areas?
Why wouldn't FB work harder to delete these fake accounts, especially if 1) they've been called out on it, and 2) FB page owners who have advertised in the past are pissed off about it.
If FB sweep deletes these accounts once a year, as both M and J claim, then why couldn't they increase the frequency?
They don't make money from clicking the paid promos. However, by masking their click with paid promo click and other "organic" clicks, they can reduce their chances of being marked as a bot.
Doesn't Facebook allow you to "target" to whom your ads go to? Doesn't this basically solve the problem, because you should be going for a narrow market anyway?
It's incredibly hard to get people to like or engage with your posts in Korea/Japan unless you have a ton of social proof already. This is definitely a cultural aspect as no one wants to be the first or one of just a few to engage with the post. In general, I've found these two countries to be more expensive than the US for getting likes even though it's about 1/3 the cost for getting post clicks.
Meanwhile, in Indonesia/Vietnam/Philippines it's incredibly easy as many people just "Like" everything in their feed as they scroll down. I've talked to several people from these countries about Facebook usage and they say it's their way of marking that they've seen a post. It's funny but I frequently get more likes than clicks on my posts that I run in these countries. Some may be fraud, but after seeing how people actually use Facebook in these countries I'm inclined to believe it's legit.
One of the hacks that works well for me is to take something I want to run as an ad in Korea or Japan and run it in Indonesia first. $2 for a post engagement campaign will get me around 500 likes. That seems to be enough to tip the scale in Korea/Japan and get them to start liking it en masse as well. It's crazy but my like rate goes up around 30x in Korea when I use this strategy of pre-seeding likes.
Anyways, going back to this author's post, the Facebook algorithm seems to be trained to follow what works and gets you the cheapest engagement rate. This is why I never ever run a single ad set with multiple countries and interests as it will just all end up saturated on the one that starts out working best. You should be running separate ad-sets for each country/interest, doing it any other way is a COMPLETE WASTE. Do not run Facebook ads like this.
Furthermore, these really don't look like spam accounts. These look like real Southeast Asian FB accounts. Most of my friends in that part of the world have very similar looking Facebook accounts with a shit ton of random friends/likes.