Out of context: Reply #1
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- chrisRG0
This was everywhere yesterday! it'd be good for FB to reply to it.
There's a guy on HackerNews who said he works for FB, and gave this answer:
https://news.ycombinator.com/ite…
Hey everyone -- sorry to hijack the top thread but I’m an ads engineer at Facebook so I feel qualified to respond. I posted this over on reddit too but it's still pending approval.
In the case of this ad — I think we actually delivered on what was asked for. The targeting specs were fairly broad (cat lovers in four countries). Getting 39 people who like cats to like a page with a cute cat picture in 20 minutes sounds pretty reasonable to me. If you want a specific kind of cat lover, you’d probably want to target even more specifically (like people in a zip code near you).
We're continually working on making it easier for advertisers to target the right people. Earlier this year I worked on a piece of UI called "Audience Definition" (in our ad create flow), which helps give advertisers guidance on how to target ads more specifically. If you set your advertising too broadly (or too narrowly) -- you get a warning.
Fake (and low quality) likes are bad for everyone. We don’t want advertisers to get fans that aren’t good for their business -- we want to help them drive real results, and we can’t do that with bad likes. We invest a lot in improving the systems to monitor and remove fake likes from the system, and also in helping advertisers set smart targeting to help them reach the people they care most about.
And to be honest, a lot of people like cats, and the picture on the page is pretty adorable. Lots of real people like lots of things. And LOTS of people like cats.