I’m a Product Manager on Facebook Ads and I wanted to reach out and respond to your comments. Thank you for taking the time to write up your experiences with Facebook Ads.

Before I respond to your specific comments, some background: When our 500M active users visit Facebook to share and consume information about their lives, they should also have a positive experience with the ads and other commercial content they see and interact with. We strive to be as transparent as possible about our systems, policies, and practices, but we do take some steps also to ensure the ads marketplace is a fair system that can’t be easily gamed. Over time, I expect our transparency to increase as we see what kinds of information would be most useful in encouraging high-quality advertisers and high-quality ads to be on Facebook.

Regarding your specific concerns:

Transparency of click data: We take the accuracy of our data very seriously. We routinely test and audit our systems, both internally and with third-party tracking like Google Analytics, to ensure that the data we provide is a true representation of what is happening. While I don’t have specific knowledge of the issue that you’re seeing, what you are describing should not be happening, and either represents an error in configuration, or a true system bug either on Facebook’s side or Google’s side. Our team is investigating and might reach out to you directly for more information regarding your specific issue.

Greater communication about ad approvals / disapprovals: You have a fair point that this has been somewhat inconsistent in the past. As with anything involving human interpretation, there will be some variance (which we do test and measure). Our systems have become more automated over time, meaning that ad approvals and disapprovals are also becoming much more consistent. Ultimately, our ad approval/disapproval policies are based largely on end-user feedback, and we tend to err on the side of enforcing strictly to ensure that only the best ads see the light of day.

Concerns over negative feedback: As with most modern online ad systems, Facebook ads takes various kinds of user feedback and signals into account when determining what constitutes a “high quality” or “low quality” ad and in selecting the right ad to show to an end user on each page impression. We haven’t yet found the perfect formula to measure this, nor the magic cutoff between high-quality and low-quality, so sometimes you will see behavior that isn’t ideal. We will continue to tweak this formula to ensure it’s a good experience for end users, and does not cause angst for advertisers.

Split testing: When you have multiple ads and our ads system has to decide which one to show, the system errs on the side of showing the ad that has been performing the best (optimized ad serving). However, “best performing ad” is open to a lot of interpretation, and again this is something we are tweaking. In general, we believe we don’t yet have world-class tools for performance advertisers to do the type of testing you are describing, and we have relied on third-party tools to fill in some of these gaps. We plan to be much better about this in the future.

Desktop tool: This is something we are considering, but I can’t yet provide a definitive acknowledgement that it’s something we will build, or when. Your feedback is an important part of our decision process, so thank you!

Separate interface, and finding the online ads manager: On Facebook, your login is your identity. We keep your personal Facebook profile and your ads accounts separate, but we tie them to a single login representing the “real you” even though your role on Facebook’s site is different in personal and work life. We have heard feedback that the online ads manager is hard to find from the main Facebook interface, and we are taking steps to correct that. For example, on your Facebook home page, you should now see a link to “Ads and Pages” in the Facebook left navigation. You can also go directly to http://facebook.com/ads should also bring you one step closer to finding the ads manager. Finally, based on advertiser feedback, we are also exposing the link in other places, as we have learned that all advertisers find the ads manager in different ways.

General transparency and engagement: We strive to be transparent – it is not our intention to hide ourselves or obscure what we do. As I mentioned above, we are taking many steps to share more information with advertisers, but we will do it in a thoughtful way so that we provide information that is actually useful and actionable to you, rather than a data-dump that you have to sift through. My posting this comment to your blog is one of those steps. The fact that you have not received a reply from the contact inquiry form, however, is very concerning to us, and we are looking into that right now to figure out where the breakdown occurred. Our team will get back to you soon on your inquiries.

Please do not hesitate to provide us with additional feedback and comments.
Thank you,
Ambar Pansari, Product Manager, Facebook Ads
ambar@facebook.com

Again, similarly to areas I’ve discussed in the blog, that doesn’t exactly fill you with confidence that Facebook’s demographic targeting is working effectively! I guess either that, or perhaps the figures presented to us in their dynamic estimator aren’t very accurate at all?

I turned an ad on just yesterday with very specific geotargeting, demographics and keyword targeting. The estimated audience (per their dynamic estimator) was less than 1000 people. However, on the first day I generated nearly 10K impressions. I’m fine with the small size of the group I was targeting, but don’t try to tell me that you reached every one of them and showed them my ad over 10 times each.

This goes right in there with your issue about clicks not showing up in Analytics. Makes me wonder if Facebook is fleecing advertisers!