Truth About Facebook Mobile
I keep hearing about Facebook and mobile and how its going to “change everything” but I haven’t messed with it much because Facebook (like Google) broke my heart. Let me explain why I’m not a fan of both giants. They seem to not care about their advertisers, even if you spend $50,000 + a month… and the reason… its much easier to rip off small business and branders who have no clue what they are doing, but I digress.
Anyway, I was bored so I decided to log into one of my FB Ad accounts to see this:
HOLLY CRAP BATMAN… can it be that I, the lowly layman can now target mobile users?
Of course I set up campaigns using our trusty Mobile Analytics and off to the races I went. I started with all Android Users.
Round 1:
Awful… so I decided to check my analytics and low and behold didn’t get a single Android user according to our data. How could this be?
I checked the raw user agent info and kept getting “Facebook” type entries instead of the usual Handset / Version / Operating System we use to track. Ok this kind of makes sense since users are clicking out of Facebook, seems sketchy but moving on.
So I came up with a clever idea for round 2. Send visitors to a landing page then send them through the tracker, that should reset their user agent info.
Round 2:
Garbage… what gives why are so many of these users on PCs, more than 80% to be exact. I started second guessing our tracking so again I dug into the user agent info and nope these were users on Personal Computers after all.
What does this mean?
Simple when you target “Android User” it should really say “Users That Have Logged in on Android Devices Sometime in Past“
By the way was I really gone so long from FB that the suggested bids are now $1.50 a pop?
Advertisers tread with caution…
7 Comments to “Truth About Facebook Mobile”
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So true…we re running facebook desktop ad campaigns for our browser games clients and its a tough business but possible to make a reasonable margin after extensive optimization. However, for mobile ad campaigns the results were always way below expectations (on a CPI basis for app installs), although our effective CPCs were low the conversion rate killed it. Now I know why…
Hey Alex,
I wrote about this just the other day as well but didn’t update my testing results from Friday evening. I’m hoping to speak with someone at Adtech but at this point, you hit the nail on the head. Mobile is completely premature over there. I’ve had success with their mobile app advertising program though for some clients.
It’s good that you are posting this publicly because at this point, I feel like you and I are the lone rangers here and it’s gonna take a lot to get our voices heard. This same type of shit is one of the largest reasons advertisers are scared about getting into mobile. Best – Ruck
Good point Ruck, I’ve been battling the mobile education war for some time, the main problem is although we all know things are moving over to mobile it wasn’t as huge as the change to search, or social, so advertisers, affiliates, aren’t spending the time they did with other medium to figure it out.
I sure don’t have as much experience as you Alex, running mobile, but that’s not the way to target mobile devices on FB. Go into Power Editor and that’s where the options for mobile targeting are. The only problem is they only allow you to promote sponsored stories.
Sponsored stories are pretty worthless that’s why when I saw this targeting I thought it was the holly grail. From my conversations with other affiliates it looks like I’m not the only one who was led to believe this was mobile inventory. The point of this article is to show how misleading it is “Mobile Users” makes it seem like you’re targeting users on their mobile devices.
I noticed the same thing actually. Its ridiculous honestly. I can’t target ONLY people on their laptops or desktops. The mobile targetting was terrible if not non existent. Their platform has unpaused campaigns randomly and has so many glitches in every browser its ridiculous. You would think they would allow more granular targetting if they wanted to increase their bottom line ad spend. Zuckerberg isnt an idiot, he knows data is key.
We should be able to target by browser, screen resolution and more. How about users that logged in within the past X days? Or place a pixel to stop advertising to converted users per campaign? The ad scheduling is terribly useless.
Facebook you need a LOT of changes to your ad platform but if you just did them you would see MASSIVE gains in your ad spend and value per user. Help us help you
Thats my 2cents
[...] and it’s terrible. I’m not the only one who has experienced this either. Alex from the MobAffBlog has literally found the same [...]