[DivByZero]

Reading this story honestly I would summarize it like this: "User don't know anything about Facebook Ads. Decide to test them. Test with $400k in 4 days. Totally waste his money".

Facebook is not perfect ... and click fraud is a huge problem. This does not means that Fb Ads does not work or return a negative ROI. You simply need to know the medium you are advertising on and use it wisely.

Thanks god we live in 2014 ... we can track everything ... real things like sales, leads, subscriptions. WHY people keep advertising to go after vanity metrics such as Number of likes or clicks. Who cares about the clicks.

Part of them are fake? Sure! Facebook should do more? Sure! Can you still earn money tracking you Facebook Ads overall Cost per sale instead of the cpc? Damn sure!

[maresca]

I'd agree right up until the point where he went to Facebook HQ in Toronto for training on the ads. If it were someone wasting a few grand, I'd understand. Once someone is actually trained in a certain product by the company selling it, wastes half a million, and sees this kind of result, it crosses over to the realm of fraudulent.

[DivByZero]

I agree on this point that with Facebook training you should have at least some experience but I guess he didn't learn that much :)

$6/400k is like a medium sized agency monthly budget. It's not something you learn to manage in 1 or 2 days training.

You never scale a campaign to that level until you've done weeks if not months of testing and fine tuning with every possible ad's creatives and demographic audience. Starting at $100k/days means whatever goes wrong it's already too late to fix it ... you don't have the time to do any serious testing and optimization.

Moreove it's not that easy to spend $100k/day in canada ... I deal with many Startups and Brands that get Facebook Ads right and their usual problem is they've found the right mix ads/audience to have a very good ROI but they cannot scale it to spend those amounts.

Spending $100k per days probably means that he was targeting the whole canada. Whitout any specific targeting on interests, demographic informations etc. If that's the case and he was getting 150k clicks per day out of a $100k budget he should be pretty happy :)

[ufmace]

That's what sounds odd about this whole issue. They don't say what the company's marketing budget was, how big a portion of that budget this campaign was, and exactly what their goals are from their campaigns, but I think it would be hard to arrange those numbers in such a way that it would make sense for them to run a ~$500k ad campaign in a medium nobody there had any experience in. Come on guys, run a couple of dozen hundred dollar campaigns to get a feel for how to target them and what returns you can reasonably expect from them. I would expect that nobody spends that kind of money on any kind of ad campaign without knowing a lot more about what the returns from it will be and whether that justifies the expense.

[iandanforth]

It's worse than that. He wasn't advertising for something he sells, he was advertising the ads on his network of wordpress fashion blogs. If I felt his business had merit I might have retained a shred of sympathy, but content farms paid to push merchandise are just a very small step from clickfarms which don't bother with the facade of providing anything of value.