sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net 3 years ago
I believe I've told the story before. I was in charge of digital advertising for a small business, and I ended up going out and trying to spend some money advertising on a bunch of different websites. Facebook, google, plenty of fish, a few others.
The one thing that was immediately obvious with Facebook is that the advertising that you got from Facebook clearly was being charged based on false clicks.
Now you might be wondering how I would know that. Well, it's very simple: in a city of may be 20,000 people, I ended up getting like 10,000 clicks. By all rights, I should have had a line right out the door every single day forever, and surely the website should just be crashing from all the traffic of people who are looking up this new restaurant they just read about on Facebook.
But in reality, none of that was true. The website according to the logs was barely getting any clicks at all, and traffic to the restaurant had barely moved.
iamtanmay@wolfballs.com 3 years ago
hmmmm.... I was using Google Ad Sense, Facebook Ads... and surprise surprise VK.com ! I was advertising my dance/fitness classes at the time, for a few years. Google was shit, it kept forwarding absolute random searches to my link, even though I was specific in the keywording and location, i.e. only dance + fitness, within 50km of my city. After a couple weeks, I pulled the plug on it
Facebook was really really good. I could target a specific demographic - i.e. girls between certain ages with an interest in music/dance within 50km. Results were superb. As a side note, it was also a very cost effective way to date. I could just add relationship status 'single' to the criteria, and pay far less to meet girls than with Tinder or OkCupid. Lol, why go meet 1 girl, when I could get 50 to come to me for the same price. This was around 2015-2019
The best, by far was VK.com. I figured out a way to set the criteria, so I got charged ridiculous prices, e.g. 2 cents for 50,000 views. I can't remember exactly what I did, but playing around in the Target settings you would figure it out on your own. The only downside was - you are only targeting Russian/Ukrainian/Belarusian speakers... so its not helpful for anyone not living with significant Russian populations in their city. Met tons of hot Russian girls for literally nothing.
But, I am not single anymore, so I don't care. I advertise organically now, via public groups etc... no more paid shit. I also tried other social media - Meetups, Couchsurfing, Internations... all garbage.
sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net 3 years ago
Part of it could be that I was paying cost per click rather than cost per view. They'd quickly find me the clicks I'd asked for, but they were garbage clicks. Google I found was super expensive, but the clicks were obviously real clicks.
That's a pretty funny trick to meet single women though lol Clever
iamtanmay@wolfballs.com 3 years ago
Like, I paid the same for both, a 100$ budget for a month each.... Adsense got me random clicks for unrelated keywords on the other side of the country.... I was really really disappointed. I think I paid for clicks to my website.... can't remember for sure though
Facebook worked pretty well, but caveat was I was directing the Facebook clicks to my Facebook Business page, not my website. It could be that Facebook Ads were shittier if you tried to direct traffic outside, hard to say, I didn't try that.
VK was a blast because European countries all have large Russian/Ukrainian populations, so I could pad the numbers really easily, and it cost me literal cents... probably it would work in US too, since there are so many Russians living there.
Fun fact: Russian is the second biggest language in China, about 20% speak it. After English and Mandarin, its probably the most useful language, followed by Spanish