Made You Click: How Facebook Fed You Political Ads for Less Than a Penny
Russian-backed messages in the 2016 election cycle had outsize reach, ad buyers say, because of the way Facebook rewards content that gets a reaction
.. On Facebook, a little ad spending goes a long way—and the more contentious the ads are, the farther they may go.Facebook Inc. disclosed last week that Russian entities spent some $150,000 for ads about “divisive” topics during a two-year period that included the U.S. presidential race.
.. the Russian-backed messages may have had outsize reach, ad buyers say, because Facebook favors ads that grab users’ attention and make them click, whether the content is political or otherwise, sensational or not.
.. In all, the Russians’ ads could have reached 3 million to 20 million or more people on the social network
.. Facebook has said little about the approximately 5,200 ads, which mostly centered on hot-button social and political issues like immigration and race relations.
.. In Facebook’s internal ad-auction system, ads compete in billions of auctions a day for slots in users’ news feeds. The system tends to reward ads that spark engagement—by getting users to click, share or otherwise spend time viewing—and sometimes it picks such ads over less-engaging ads that have a higher bid, advertisers say.
.. “When you put out an ad and Facebook sees that relative to other ads this is one is getting a lot of shares, that really seems to drive the cost down,” said Anthony Astolfi, creative director at IVC Media, who led digital advertising for Gary Johnson’s presidential campaign.
.. The day before the campaign, 32,500 Facebook users had engaged with the client’s ads. The client spent only a fraction of a penny, or 0.024 cent, for each user its ads were intended to reach. After the video launched, 55,000 users engaged, and the cost of reaching a single user dropped 30% to 0.017 cent, he said.