What do negative comments on your Facebook ads cost?
You paid for the impression. If a scam accusation was sitting under the ad when it landed, you bought that person's first impression of you. Put your real numbers in below and see what that is worth. Nothing you type ever leaves your browser.
Your ad numbers
The two assumptions
What it costs you
Your funnel, from your numbers
Free. No signup, no email. Nothing you type here leaves your browser.
Automated comment moderation for Facebook and Instagram
We monitor your Facebook and Instagram pages 24/7 and automatically hide bad comments and spam in your ads and organic posts.
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What this tool does
There are two numbers on this page and they are not the same kind of number, so it is worth saying which is which before you read either.
The first is wasted spend, and it needs no guessing at all. If a fifth of your impressions land on a post with a scam comment visible under it, then a fifth of your ad spend bought those impressions. That is not an estimate, it is division. You know what you spent.
The second is lost revenue, and it is an estimate, because it depends on how many buyers a bad comment actually deters. Nobody knows that number. Nobody can know it, because you cannot count a person who read the comment and quietly scrolled on. Anyone quoting you a percentage there made it up, and we are not going to join in.
So we let you set it. It defaults to 1 in 20, which is deliberately small, and the honest way to use this page is to move that field and watch the range rather than trust any single figure. Every number here comes from a number you typed, and the formula is printed underneath.
How to work out what your ad comments cost
Four of these you can read straight out of Ads Manager. Two of them are judgement calls, and the page is built around being honest about which is which.
- 1Take spend, CPM, CTR, and conversion rate from Ads ManagerUse a real month, not your best week. Use the campaigns that actually attract comments, which usually means your cold prospecting, not your retargeting.
- 2Use your real average order valueRevenue divided by orders, for the same period. Not the price of your hero product.
- 3Estimate how many impressions have a bad comment sitting under themThis is the honest bit of work. Open your top three ads and look. If there is a scam reply near the top of an ad that has been running a week, that ad's impressions are all exposed, not some of them. Most people find this number is higher than they assumed.
- 4Set the deterrence rate low and leave it lowIt defaults to 1 in 20. That is a small claim on purpose. The number is still uncomfortable at 1 in 20, and a small defensible number beats a big invented one.
- 5Read the wasted spend figure firstIt is the one that needs no assumptions. You spent the money, the impressions happened, and a scam comment was underneath. Whether or not a single buyer was deterred, you paid for that.
Why the deterrence rate is a guess, and why we say so
Every competitor tool in this space quotes a confident percentage here. Here is why this one does not.
- 1You cannot measure someone who leftA buyer who read a scam accusation and scrolled on generates no event. No click, no add to cart, no bounce. They are invisible in your reporting, which is exactly why the cost of comments is so easy to ignore.
- 2It is not a constant anywayA crypto reply under a supplement ad and a customer saying they never got their order do different amounts of damage, to different audiences, at different prices. One number cannot cover that.
- 3A number you chose is more persuasive than one we inventedIf we said 30 percent, your first thought would be who says. If you set it to 5 and the figure is still uncomfortable, that is your number and you already believe it.
- 4So read it as a rangeMove the field from 1 in 100 to 1 in 5 and look at the spread. The truth is in there somewhere, and the range is more useful than any point in it.
What this number gets right, and what it leaves out
One of the two figures is arithmetic and one is an estimate. Here is exactly what each is worth.
What this counts
- Spend you can verifyThe wasted spend figure is your own spend multiplied by your own exposure estimate. No benchmarks, no invented statistics, nothing to take on faith.
- Your funnel, not a generic oneA lost order is worked out with your CTR and your conversion rate, so it is an order your own numbers say you would have had.
- The scale problemThis is why it matters more for advertisers than for organic pages. You are buying the impressions that put a scam reply in front of strangers, at whatever rate you set your budget to.
- An assumption you controlThe deterrence rate is yours to set, and it is labelled as a guess everywhere it appears. Set it to zero and the page still has something true to say.
What it leaves out
- The actual deterrence rateThis is the big one and it is unknowable. Nobody can count the buyer who read the comment and scrolled on, because leaving generates no event. Treat the lost revenue as a range, never a figure.
- That not all comments cost the sameA crypto bot and a customer saying this is a scam are not equally expensive. The maths treats them identically because it has no way not to.
- The people who never come backThis prices a lost order. It does not price a buyer who decided you look dodgy and never returns, which is the same money over again for years.
- Your own team's hoursThe time spent finding and hiding all this is a real cost and it is not in here. Our moderation ROI calculator does that half.
- Anything about your creativeA bad ad with a clean comment section is still a bad ad. This says nothing about whether the ad was any good.
- Doing anything about itA number is a mirror. It cannot hide a comment, and the calculation is identical tomorrow unless something changes underneath the ad.
Living with it vs Sweep Inbox
The number above repeats every month for as long as you spend. Here is what changes when the comment is gone before the impression lands.
| Doing nothing | Sweep Inbox | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | The figures above, every month | A subscription, with a 7 day free trial |
| How long a scam comment is visible | Until somebody notices, which can be overnight | Seconds |
| Impressions bought next to it | All of them, at your daily budget | Almost none, because it is gone first |
| Who reads the comment | Your buyers, before you do | Our AI model, as it lands |
| Out of hours | Your ads run. Nobody is watching | Watched around the clock |
| Customer questions under the ad | Missed with everything else | Left visible and waiting in one inbox |
Questions people actually ask
- The part that is not arguable: you paid for the impression, and a scam reply or an accusation was the first thing that person read about you. Whether that particular buyer would have converted is unknowable, but the spend is not. That is why this page separates the two, and why the first figure is wasted spend rather than lost revenue.
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Open toolYou are paying for those impressions either way.
The comment is free to post and it costs you every time your ad serves. Connect your pages and let Sweep Inbox hide it in the seconds before your next buyer reads it.
7 days free. No credit card. Cancel anytime.
