This is important because if the Russians were largely using off-the-shelf tactics, then we can use what we know about digital media broadly to assess how great an impact their operation had. And put it this way: If the Internet Research Agency were a start-up media company, they probably would not be picking up a fresh round of venture capital for their media skill.

Take the topline number of 150 million people. This includes those who might have seen a single ad as they scrolled on Facebook. One hundred million Americans saw the ads on during the Super Bowl, and those are multimillion-dollar commercials designed for maximum impact, not some promoted post from a Facebook page called Heart of Texas. Facebook and Instagram ads obviously work in some circumstances, but even the lowest-rent operators of online stores know that it takes a lot more than one ad out of the thousands Americans see every day to do anything.

Which is just to say: Let’s not give the Russian ads too much credit. The ones in the public domain had tiny audiences, even if they were remarkably effective at getting people to click on them. Showing a lot of people—even millions spread across the country—a couple of ads or holding some sparsely attended rallies is not what landed Donald Trump in the White House. There is nothing in the public record or indictment that indicates the efforts were large, targeted, or effective enough to sway the vote in the key states that gave Trump the victory.

Here’s what the Russian trolls did, according to the Mueller indictment (which is in line with everything that’s been publicly reported). They built medium-sized social-media pages, primarily on Facebook and Instagram. They posted to these pages regularly, usually targeting Hillary Clinton, with a mix of content.

“Defendants and their coconspirators issued or received guidance on: ratios of text, graphics, and video to use in posts; the number of accounts to operate; and the role of each account (for example, differentiating a main account from which to post information and auxiliary accounts to promote a main account through links and reposts),” the indictment reads. None of this is magic. Many media companies from HuffPost to Blavity would be familiar with trying to optimize the type of posts going out on a page or set of pages. In a quick scan, HuffPost maintains more than 50 Facebook pages, the main one and dozens of auxiliary ones in different languages and on specific topics. And they coordinate action across them.

The Russians tracked how well what they were posting was connecting with people. “In order to gauge the performance of various groups on social-media sites, the ORGANIZATION tracked certain metrics like the group’s size, the frequency of content placed by the group, and the level of audience engagement with that content, such as the average number of comments or responses to a post,” the indictment reads. And in another spot: “Defendants and their coconspirators received and maintained metrics reports on certain group pages and individualized posts.”