Facebook Fans – Worth the Investment?

Hello Holoficationers.  We’ve been busy busting our technological butts on a version of Holofy for the UCLA campus, so our blog posts have been delayed a bit.  But we’re back with another (*sigh*) evaluation of Facebook’s ad units.

As you might have read around the web or in previous postings, Facebook ads are viewed by many local SMB’s to be a good option for exposing their businesses to hyperlocal audiences.  But as we’ve also reported in our own ad-review posting, getting results from a Facebook campaign is challenging at best – wasted money at worst.  We’ve now just read another article from Business Insider which profiles a company that is removing their entire Facebook presence, not just their ads.  That article highlights how Limited Run built their own page logger to verify the results they were seeing on their Facebook ads, and how those results seems to indicate that 80% (80%!!!!) of the clicks on their ads were generated by bots instead of actual Facebookers.  We here at Holofy have also internally commented “Wow, it’s amazing how Facebook seems to always hit the per-day ad budget we’ve assigned for clicks – but those clicks aren’t generating any downstream interest or actions.  Weird.”  Well, it’s not so weird anymore.  Brand after brand is pulling out of Facebook, some with massive budgets.  And Facebook itself has admitted that it might take more than a year (!!!) for an advertiser to see any impact from running an ad campaign on their site.  This, to us, indicates that Facebook ads aren’t just broken – they’re pink elephant mythical!  And if it turns out that these “bots” are being run by Facebook itself, in an effort to scare up more than a 0.001% CTR rate, there’s going to be hell to pay and we don’ t like the prospects of what that’s going to do to the tech sector in the stock market.  Come on Gokul Rajaram, we need to see how Facebook is going to fix this situation!  It seems to be rapidly devolving into an “anything but Facebook” ad world.