Tuesday 18 August 2015

The fallacy of Facebook advertising

The fallacy of Facebook advertising

Facebook claims it can reach huge swathes of people to promote your business, but Stewart Mitchell finds audience numbers appear larger than they should

Facebook should be an advertiser’s nirvana, providing targeted access to 1.4 billion potential customers across the world. The company’s advertising revenue is ballooning and rates are going through the roof as two million businesses have tried to tap into Facebook’s userbase.

According to research from Kinetic, the cost per thousand impressions has grown 490% to $4.03 in the past year, so businesses are clearly lining up to pay for exposure. But does Facebook really have the audience numbers in claims?


Take La Brasserie Verte, your correspondent’s own micro-brewery deep in the sparsely populated centre of France. It’s mostly cows and OAPs for miles around, so when Facebook claimed it could reach 620,000 people within a 50km radius, it seemed too good to be true. And it was.

Uptake of social media among Gallic octogenarians is modest at best, but the official population of the entire département of Indre is only 232,000. Being on the edge of the area complicates matters, but the neighbouring county, Creuse, is hardly likely to swell potential reach given only 126,000 people live in its grassy folds.

After looking into the discrepancy, Facebook said claims of such a wide reach shouldn’t have been made. Using its own targeting tools within the ads system, a company spokesperson came up with a drastically reduced figure without offering further explanation. “I’m unsure as to why you were shown a reach of 620,000 previously,” said the Facebook spokesperson. “I’ve tried to create an ad targeted at everyone in the region and, when selecting all demographics for up to 50km, I get a very different reach of 80,000. If I then, for example, choose only to target men aged 20-35 then the reach is much less at 17,000.”

Such figures make more sense, but the headline figures shown in its own in-house ad stated 620,000. It’s impossible to know why, or whether potential reach figures are similarly inflated elsewhere, raising questions as to what the advertising platform promises and what it can deliver.

The high price of Likes


La Brasserie Verte isn’t the first to be tripped up by Facebook’s ad platform. English teacher and writer Jakub Marian shelled out to promote his page, and did see an increase in Likes, at first believing it to be a good return on his advertising spend. However, closer inspection showed that these were not potential customers, but robot or fake accounts of no value.

“The majority were from people who had already liked over 10,000 pages,” Marian said. “The point is that even if they were real, and I believe many of them weren’t, the money invested in advertising to such people was wasted anyway, since they will almost never see anything I post.”

The post that he boosted through paid advertising attracted plenty of Likes for his Facebook page, but they weren’t converted into clicks through to the website where people could actually read about his book or buy it. “This is ridiculous — why would you Like a link to a website without even clicking on it? Again, only bots or ‘pathological likers’ do that, so I’m afraid advertising on Facebook does not really work,” he said. “It’s a waste of money.”

Facebook said it has clamped down on fake accounts and continues to police the platform, but with click farms employing people as well as bots, it’s no easy task.

Frustrating results


Marian’s story is similar to many small businesses that have bought into Facebook advertising only to be frustrated by poorer-than-expected results – even more so since changes to the platform has limited how well posts perform unless companies pay extra to reach their own followers.

According to social-media marketing specialists, much of the discontent comes from people demanding too much from Facebook – with goals exceeding what companies should realistically expect from their investment.

“Expectations are often too... ambitious,” said Matt Prater, paid acquisition manager at digital marketing firm Single Grain. “People have unrealistic ideas of what they should be getting from Facebook, and it’s been that way for a while. First, brands were upset that their organic reach was going down, but seriously... do they just expect a bunch of free traffic for making a Facebook page? Same thing with ads.”

Although Facebook provides numerous tools for tracking ad performance, many are baffling to users, and Prater warned that sales won’t necessarily follow advertising spend, and can’t be compared to more direct adverts. “Facebook is more ‘top of funnel’ than something like paid search, where people are more ready to buy,” he said. “So, lots of times, the goal for Facebook ads will just be list building – offer a free ebook in return for their email address. People aren’t looking to buy when they’re scrolling around in their News Feed, especially something like B2B software.”

The frustration for businesses is exacerbated by flexible prices and post performance, which makes it hard to know what you should expect to receive for your budget. “When you set a campaign budget, you’re given an estimated daily reach – but this is only an estimate, so it is difficult to see exactly what return you will get for your money,” said Oliver Ewbank, digital marketing manager at agency Koozai.

This lack of clarity won’t stop people buying Facebook advertising – and there are many companies with resources and deep pockets willing to pay – but it does make it harder to justify for anyone that doesn’t have a specialist digital marketer to lead them through the pitfalls. Just make sure you know the size of your local population first.

How to make Facebook ads work


Targeting is key

Concentrate on small, targeted audiences to get better value. Stick to segments of fewer than 100,000 people and focus on niche areas or interests. “Small-business advertising can still be effective, but [those businesses] have to realise they’re competing with big brands, so they have to adjust their targeting,” said Matt Prater. “If you only operate in one city, you don’t want to target the whole country. You can get as granular as specific postcodes.”

Set realistic goals

Whether it’s contacts, new Likes or actual sales, set viable, measurable targets. Achieving results on social media can take time and it simply may not work as a direct sales tool.

Run pilots

Test adverts on a small scale before ramping up to more costly campaigns to ensure your target audience will be interested. Keep adverts or promoted content fresh. “Always be testing something new,” said Prater. “Even when you find something that works, keep that one and test new things against the control. Ads will get ‘fatigued’ after some time.”

Refine your targets

Retargeting trumps targeting when working with Facebook audiences. Tap into people that are already your customers, website visitors or email-list members, and reinforce interest via Facebook using the Custom Audience pixel, which links your company’s website to your Facebook page. “Place a pixel on your site to build audiences of your traffic, then show those people an ad when they’re in Facebook,” said Prater. “You can segment by where they’ve been on your site and how long ago they were there, then build lookalike audiences based on that data.”