Don't Use Ad Spots On Facebook!

I have often been asked what do I use for advertising. Do I use Facebook ads? Do I use Google Pay Per Click? The answer is none of them. I have a much better option that saves me money, and provides a better clientele. I won't get into that now, but instead want to adress just one of those guys. Facebook.

Now I am a Facebook fan and am on it all the time, but when it comes to buying adds to promote your business, my experience has been a bust. You spend a ton of money and no one calls you. But according to Facebook, they are steering all kinds of traffic to your site.

Problem was, I could never validate that on my end. In my case I was trying to promote MyProFoto.com. They were charging me, but the phone was not ringing, and the analytics we had on the site suggested something was hinky. We dropped them and now totally rely on word of mouth.

Well an article found by Steve O'Donnel (Facebook Group Moderator) on Yahoo News, tracked a similar story by a business called Limited Run. They posted the following statement on their blog, and you can read the full story here.

Unfortunately, while testing their ad system, we noticed some very strange things. Facebook was charging us for clicks, yet we could only verify about 20% of them actually showing up on our site. At first, we thought it was our analytics service. We tried signing up for a handful of other big name companies, and still, we couldn't verify more than 15-20% of clicks. So we did what any good developers would do. We built our own analytic software. Here's what we found: on about 80% of the clicks Facebook was charging us for, JavaScript wasn't on. And if the person clicking the ad doesn't have JavaScript, it's very difficult for an analytics service to verify the click. What's important here is that in all of our years of experience, only about 1-2% of people coming to us have JavaScript disabled, not 80% like these clicks coming from Facebook. So we did what any good developers would do. We built a page logger. Any time a page was loaded, we'd keep track of it. You know what we found? The 80% of clicks we were paying for were from bots.

Bottom line, use this service at your own risk.