Brands Are Wasting Money on Facebook and Twitter, Forrester Says
I found out this very early, a few years ago when their ad platform was barely launching for everyone. I had a digital magazine and overall it seemed like a good deal, send me people interested in music from these countries at very low CPCs, nice. In total, I may have spent around $1200 USD over a month for a little more than 100 subscribers; needless to say I felt scammed. When trying to figure out what happened (w/ Google Analytics, my own event tracking code and even a few apache logs) I found out very interesting stuff, like that 99% of those clicks were people who didn't stay for more than a second on my webpage, like in: they didn't even wait for the page to load completely... weird.<p>Just for the record, my ads were not clickbaity and were targeted fine, and my magazine didn't suck (IMO at least heh), so if someone clicked on my ad I would pretty much expect it to stay in the page and have at least a look at the cover of the current issue.<p>Why did I burn $1200 if the ads weren't working from the start? I wish I had figured that out earlier and spend that money on a fancy chair or whatever instead... The thing is that I was only looking at my daily visitors and believed that everything was fine, it was until the end of the month (where I always made some kind of audit thing to see if I was growing or not) where I noticed that the number of new subscribers had remained the same even though FB ads were active all time.<p>Since then, the only advice I give to friends and clients is "stay away from Facebook ads, it's not what you think they are". And on a small side note, I tried a lot of advertisers at that time and the best experience I had was with StumbleUpon, their referrals converted to subscribers at an incredible ratio (like >50%!!!) and on top of that they drove some extra organic growth even a few months after then campaign was finished, respect for them.