Facebook Advertising: Failing to Deliver On Real Value

Those of you who know me, know that for a long time I have believed strongly in the fairness of the system adopted by Google in its' Adwords platform (namely the Pay-Per-Click or PPC system).
Simply put you pay Google every time someone sees you sponsored link and clicks on it where they are transferred to your landing page or website.

Unlike this system, Facebook adopt the Pay-Per-Impression (PPI) system which charges the advertiser not on the number of times someone clicks on your ad but rather the number of times it appears organically next to someone's news feed for example Facebook may charge you a dollar fee per 1000 impressions. This occurs regardless of whether or not anyone ever clicks on the ad. Is it just me or is this a very sweet deal for Facebook but so much for the advertiser?

Now if this wasn't bad enough I had the opportunity this week to work with leading IT and multimedia expert Trent Rebeiro  who updated me on the extent to which ad blockers are being adopted by people today.

As of this week over 15,000,000 people who use Google Chrome as their browser have installed mostly at no cost the Ad-block software extension that as the name implies, disables all your incoming ads.

Now think about this from a marketing point of view for a minute. In good faith you the advertiser are paying Facebook money for impressions that are quite often being blocked and therefore never appear. How unfair is that?

Over time and as people find out about the availability of such options I have no doubt that number of 15 million will continue to grow. So what if your target audience is one that is computer savvy and is therefore likely to include the lions share of these people on Facebook. Imagine how this will impact on your ability to efficiently target your niche here.

If this all wasn't bad enough this week I also heard that Facebook have now come out and formally admitted in a statement saying that: "We expect organic distribution of an individual page's posts to gradually decline over time, as we continually work to make sure people have a more meaningful experience on the site."  Translation: Facebook want you to pay for the right of getting your message across and it is being touted that there will be around a 40% reduction in organic reach even to your pages followers.  That's what I call a double whammy.

On the one hand Facebook want you to do more advertising but on the other hand the real effectiveness of Facbook advertising is being erroded away with the adoption of Ad blocking technology.  Memo to Facebook.  There's a reason you struggle to make money and hopefully this post will shed some light on just some of those reasons.  Please fix it soon.

So until next time, good luck and good marketing.
Regards,
Daniele.