Buyer Beware: Facebook Ad Manager Reporting False Results

I decided to switch to local awareness ad campaigns on FB and wanted to evaluate the effectiveness of such campaigns. There are two mechanisms for conversion tracking: FB pixels and custom conversions. Well, I decided to try both (not at the same time obviously). I was completely outraged with the results:

First 3 days (FB pixel at the page associated with conversion):
FB reporting: 32 conversions for clicks from FB ads
Google Analytics reporting: 27 conversions (this is TOTAL for all channels incl. 17 conversions for Organic traffic and 6 conversions for AdWords).

Next 3 days (with custom conversions based on URL pattern)
FB reporting: 41 conversion for clicks from FB ads
Google Analytics reporting: 33 conversions (this is TOTAL for all channels incl. 24 conversions for Organic traffic and 11 conversions for AdWords).

Basically, you cannot trust FB reporting at all, their results are inflated and at least 3-5x higher than real conversion ratio.

To be honest, I don't think it's an intentional misleading, most likely it's just a buggy code. Here is why I think so: I defined conversion value as $10 and created a custom report with predefined field "Total value of conversions". Well... it shows zero for the entire testing period. Shame on FB developers, I would think they do a bit more testing for such important features.

 

Ridiculous! Just checked FB ad results for the week (as reported by FB):
- website clicks: 72
- conversions: 147
Obviously, you cannot have twice as many conversions as website clicks... asked FB support, no answer

 

It seems like you're not the only one questioning this (obviously). I Googled it and saw this article. A more in-depth explanation of how to understand their stats and conversions: http://www.jonloomer.com/2014/04/14/facebook-conversion-tracking-google-analytics/

On a personal note, I don't believe for a second that FB is trying to intentionally mislead anyone.

 

Thank you +qwikad.com, I know this post (Googled it when tried to make sense of results) and, unfortunately, it doesn't apply to my case (or at least to my results).

I don't think they are trying to intentionally mislead... but they may be intentionally "forgetting" to fix bugs in their reporting software as these bugs result in inflated results. I bet that most people don't even notice this, I wouldn't if I didn't want to compare FB conversion rates with AdWords ones.

 

Interesting. I still didn't receive any response from FB advertiser support and my questions in FB advertiser forums were removed (1st time they were removed under pretense that it is related to some other question) and second time (when I restored them) they were removed as duplicate questions.

I installed GoSquared analytics package to validate whether GA reports proper conversion numbers from FB and the results are within less than 10% difference from GA.

This confirms that FB reporting of conversion results is seriously inflated and, considering the situation with FB advertiser forums, I now have my doubts whether they are "intentionally misleading" or not (see thread above).

As of today, I turned off all paid advertising with FB, apparently their real conversion ratio doesn't justify money spent.

 

And that's a different story. I tried their paid advertising with a couple of job search sites in the past and got no results. It looks like unless you run entertainment-related campaigns (dating, games, casino, etc.) their paid advertising is a black hole.

 

+gwikad.com, what do you use now for paid advertising (aside from AdWords)?

 

Bing Ads. It's cheaper, but you have to be careful with their options. Refrain from choosing "All search networks (Bing, AOL, and Yahoo search and syndicated search partners)" while creating a campaign. It will drain your budget overnight. I always choose "Bing and Yahoo search engines only".

 

Thanks. I tried Bing Ads a couple of years ago and my results weren't great. May be I should give it another try...

 

Further on Facebook Fraud (watch this video):

 

I was involved with a designer dog collar company a few years ago and we tried FB ads, thinking that it was a casual type of purchase that might be successful on FB. Total loss of investment; not a single sale. At the time, a marketing friend opined that people go on FB to goof off and not buy things.

 

Well, we received few sales thanks to FB ads, but the cost ratio of these sales (i.e. advertising cost to sale value ratio) was approx 8-10 times higher than for other ad channels. Basically, the profit we made from these sales was less than a half of advertising costs

 

Everyone gets fake likes, visits from facebook ads. Clickfarms are working for facebook and co (adwords involved).
Increasing the budget (tried with $350/day) will get better visits. This is made to keep in the game big fishes and the small one to burn.