Facebook ads - waste of money?

People that do not have any clue how to run any type of ads should not be running ads.
You need to understand that people that are actually making money on FB are not spending
$40-$50, they are most likely spending $1,000s, and if they did their job right, then they
may spend $5,000 and earn around $10,000, this is because they know what they are doing....

stop playing games with FB, if you are serious, then you really need to have $1k-$2k budget before
you start testing the waters on FB. You should do deep product research, and see if your product
even has a chance in hell, not all products will make money, no matter how much you invest, and
if you have passed this stage, then you or your ad agency needs to create 100s of FB ad
variations for testing, as you go along, most of these ads will be cut, and you repeat the process
until you find winners, so spending $40 tells me you have no clue what you are doing as you
expected to spend a few dollars, hoping to make money the same day, and this method only
works for lucky dumb hicks that got lucky on their first go using FB ads, otherwise, not realistic....

This is not as easy as you think, just one word in your ad could make the difference between
fail/success. How many FB image ads are you testing? How many videos are you testing? There
are a few factors on why your product sells or not; It could be the result of bad advertising, poor
audience targeting, your website sucks, your product cost is to high, bad product, plus other factors...

Is your product unique, or you just selling the same old china-product crap? If you are just re-selling
the same old crap, then you just need to stop, why? because people on FB are already selling
the same old crap, and they know what they are doing when it comes to FB ads as not to burn up cash.....

stop watching all those fake youtube ego videos "How I made $50,000k using ecommerce..."
(most of the time, this is not how they make their money, but what they sell you...."

and FB did nothing wrong, they estimated that you would get 13k and 19k views,
so beyond that, it is not their fault, your ad did not pull its weight; FB can
only estimate what you will receive based on past history of ads, so if
you are far below the normal, then your ad must have really sucked....