Facebook ads: spent $1000, got 20 clicks and 0 sales Is that for real? Is everyo... (2024)

Anecdotal response: As a user, I hate facebook ads so much that the dislike bleeds into the product/service being advertised. I'm sure xyz widget is great on its own, but facebook insists on inserting ads into really strange contexts, like next to a heart felt eulogy by my friend or someone's random anti-Trump rant that I am tagged in.

Facebook ads for me are "anti-ads". They associate the product with really bad feelings through poor contextualization.

Not a Facebook user, but I see Twitter ads. If they're irrelevant to my interests, and almost all are, I flag them with the "Not relevant" link, which has become the awkwardly named "I don't like this".

I'm routinely surprised that despite me talking openly about my interests, I just don't get relevant ads. On one of my most frequently used sites (about basketball), the ads this week have been all womens fashion. I've not searched womens fashion and my wife doesn't use my laptop or phone. Waste of ad money.

They probably guessed that you were male and then showed you women's fashion to make you buy something for your wife.

I have come to understand advertising a lot better since I asked, while looking at some lingerie ad, "Who would ever want to wear something like that?" and someone replied "This ad is for your spouse who wants to see you in this."

> "This ad is for your spouse who wants to see you in this."

The same reason that underpants come packaged with pictures of hunky guys on the front. The guys aren't there for the men wearing the underpants, so presumably they're there for the women buying them.

They're also there for you: "Maybe I'll look more like this wearing these?"

They don't crop the faces off the model's picture only for costs. They don't have a face so that it's easier to project yourself with said body.

My wife's fashion choices are best left to her. Giftware or gift vouchers for fashion stores I could understand, but not dresses.

Meanwhile, I research hiking trips almost every day of the year, talk online about hiking frequently, and I can't remember seeing a single ad for hiking gear or anything remotely related.

Have you tried this?

https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/22210-facebook-unsponsored

Fixed it for me. Web-only, but I just removed the icon from my phone's home screen and my FB usage went way down, which I think is a good thing.

I did the same thing, except I turned it off after $500. My professional opinion is that Facebook's platform is very accessible for anyone to get up and running with (good). And in terms of offering advertisers good analytics and actionable feedback, it's pretty much garbage (bad).

My background: I spent a couple years optimizing Google PPC campaigns as a full-time professional when I was at a digital marketing agency. I held Adwords certification for a couple years. I added this so people don't think I just couldn't figure out how to do PPC in general.

It depends a lot on the product and the audience, but from my experience, you are never going to get results with your first $500 or $1000 on Facebook Ads, regardless your background. It takes a lot of trial and error just to understand what works, and then some more to drill down, get better, lower costs, etc. I'd say you are looking at three months and several thousand dollars of experimenting at least to start getting decent results, even with a strong PPC background. Facebook is just a completely different beast.

You can most definitely not set up your first campaign, pick the first targeting criteria that comes to mind, and expect good results with a positive ROI within the same day. If you don't keep at, it of course you are going to walk out with the idea that Facebook Ads don't work.

Source: Spent a six figure amount on Facebook over the course of two years.

>You can most definitely not set up your first campaign, pick the first targeting criteria that comes to mind, and expect good results with a positive ROI within the same day.

I have actually literally done this. Just took a stab at an audience, got sales that justified the ad right away.

But we're in a great position with profit margins. They're hand assembled craft items that people generally buy for gifts or weddings, so cost to make is low and sell price is pretty good. Businesses that require high volume on low margins would have a much worse time.

Women, 24+, interested in family, weddings, gifts, babies, family photos, etc. We kept it to Australia for now, but I'm working on going international.

Since the items integrate the buyer's photo, people also often use them as memorials of dead people, but we didn't specifically target that. Yet.

We have just completed a profitable FB campaign (5.5x ROI), after many attempts. The key for us was:

(1) Audience. We created a lookalike audience based on the attributes of our high spenders, which outperformed all previous attempts by a significant margin. I appreciate this option is not going to be available to businesses with no existing customer base.

(2) Tracking. Given the majority of our ads are served on mobile, but convert on desktop or iPad, only Facebook is able to join up the impression and transaction. Previously we had expected to be able to see the attribution in Google Analytics.

> Is that for real? Is everyone else's experience with Facebook advertising similar?

Yeah. It's called "Facebook Fraud". See a real live experiment someone did, to figure out the true reach and ROI on Facebook Advertizing. => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjagI too did a similar experiment using a pre-paid Visa card (for 50$) so that FB doesn't keep charging my Credit Card and/or lets it get stolen from bad security practices. My results were similar to the guy in the Youtube Video.

Facebook's likes and "reach" are mostly automated or from in-house click-farms in South-east asia (think India, Vietnam, Phillipines etc)

That video is well worth a watch, but to summarise it: the channel owner's users are predominantly first-world and engage with his channel to some degree. He purchased FB advertising to promote his channel, and got a huge amount of traffic 'from' third-world locations that didn't engage (leave comments, etc) and that came from content-free FB accounts that liked hundreds to thousands of FB pages with no particular pattern.

Couldn't be more obviously a scam if it was twirling a waxed moustache.

I've had this experience as well. I'd love an opportunity to chat with someone who runs these click farms for a living, so I can understand their motivations a little more clearly.

I can't wrap my head around why someone would run a bot farm to click on my FB ads. It's not like AdSense, where they're getting a cut. I've read a theory it's to hide the bot accounts from Facebook's bot-detectors. But if people like in your experience can easily ID the obviously fake accounts, FB can (using the same criteria you mentioned).

I get FB has moral hazard to allow bot clicks, because they get paid. But if they're so sophisticated as to require fake engagement on ads (which is why I care -- I'm getting charged!), wouldn't they also be monitoring the simple heuristic you provided?

This could be explained by Facebook requiring bots to make them money to not get banned, but I don't think there's sufficient evidence for such a conspiracy just yet.

In the end, all I care about is how much I put into FB ads, and how much directly attributable revenue that generates. The fraud might hide otherwise profitable campaigns (ones that don't break even), but frequently this isn't the primary concern. (My concerns are usually, "does this part of Lake Facebook have any fish I can catch?", followed by the step 2 of optimizing the campaign to get a positive ROI.

Like someone below said bots are more complicated than just clicking on what brings them money.

In order to be not detected as bots, they need to behave like humans. Hence, they like and visit websites that they have no special interest in. Think of it this way: 50% of what they click is just something random, other 50% is what their masters programmed them to do.

This really doesn't have to do anything with Facebook. There are companies in Russia and India that sell likes, follows, etc. These bots then have to fake their identity and as a result they like stuff that you pay for as Facebook advertiser. I am sure Facebook does something to mitigate this and block the bots but it's a never-ending game for them and those who sell fake like/follows/etc.

> A potential solution for Facebook

Sorry, but Facebook is not looking for a solution. I should've made it clearer in my response, that the like and click farms are managed by Facebook themselves.

They (the Ads Team) moved the click-farms and fake likes in-house after discovering other shady companies that were doing this. Then I think they realized how lucrative it was to their share price and quarterly revenues bottom-line so they went with it.

Technically, it wasn't FB, it was Jared doing it secretly, until he was caught by Richard. They tried to keep it secret, but Dinesh and Gilfoyle eventually realized where the uptick in users came from. Dinesh _did_ then offer Richard a program to do just that, edit the databases directly...

Man, I can't wait for Silicon Valley to come back next season lol

Just because you get a lot of clicks from Asia, it doesn't mean that they have click farms there. Don't know if you've been to Southeast Asia, but there are a lot of people and most of them use Facebook. If they see the ad they might click it because they're interested, even though they cannot buy the product because they're in the wrong country. Still doesn't mean that FB fakes clicks, it just means they target them badly.

And even if the accounts are fake, they were likely created to sell followers/likes, not to click ads. Clicking on things just shows activity.

Well, Facebook's been around for about ten years now, and people tend to check it about once a day, on average, with (say) 5 ads per visit.

So you've personally been served something like 20 000 targeted (!) ads on Facebook, if not more. Have you ever intentionally clicked one? I sure haven't.

When did you ever, upon seeing a TV commercial, pack up and head to the store to buy the thing you saw? Never. Even though you saw many hundreds of thousands of those (OK I'm actually talking about me, growing up pre-internet).

That's not what TV ads are for, and IMO for the same reason not what FB ads are for. They are however both excellent brand advertising mediums. And brand advertising spending is HUGE, therefore FB is worth a gazillion dollars. People don't buy co*ke or Nike or Tide because of an ad they remembered seeing, they buy them because of ALL the ads they forgot they saw.

Growing up, I probably saw cool toys advertised and was like "muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuum I reaaaaalllly neeeeeed this enormous lego pirate castles it's got hidden doors and cannons everywhere and a TREASURE CHEST. pleeeeeeeaaaaaasssssse".

I didn't get it though. Poor Deprived Child.

Anyway, I always wonder about the brand advertising thing. Do I buy stupidly expensive razor doodads? Sure. Why? Well, I use the same brand my dad did. He bought me the first one and I don't really go in for change, so I've stuck with it. I can logically acknowledge that it's dumb, but here I am yearly spending £30 on razors with more blades than can possibly be necessary.

co*ke? I guess I had it somewhere for the first time, I like the taste. I don't think I buy it because of the advertising, I buy it because I like it. Why don't I buy own brand stuff? It tastes different. Would I prefer the own brand stuff if I'd started on that and was used to it? I suspect that is true, so for me it feels like the massive win is in being the first product that I use.

Surely when I go to the shops and pick something off the shelf that I have zero context for: What did family buy? What do friends buy? Is there a brand that somehow jumps out as attractive (advertising works!). But if a first mover gets my social circle to use and approve then that's going to be way more powerful than a sh*t ton of facebook ads down the line

Just my thoughts.

LOL, that sounds very familiar, I was a PDC too :P.

The global brand ad spend is >$400 Billion a year! It's about 10x bigger than the "transactional" advertising market (Google CPC, coupons, etc). Brand is a very ephemeral almost artsy thing though, and it's not easily broken down into metrics (probably why Google didn't focus on it). Building a brand takes a lot of time and ad impressions to build up. Consider full page magazine ads or most bigger TV commercials; they often don't have a immediately obvious conversion ask, they're more about establishing a perception of something over time.

If you look back to the beginning of commerce, there were no brands. You would go down to the bazar or church to ask around and find out the best grain farmer or milk producers or whatever. The butcher you trusted might say "Oh go see the Quakers, they have the best oats!" That reputation became brand over time as commerce got more complex. Eventually they stuck a picture of a Quaker on the bag of oats to associate a certain expectation of quality or price or consistency with their products. Brand is really sticky too. Once you make that choice as a young adult to buy Tide detergent, or Gillette razors, or Honda cars or Nike shoes, its very likely you'll keep buying Tide, Gillette, Honda, or Nike. The lifetime brand customer value is very high even though the marginal profit on each purchase might be relatively low.

Im just suggesting essentially that the FB news feed is the new TV; a passive state where you "flip though the channels" consuming entertainment, and that's an ideal place to present a brand message. The fact that a FB advert fills the users' mobile screen for a few seconds as they scroll is analogous to how TV commercials interrupt a show for a short period.

On razors: I just don't get why they are still a thing. I got an electric shaving machine in my mid teens, and I still have and use the same damn thing. Basic, cheap Philips machine that probably cost $60 and has lasted literally decades. The battery's long dead, so I just use it plugged in.

Can anyone tell me why razors are better?

They aren't :P

I guess they remove your manly stubble if you're into that, but my clippers keep me going for another day easily :P

> When did you ever, upon seeing a TV commercial, pack up and head to the store to buy the thing you saw? Never.

I just spent $150 today buying a product online I had never before considered or researched, from a company I knew very little about, thanks to an (organic) tweet in my Twitter feed.

So…it does happen, if the timing is right. :)

I've seen the numbers for the company I work at and when they adjust their Google ad spending amount, it correlates pretty directly to sales. I was quite surprised as I had a similar feeling before seeing that.

What's interesting, though, is that the company I work for does a lot of repeat business. So I don't think we actually pick up many new customers. It's more that the ads encourage our existing customers to visit us again. They may not even click on the ad.

Sponsored articles from pages I have already liked I sometimes click on.

Retargetting works okay for us, nothing amazing but at the same time it isn't throwing money away.

I've heard a lot of similar experiences using both FB and Google.

I feel like the entire ad-tech industry is a house of cards that is bound to topple over at some point.

You have to be good at it!

Yes, it's very possible to throw money into a hole with advertising. If you're selling something people don't want, targeting the wrong people, or have ads that don't work with your audience then you'll get nothing back.

Buying advertising isn't a guarantee. Lots of people with little advertising experience would do good to seek out tools and advice to get started.

I think it is too. We finally killed our campaigns on bing, google, and fb - we go with just a few smaller ads on more targeted platforms... and get 10x the results for 1% of the money.

Still nothing to brag about, but money on adwords is definitely money wasted

That's precisely it.

Advertise to people who are already interested in your type of product in places they may be looking for something new. Games at Gamestop/IGN etc, specific subreddits, books at goodreads, camping/hiking stuff on hiking boards.

Not really, it works great for some people. I'm very interested constantly turning over 1.2x roi using FB.

There are just specific types of campaigns you don't do using FB and if you're not experienced you most likely burn money.

This turns out to be an argument for ad-blocking.

By blocking all ads, because I am not going to buy anything from an ad anyhow, I'm not being counted towards your bill, which makes things cheaper for you and more pleasant for me.

You're welcome.

Only for awareness marketing.

Usually direct response marketing (like ads to buy a game) is paid per click, so you weren't getting people charged before you started ad blocking, when you weren't clicking on the ad anyways.

And as a beside, people typically don't do direct response marketing to engineers, because it's known they don't click on ads and they're better marketed to through referrals from other engineers and online content (like this article).

Yes, exactly that.

I'd love an easy option to only include ads on sites that I trust, or that do ads well, and some reliable metrics surrounding that. Then content producers could get some feedback on "ad acceptance rates" and create better user experiences.

Now that I think about it, one of the most obnoxious things about online ads isn't that they are eerily intelligent, but that they are still mostly dumb forms of broadcast.

It's real. I asked all my digital marketing friends for advice too. I made ~20 iterations, tried different pictures, headlines, targeting schemes to no avail.

There are def ways to make it work, but it's not an easy thing. If I were to try again, I'd make an audio-less video.

Getting started from 0 with ads on facebook is hard.

If you don't have good email lists, have the money to throw at ads to figure out your ad groups / demographics (just because purple fish people are your #1 customers doesn't mean they buy things off of facebook ads), and don't have a whole ecosystem (landing pages, cross platform re targeting, etc), its an uphill battle that even the pros can't always get working right.

Good on you for trying. Back when I ran ads, a common story from small clients was "I spent $50 - $200 and didn't get any sales, so I figured it wasn't for us" - At least you figured out it wasn't for you, or it wasn't for your budget/time scale.

Just to throw in our experience (hardware product, UK market) we've tried facebook a few of times over the last 3 years.

The initial attempt was a massive fail, we wasted about £3K on facebook ads to generate about £300 in sales.

Following season we focussed on TV ads and generating lots of reviews from our existing happy customers. We then gave facebook another attempt at the end of the season and generated as much sales and traffic as all of the tv advertising for about £3k of facebook ads.

The primary difference was knowing who our customer is - which we learned from the TV ad customers, you can probably learn from your Kickstarter backers. For all of the TV generated sales we got reviews and sent out surveys to each customer. From this, we learned 1. What people loved about the product (which we could use is ad copy) and 2. Who they were and why they purchased.

This allowed us to create very targetted facebook ad campaigns and hence the improved ROI. Facebook is excellent at generating very cheap traffic but only when you get the audience dialed in.

Also, read anything written by Nick Kolenda (http://www.nickkolenda.com/) amazing stuff.

That was pretty much ours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12969922.

Our best advertising bang has for years been our blog: http://www.seliger.com/blog, in part because many of the topics we write about are also the kinds of search strings people interested in hiring us tend to use.

I have the same thought in the Facebook Ads and Google Adwords control panel that I do sitting down at a craps table:

"I'm going to lose all of this, aren't I?"

Are you very experienced with either? As someone who manages digital media for a living and has dealt with 8 figure budgets, I certainly don't feel that way. However I'm very aware of how expectations are often not properly set by either company.

In their quest to reduce the friction to people's wallets Google and FB in some ways portray it as clicking a few buttons, creating a couple ads, selecting some suggested targets and you'll make a ton of money right off the bat. And perhaps that used to work to some degree.

The reality is that professionals tend to change or disable most of the defaults because they don't perform well or have other issues. We then go in implementing tried and tested best practices, knowing full well performance will still suck initially and that we have a long, expensive road of testing and optimization before we have things dialed in.

It is a tough business challenge because to some degree it is like trying to cram something simplistic like Paint into a hugely technical and complex platform like Photoshop. You just wanted to draw a damn cat, but there are all these confusing menus and tool bars, these weird layer things, and before you know it you've wasted an afternoon and end up just paying someone to draw it for you before you waste more time.

A company I know well cough is built an app and pays about $7/download via Facebook ads. This company has tried many other options and while it has gotten more conversions using alternatives, the users have tended to be poorer in quality (much lower DAUs/MAUs). I have heard the average cost/download via Facebook is lower than $7 (maybe $5) for an app like this one, but I think it has been worth the money spent, and I would/will do it again. And yeah this company has spent quite a bit more than $1k on these ads.

Downloading a free App is a lower hurdle than buying a card game, so it doesn't surprise me that the author didn't see many conversions. I have read that if your customer acquisitions costs are less than or equal to the money you expect to make off of them during your first year with the customer (supposing a subscription model, not unlike a card game with expansion packs), then you are doing well. The author has seen that his customers have often become repeat customers, so it may be ok to expect that $17.76 is an ok price to pay per converted user, so long as you expect some larger percentage of them will come back for expansion packs.

Some notes: DUDE! it took me WAY TOO LONG to figure out where to buy your game! The link to the product is at THE VERY BOTTOM of your Medium article. PUT IT AT THE TOP WHERE YOU MENTION IT FOR THE FIRST TIME (sorry for yelling). Make it easy for people to find and buy your game!

If you've spent $1000, got 20 clicks and 0 sales, then either your targeting or your ad or both are piss poor.

I have made quite a lot of money (and lost quite a lot in the beginning) advertising on Facebook ads in the past. Just because you have a lot of experience with Google Search PPC doesn't mean you'll have success with Facebook, and visa versa. It depends very much on the product, how broad or niche the appeal is, the price point, the approaches you've tried.

You need to know the target demographics of who your customer is, and Facebook is one of many cost effective avenues to reaching certain types of people. You need to be creative in creating great ad images, ad copy, a good landing page, and measuring actions that tie directly to increased revenue.

These are all basic common sense things, but I have yet to see someone's campaign that didn't have some obvious flaw that set them up for failure. There are a lot of ways to fail and only a few ways to succeed.

I don't think retargeting is particularly creepy.

What is creepy is that when my in-laws were visiting for the first time I had a American Express ad with Tina Fey congratulating me on meeting my in laws for the first time.

the ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEX5e-_YxxA

We've spent $2300, reached 140,000 people (according to FB). 11,000 of those visited our website. We also have 7300 likes on our Facebook page which we post to every few days.

$2,300 on marketing is peanuts, so we believe is worth it to be able to directly contact 7,300 people who expressed interest in our business. These people are also liking and sharing our posts.

Not to everyone. Neither do all of the pages that you've liked over the years show up in your news feed.

Basically, the procedure is the following:

 post is shown to a small minority while a proportion of the people seeing it engages with your content: show the content to more people

So, if the initial... let's say 200 people that see the post on your Facebook page are not engaging with it, the content wouldn't be spread further among people who liked your page. If they engage with it, the content will be spread further.

That small minority decides the future of your post. If you have non-genuine likes that are not interested in your content at all (as in, not engaging with it), but they see the post first, you're gonna have to spend money to promote posts.

You guys may be in a position to make Facebook Ads work, because of your existing customer list. If I recall correctly, setting up the appropriate demographic channels is way too hit or miss. It'll be an expensive education.

BUT, if you have an existing customer list (like yourselves), FB gives you an option to upload those existing customer emails and it will do some AI matching to find the appropriate customer demographic pools? From the tutorial I read, this was the only chance you'd have to get any sort of traction on your campaign right out of the gate.

Disclosure #1 : I've never run a Facebook ad campaign in my life just read several tutorials regarding running a successful campaign.

Disclosure #2: I don't remember where I read this information, but given the fact that FB knows everyone's interests (directly and indirectly from statuses and likes), their algorithmic assessment of who should see the ad could be worth trying.

You have to find your audience, which is usually doable, but takes iteration and experimentation.

The trick is keeping the cost of testing as low as possible. 100 $1 campaigns are going to have a better return than 1 $100 campaign.

I had success with Facebook with Pokemon Go, I don't believe it's easy reproducible on a lot of other things. I wrote everything down here : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12858993

Tldr; don't do Facebook ads if your not doing a hype and if don't want to give things away for free

If you only want useless likes locked in on Facebook, you should do go all on. Remember, you can't easy notify the people who liked your page even though you payed for them

You'd be surprised how your marketing strategies will fail when starting a business. Best, recent writeup is Clifford's below. Really shows the level of apathy and confusion you will experience. :)

https://medium.com/@cliffordoravec/expect-everything-to-be-u...

I've had amazing results with Facebook ads. We usually turn 20$ into a couple of sales of 40$ items with high margins. I've got a new ad going up in 4 hours.

That being said, if the profit margin on the items wasn't so high it would be far worse. We're in a particularly good position that way. But on the other hand I haven't done alot of analytics or improvement on the ads either.

Yes. Same here. I've tried Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, Reddit Ads, BlogAds aimed at design websites, and a custom placement by a site itself (paid $300 for a top header ad (the best position) and got nothing from it.) Literally hundreds of dollars wasted and not a single sale. I was pissed.

People ignore ads. 1 year I was simply mentioned on DesignMilk.com and my calendar sold out. The following year I paid $300 to advertise at the top of DesignMilk.com and didn't get a single sale. That's what really made me realize advertising is highly unwanted.

When I ask around to other inventors and sellers of physical products, Advertising is just a waste (except if you're selling a high priced item that can easily make the money back on a few sales). It's a suckers game if you're like me, selling a low cost item at high volume. If the advertising worked for all these businesses they would keep doing it. They don't. They run a few campaigns, advertise for a bit, watch it fail, then leave, and the next sucker takes their place. Unless you're one of those big box stores that advertise every week. But you are not walmart or target. You do not make millions in revenue a day. You cannot afford to run full color catalog ads bundled with newspapers every single week.

Also, don't let flash sales fool you. Back when I sold my large format physical paper calendar on Fab.com (back when it was big, it went bankrupt and reorganized due to... spending too much on advertising and not enough revenue, ironic isn't it) I sold out in less than 1 month. All 300 units sold out at $15 each. When they reorganized I was literally ruined. They no longer took in calendars like mine. I was stuck selling on Amazon.com and Ebay.com and Etsy.com and sold just a few units.

But man was the journey worth it. I lost thousands but I learned enough to justify it.

Plenty of companies have success. There are tons of digital marketers killing it on there. The level of targeting you can achieve is absurd. It's zero sum game where you compete against other advertisers though.

Because of this it seems incredibly obvious to me that it'll almost certainly be unprofitable until you've done a lot of work to optimise your campaign (as you're competing with bids against people who have optimised their campaigns) and also probably be incredibly unprofitable if you're not a full time professional digital marketer specialising in facebook ads (because that's who you're most likely competing against for eyeballs).

Yet I see average punters throwing tiny budgets around and failing at facebook used as evidence that facebook advertising is garbage on a regular basis.

$50 CPC is not unheard of before optimizing the ad content or ad targeting.

Keep in mind that Facebook ads are more like display ads than search ads - users don't necessarily have a specific intent when getting the impression, so they're less likely to give you a direct response.

In my experience, we're able to create a lot more engagement using Facebook, but you have to consider that we're a niche startup in Brazil (where CPC seems to be cheaper).

On the other hand, most of the users we got from Facebook were a kind of "freebie hunters". As soon as they saw it would be necessary to pay a monthly fee to use our services (It's an app! Am I really supposed to pay for this?), most of them disappeared.

In the end, as someone has already mentioned here, Facebook seems to be a really good place to advertise free stuff or products that can naturally trigger some emotional response (Look at this lovely products made by this grandma)... and maybe just them.

By tracking people that converted and then feeding that into Facebook's Lookalike Audience we were able to drop the cost per lead to about a third of the original cost over time (from $78 to $27). It beat everything else (TV, display ads, retargeting, SEM, etc), to the point where we only did that.

We've noticed that every time we stopped the ads, or changed the targeting parameters/audience, it would take a while for Facebook to get back to the same results.

p.s The lead cost was that high because we were selling $200k land + $500k houses from a small tropical country to US consumers that may have never even heard of that country.

I've seen quite a few Shopify store owners in a group on Facebook mentioning that they've had good results using Facebook ads.

I've only used Facebook ads to have a bit of fun and boost a picture of my cat[1]. He got a couple of likes after I'd spent about 50 cents, which pretty much achieved my goal.

[1]https://www.facebook.com/gerrytuxedocat/posts/12184708481998...

It seems extortionately high. I've just started with some small ads for an ecommerce site I'm playing about with. Currently costing £0.34 per click, with a relevancy of 6.

This is optimising for sending visitors to my website though. If you focus on page likes or soemthing, then it's not likely you'll get very good off-site CTR

Ours wasn't as dismal (the zero sales part), but in order to get a sale we had to spend ~5 times as much on Facebook ads vs. Google ads.

The bounce rate alone from Facebook ads was just under 3x that of Google ads - around 90%. I'm assuming a lot of Facebook ad clicks are accidental.

I bought a kickstarter after seeing it adverstised on Facebook. That is some anecdata at least.

I have to say, though, a lot of the stuff advertised on Facebook and Instagram seems kind of dodgy. Unless I am just being targeted for dodgy stuff by their algorithms.

No different than AdWords, many people lose money.

But many people make money, too.

The first mistake is thinking "how hard could it be?"

Worse. At least they got clicks.

(But tbh. that was some years ago when the advertising stuff was new to FB ... so maybe it got better by now).