Are Facebook Ads a waste of time?
We are just trying to experiment with Facebook ads again after a long break from doing so.
Initially, we were thrilled with the increased number of clicks to our SaaS landing page coming from these ads, but when we looked deeper, I began to grow suspicious. I've attached a screenshot of our Inspectlet dashboard, which we use to track screen activity when a user visits our site.
As you can see, nearly all visits are less than 20 seconds, and when we look at the screencast, the visitor just gets to the landing page - no clicks, no scrolling at all, then closes the screen after about 10 to 20 seconds.
Added to that, a lot of the IP addresses on the dashboard seem to be very close to each other. Is this indication of a click farm at work? Perhaps Facebook trying to increase their click ratios on ads on their platform? A competitor of ours burning up our 'per click' spend?
The bigger question - are Facebook ads a total waste of time nowadays?
They're not a waste — but they punish anyone who doesn't watch them closely. The problem is Meta gives you spend data but never tells you why something stopped working. That's where most people lose money
Facebook ads definitely are not a waste of time - but you need to set them up correctly. I ran B2B marketing for a SaaS company for a few years with high spend, and built a good relationship with Facebook during that time.
It is a complex subject and there's a lot of factors to consider that are specific to your funnel that can't be answered effectively here.
What I can see though is that your product seems to be a desktop app, right? Desktop traffic on Facebook is basically dead. You'll get a lot from Instagram ads (probably more than Facebook). If your product only really works on desktop, this means you need to make sure your app at least loads quickly and handles the initial signup easily (don't drop leads... it will only make acquisition too expensive). Then you will need to carefully nurture those leads across to desktop through drip emails etc. Monday.com who do a LOT of FB/IG ads used to have a good method for doing this (and probably still do). Use them for inspiration.
Our LPs for FB/IG ads were heavily designed for mobile traffic, conveyed only a small amount of info and loaded extremely quickly. Again, it is mobile traffic, so most probably won't be on decent connections. If your page is spinning away loading tracking scripts etc, the traffic is not high intent enough to wait around, so your bounce rate will be high. They also had no exit besides lead capture. Again, this is a tool employed by monday.com too. How are your LPs designed and hosted? Can you link to one here?
Most viewers of FB ads click to your facebook page, no matter how your CTA is. If you cant get value from a visit to your facebook page, do not advertise on facebook.
To determine if it's bot traffic you can code an invisible button into your lander or whatever. If it gets clicks it's most likely bot traffic.
Do the bots click on things? I guess that would make sense, but a lot of the traffic I see just bounces?
Maybe you could see if users are scrolling down / what percentage of the page they’re scrolling to? Hmm 🤔 will check if I have any of that info somewhere
I use this method regularly on affiliate campaigns. Mostly on native and other traffic sources. Works quite well.
Is there an average % of clicks that bots would make on a given button? Does it depend on # of buttons on the page?
Ie if the button gets pressed 5% or time, what % of traffic can we attribute to bots?
In general, the cost of FB ads is going up and the results are getting worse.
IME, takes a lot of time to build an audience through FB ads, so it needs to be part of a larger strategy.
You can’t just show one ad to someone and expect a result now, needs to be many ads over time + retargetting.
I follow the Julian.com article with some slight changes to the process and results are okay, depending on the target market. Would use other channels first, if possible.
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A few things that have worked for me recently:
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I’ve heard good things about messenger marketing, but haven’t implemented it
Facebook can be waste if your ads and auditory configurations wrong. Can you share screens of your ads configurations and we will try to find out what is wrong.
If you just put up a random ad that says "hey, buy my stuff" then yes, it's a waste of time especially for B2B.
If you have a good product, a solid funnel, a great creative and know how the platform works (learning phase, 50 conversions per week, CBO, etc.) it can work amazingly well.
I know media buyers who spend millions on the platform and although ROAS is going down year after year due to increased competition, they are still able to make a lot of money.
It really depends on the objective you set in your ad campaign. Facebook AI would send bot traffic to your site if thats your objective (they show your ads to people/bots who just click on any ad they see).
You might want to improve your funnel and let facebook optimize based on that. i.e create facebook pixel events when users click on signup now or another event and tell facebook to show the ads to similar audiences (LLA or Looklalike Audiences). however in order for Facebook AI to really help, the event signup for example have to be triggered by at least 1000 times by different people in specific country to show the ads to similar people effectively.
I had a look at your product and site and I'd guess you'd have a better chance of finding your customers with LinkedIn advertising.
If you share a picture of your ad I can give you some suggestions for different content/approach to try.
This comment was deleted 6 years ago.