[123e1daAdfafsdf]

I run mostly direct response campaigns, so conversion focused. Take it for what it's worth.

I would never trust the numbers reported in any ad interface to accurately reflect reality. But, why should I care if it reflects objective reality? I'm only trying to get X conversions for $Y.

For me, building the "fraud" or poor accounting into my economic model is how you play the game. I don't care if FB sends me 500 visits at $1 each, with 20% bots. I just care that I spent $500, for $conversion_result.

People who do branding campaigns may feel differently because they're reporting on how many humans saw their message. I don't think that's a big deal, but I also think branding campaigns are a waste of money anyhow.

[shostack]

Fully agree with your view on the DR side of things. There are obviously questions as to the incremental lift of a given view-through conversion (especially for campaigns where the vast majority of conversions or VTs).

However branding campaigns definitely can work, they are just hard as hell to measure somewhat accurately without LOTS of budget, fancy software, focus groups and statistical modeling. You need a large amount of data to notice the needle moving, and that just isn't always feasible.