I will answer your question with another: what metric are you using to measure ROI?
Edit: When you say you know lots of "marketers and advertisers" that are making money from ads, are you referring to resellers and providers of ad inventory and/or analytics, or are you referring to people who actually sell goods and services other than marketing and advertising inventory?
Return on investment for advertising is very simple:
net present average customer lifetime value acquired per unit of advertising cost
If it's over unity, you're making money with advertising, if it's not, you're wasting money on advertising or need to increase your CLTV or decrease your discount rate.
OK, so how is the success of that funnel measured vis-a-vis other promotional channels? And are you able to demonstrate definitively that a visitor from FB concluded a sale? If so, how?
I don’t understand why you seem to think that companies are throwing tens of billions of dollars a year at Facebook (and Google, and Twitter) with not only no returns but also no ability to measure that lack of returns. It’s just such a ridiculous viewpoint to hold.
I think so because the entire history of advertising is based on hiding the ball in terms of ROI. How many sales does a Super Bowl ad generate? How many does a billboard generate?
For some extremely simplistic e-commerce conversions, such as for referrals to SaaS, it is easy to measure. For entire swathes of consumer products, the game is brand recognition and other soft metrics that drive huge ad spends. You can pretend it’s a science, but the incentives are all upside down for a true end-to-end ROI determination.
It's really, really easy. And that is why Facebook and Google are printing money - vendors know it works and can measure exactly how well, so they throw money at them.
FWIW, I am not trolling. FB domains are deliberately blocked via my hosts file, and my business has nothing to do with consumer ads. I am just a skeptic of intertuption advertising effectiveness in general, and curious to see how rigorous the defense of FB advertising will be. I am still not convinced that click tracking is effective, but I’m willing to be wrong.
Yes. Facebook gives you a unique visitor id when they see the ad that persists and is included in the sale form. It's completely linear, and is tracked from beginning to end. Every click is tracked, and users are tracked even if they leave the website and return later.
There's hard, direct evidence involved in every step of the way.
> And, users are still very much annoyed by distracting, irrelevant, or overly-targeted ads.
How would you know, if only users who are actually annoyed are vocal about this?
I, for once, mostly see ads from the companies which I am already a happy and enthusiast customer of, for new versions of products that I enjoy. I even follow the industry news to know about new versions of these products and their reviews - and when I can't buy them, I genuinly enjoy watching youtube reviews about these products.
Do you honestly think that a person like me would be annoyed by these advertisements?
Don't you think that a _lot_ of people can say the same about their own product category that they're enthusiastic about? In my case, it's music software and hardware, but it could be cars, power tools, clothing or some other hobby that people enjoy spending their money on.
Sorry for the rant - I'm just tired of seeing the notion about how bad and annoying the ads are, when I see zero confirmation of this in my reality.
I get it. I like ads in Japan because they're entertaining. You're the first person I've ever hear of who enjoys being a target of online ads, so I'm still convinced that you are very, very unique.
Agree that we need to improve the quality of ads across the board.