[vibrunazo]

I just checked and Facebook gives you the option to buy ads per click, around $0.25 per click in my category. So why does it even matter if it has a low CTR? If the user didn't click, you didn't pay for it anyway. If the user does click, well there's your intent.

From my point of view as an advertiser, how is the CTR even relevant? Why do I care if google has 1% CTR and Facebook has 0,1%? If you assume both has the same cost per click. And I spend $100 on each. I'll still get the exact same amount of people clicking my ads on both.

Why does everyone keep repeating that facebook ads are only for branding, there's no intent, CTR is low? Doesn't the pay per click auction makes all of these irrelevant?

[glesica]

I don't necessarily disagree that CTR might not be the most relevant metric here, but at some point their revenue is limited by the CTR. If they have a billion page views per day, one ad per page (for simplicity) and a CTR of 0.1%, then their daily revenue is capped at 100 million * p where p is the average price per click.

So even if users coming from Facebook are more likely to actually buy something than those coming from Google (which would make Facebook ads more valuable than Google ads, all else equal), the CTR still creates a cap on how much they can earn.

[jack-r-abbit]

CTR is one piece. But conversion in another. And intent is important. Take two identical ads on Facebook and Google, with the same CTR and CPC, if the Google traffic has more intent to take action beyond the click (I'm not saying they are necessarily) then Google traffic is worth more. I worked in the LeadGen space for a good number of years and conversion rate is a very important piece of the puzzle. Generally speaking, intent leads to a better conversion. Plus, advertisers do them selves a disservice to attract higher clicks if that means their conversion rate is lower because the ad was bait. I've noticed that FB ads tend to have a spammy/scammy feel to them... bait.

[vibrunazo]

That perfectly answers my questions, thanks a lot.

Does anyone happen to have some real world example data of conversion rates between these ad platforms?

[prof_hobart]

You may get the same clicks/$ but you may get a significantly different numbers of clicks/day, and surely that's going to be an important consideration when you're deciding where to spend you advertising $.