[butner]

Is +2pts of people who say they're more likely to buy worth 4x the budget? Hard to say... "During the eight-week campaign, 18.1 million women aged 45 and up saw at least one ad, according to Nielsen’s research. That was 56 percent of the target audience. The number who said they were now more likely to buy MegaRed rose by two percentage points."

Seems like the classic media sales approach is alive and well, and that it's boosting Facebook's revenues. The issue is that the way that Facebook shares data (or rather doesn't) makes meaningful analysis possible. "the [Facebook] ad strategists were saying they wanted him to spend money to show ads to every American woman 45 and older on Facebook — as many as 32 million people."

no kidding...

[Bahamut]

If you read the article carefully, you would have saw that revenues were twice as efficient as traditional ads during the campaign. That's a big win.

Whether you can extrapolate those results to even more improvement by spending more on FB is debateable though.

[7Figures2Commas]

That's according to one company's analysis which is not described in any detail. Worth noting is this:

> R.B. was also running TV ads, handing out samples and doing in-store marketing at the same time, but the company says the Facebook campaign contributed to the gains.

Don't get me wrong: there are some very smart people trying to figure the ROI calculus out. But that doesn't mean that producing solid answers is easy or even possible.

One of the biggest problems in my opinion is that few people involved have an incentive to come to the conclusion that Facebook ads aren't effective.

Facebook obviously wants to prove that its ads work. Brand marketers want to prove that the money they spend isn't being wasted. And the data/measurement companies, many of which count the brand marketers as clients and Facebook as a partner, wouldn't have a business if they concluded that there was no ROI.

The Upton Sinclair quote "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it" is very appropriate to many aspects of modern day marketing.

[butner]

It says twice as much as they spent on the ads. That's a measure relative to the ad spend, not a performance measure compared to their other channels or campaigns. Big difference.

"the campaign generated about twice as much revenue as R.B. spent on the ads"

Which is put into light by the channel cost comparison from the article: “I can go to television at a quarter the price.”

[cldellow]

Is the channel cost comparison relevant given that we don't have the ROI of TV spend?

[butner]

ROI for other channels vs FB would indeed be the missing variables that would give context to the article. Cost of channel (TV in this case) is part of ROI, and it's the only other hint provided.