On the efficacy of Facebook ads

Here are the results from my ad campaign. It ran for about ten days.

So, did it work? Well, assuming Facebook isn't just making up numbers, they showed my ads 129,118 times to 31,662 people. Some people must have seen them a lot more than once, so I guess I'm kind of the MeUndies of puzzle card games. That's a lot of potential views. However, there were only 37 clicks on the ad, which is a fraction of a percent of the people who saw it.

Was it worth it? Well, I spent a little over $50, which means that I need to sell six games to cover the costs. I likely didn't. At this point, I have sold about eight games to people to whom I don't have a known personal connection. All but one of those were on Amazon, which wasn't where Facebook pointed. So, I can't possibly have made back my investment, unless all eight of these sales came from Facebook click-throughs that somehow ended up on Amazon, which is really unlikely. It's far more likely that I have zero sales from Facebook. My Google Analytics aren't really robust enough to track sales yet, because I handle the transactions on my site through PayPal, and I lose the thread of connectivity once they go shopping. I'm working on that, but it isn't really an issue with only one PayPal sale so far that I don't know the source for.

Caveats:

• People may have seen the ad, become interested, but intend to buy later.
• People may have seen the ad, stored a scrap of brand awareness in their subconscious memories, and have a vague positive association if they encounter it later.

Conclusion: 

For me, Facebook ads seem to have a return on investment value near zero.

Jury's still out on Google ads (the numbers are a lot lower), but I suspect it's similar. My guess at this point is that most of the sales for which I don't know the origin come from Amazon searches.