Two of my friends run a wedding planning business. They gave up on targeted Facebook ads because they got MUCH better results using Adwords.
The ads were targeted to a nice big radius that included Lincoln, NE (a college town) and Omaha, NE (a big city, for NE). They targeted women in a specific age range, and if I remember correctly only women with a status of Engaged or In A Relationship. I think they may have aimed for relevant keywords as well. (I personally don't know the exact details of their ads, so I'm sticking to what I know for sure.)
I can't think of a more ideal targeted advertising scenario, and they got less traction on Facebook than they did via AdWords. That's either a REALLY bad reflection on Facebook's ad platform, or a really good one for AdWords, or both.
(Their business is doing really well, for the record.)
Your friends probably tried to do the same thing that they were doing on AdWords, but targeting people instead of keywords. (I am assuming here, so please correct me if I'm wrong)
This doesn't work because they have to approach the people differently; for wedding planning, I would instead do something along the lines of "read these 10 tips to keep your wedding amazing" or "use our free wedding plan tracker"
With an approach based on interest, your friends can educate people and get them thinking in order to follow up for more information. Instead of a hard sell, hit them with a soft one that helps them feel like your friends know what they need.
Facebook ads would have to be really, really terrible for their claims to be true. According to another Forbes piece, $40M is not even 1% of GM's ad spend per year.
And this is where all the young consumers are spending hours per day. And lot of car ads are just about brand awareness; they don't depend on intent, or even clickthroughs. Seems fishy to me.
Well if Facebook ads DO work (at least for GM) I don't believe they would have pulled their campaign no matter what ulterior motives they may have. Sales are sales.
That's pretty ridiculous. The marketing department of GM isn't worried about the best deal. It's great if they can save money, but how much could GM really be saving with, oh I don't know, let's just say, Google? Keep in mind they spent $10 million on Facebook. One tv ad during the Super Bowl is probably half that. If GM believed they would lose sales by ending Facebook ads, they wouldn't end them. Even if that were true, you aren't going to sabotage a projected $100 billion IPO with a $10 million account.
It would certainly be better for Facebook if this were a conspiracy, but I don't believe that's what's happening here.
Perhaps the author has been sitting on said story for a while and decided to publish it at point of maximum impact? It's likely to get a lot more attention now than it would do at almost any other time.
