In the summer of 2012, GM ditched its paid Facebook (FB) ads. Executives of the social media giant have been talking with GM executives trying to lure them back. When GM asked for evidence that FB ads are effective, FB executive Brad Smallwood told them that, in essence, a FB ad campaign starts to deliver results in approximately one year. Oops. A Wall Street Journal article then suggested that FB ads are impractical, in particular for small businesses, if it takes a year for a return on the advertising investment. Double oops.
Here at Blink Tech, we fundamentally disagree. Facebook, Google, and other social media and advertising sites are not directly responsible for the ROI of advertising.
Consider that there are four steps in the Internet-related sales cycle: Impression, click, conversion, and sale. At best, the responsibility for the first two steps falls to both the client (e.g., GM) and the provider (e.g., Facebook), while the success of the final two steps-including actually closing the deal-depends solely on the client. Think of it this way: Commercial landlords are not responsible for the sales of the renter, nor are the Facebooks and the Googles of this world responsible for getting clients to purchase products or services.
At Blink Tech, we devise for our clients successful ad campaigns, including a very sound, simple, yet sophisticated way to process clicks into conversions and-most importantly-supply additional data for our clients to calculate their ROI. A successful Internet marketing campaign is one where all the parts are clearly understood, properly engineered, and implemented.
We were not part of the context when the “one-year oops” was divulged, but because we have long-term experience in that field, Blink Tech suspects that this was mostly taking out of context.
When used correctly, Facebook is a wonderful venue for tailored ads, especially if a business owns data on its client demography and geography, the details of which we have elaborated in other articles and will continue doing so in future ones.
For now we just want to take this momentum to level the playing field and clarify the big picture, so that all can partake in this this elegant and productive process.
