Advertisers Beware! Facebook Ad is Taking Credit for Your Direct Traffic.

Recently we started using Facebook Ads for Pothi.com. And ran into a problem that must be familiar to most Facebook advertisers. The click-through numbers reported by Facebook were nowhere close to the numbers reported by Google Analytics on our site.

So, we searched around and put into place some more tracking setup so that we could have more accurate data on traffic coming from Facebook Ads. But the traffic number tracked on our site was still about only 25% of what Facebook reported.

Then we studied the potential reasons on Facebook’s official page about it.

Some of those are reasonable, but 75% of the traffic not being reported was still too much! Then the following caught our eyes –

Umm… What?

Because a person saw my ad on Facebook (correction – Facebook served the ad, whether the person saw or ignored it can hardly be known!) and later visited my site, it will be counted as Facebook’s conversion? Even though he didn’t click on the ad?

Pothi.com is not a new venture. We already have many customers, many of whom are on Facebook, many of whom might be served the ad. Later they log in to check the status of their order or their sales dashboard, or to upload a new book, and Facebook takes credit (and money!) for that?

I may even be running other promotions elsewhere. And it is one those other promotions that may have brought this person to my site. But that too will go to Facebook’s credit (and pocket)?

When I advertised for InstaScribe in the beginning, most of the traffic was coming from Facebook ads. So I think this problem was not too big. But with Pothi.com, which has an existing user base and traffic, this is just ridiculous.

So, please don't rely on what CPC numbers Facebook reports for your ad. Do you own tracking and calculations. In my case, the cost per click is four times of what Facebook would have me believe.

Certain types of ad options on Facebook are known to be utterly spurious. I have never heard anyone getting any genuine results with post boosts or for the ads run with the objective of increasing likes. I always choose website clicks or other actions as ad objectives that bring the users directly to me and not just drive traffic to Facebook's properties. Given all the data Facebook has, targeting the ads correctly can bring good results. But the takeaway from the current experience is that even with the correct objective and correct targeting, Facebook's measurements are evil and cannot be trusted. Do your own measurements.