FouAnalytics shows Facebook advertising works

How do you know if your Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp campaigns are working? Of course, measure outcomes -- did those users that clicked through from your Facebook ads ultimately become customers and buy something? But what else can you do to check the effectiveness of your Facebook advertising and make sure the clicks you are getting are from humans and not bots. Right, use FouAnalytics on your landing pages and also measure the attentiveness of the users that arrive on your landing page.

A quick reminder -- attentiveness means the percent of users that did something on your site, like move the mouse, scroll the page, click something, or touch the screen on a smartphone. Humans that deliberately clicked an ad were curious about something so they are likely to do something on your site when they get there. Attentiveness is the opposite of high bounce, low time-on-site.

Note that the above statement -- Facebook advertising works -- only applies when you have turned off FAN ("Facebook Audience Network"). The audience network includes all the sites and apps outside of Facebook that chew through tons of ad impressions and deliver tons of meaningless clicks. Note the color differences above -- dark blue means humans clicking through to the landing page.

See the screen shot below. You have to change the radio button to "Manual Placements" in order to see the option to UNcheck "Audience Network." Turn off FAN to ensure your ads stay on the main properties, and thus avoid 90% of the ad fraud and fake clicks. Once you do this, you can move on to the following sections and optimize for higher attentiveness.

Note the examples below of FouAnalytics measuring what users did on the landing pages. The red clicks (and larger red circles) means repeated clicks on the same pixel on screen. These are faked clicks by bots. And these fake users and faked clicks can be avoided by turning off audience network. The blue clicks below are spread out across the page.

When looking at UTM_SOURCE=facebook for users on mobile devices, we also see a healthy amount of attentiveness -- clicks and touch events. Humans have to touch their smartphone screens in order to click something. So we can see that the data below corroborates.

FouAnalytics on-site tags can be added to Shopify pages and Hubspot pages. Many ecommerce sites use FouAnalytics to check the quality of the clicks arriving not just from Facebook campaigns, but all other paid digital channels. And adjust budget allocation accordingly - increase budget to sources with more dark blue, and reduce budget to sources with more dark red.

Advanced practitioners have tested the difference between branding/awareness campaigns on Instagram versus performance/click campaigns. While performance campaigns drove more clicks and higher click rates, attentiveness of the users on the landing page was not much different. They found that using lower cost awareness ads was more cost efficient. As long as new users were made aware of the product or service being advertised, and the ad creative did enough to generate interest, the humans that click through will do something on your landing page -- i.e. higher attentiveness -- which in turn leads to more conversions.

For more inspiration, see the following 2 stories

(2019) How Two Small Businesses Beat Ad Fraud

(2022) Slow Digital Marketing, Like Slow Juicing, Works Better