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Comment by Mahn | Hacker News Reader

> Facebook ad spending is a waste; do companies actually get a ROI on all the money they give to Facebook?

Yes they do, and yes they know. Facebook is very effective at reaching qualified leads, it's not "likes" or "engagement" what advertisers are buying.

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Maybe for a small subset of the total advertising spend, but for the big players, they can't always be sure which part of their revenue can be attributed to Facebook and which part can be attributed to other sources or which part can be attributed to their sheer scale (everyone knows about Coca Cola, but that won't stop the company from spending big on advertising). Companies like Procter and Gamble started scaling back their Facebook ad spend; they had no idea what their FB ROI was until they actually started scaling back and they realized that it was essentially $0.

I don't think that lead generation ad spending on facebook represents a small subset of the total advertising spend on there. Sure, there are always going to be monolithic companies that market poorly on facebook, but from my experience this is not the norm, and a lot of companies and startups are marketing on facebook without blindly throwing money at it.

If they can't measure their ROI, big or small the players, it's their fault, not Facebook. It's not that hard to deploy direct marketing campaigns and monitor conversions. It's actually the ABC of online marketing.

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