Nope. Stay away.
1/ Lead Quality is Horrendous
If you’re advertising a service, Facebook will quickly send you the contact details of “leads” (people who have filled out a form on your ad). Even though the cost per lead is usually relatively low, the quality of each lead is terrible. In our experience, more than half the “leads” don’t remember filling out your form or seeing your ad, many won’t ever respond to your follow-up, and the rest are tyre-kickers.
2/ The reporting metrics are just plain wrong
Metrics such as landing page views are often just wrong. They don’t match Google’s analytics stats, and different reporting platforms within Facebook don’t agree with each other. Check this ad below, which in the “Business“ section of Facebook (from ‘Business’ Facebook URL) shows zero landing page views for this ad:
And when viewing results for the same ad from the Ads Manager section of Facebook, it reports 68 landing page views:
You need more reliable data to make conclusions about the performance of your ads.
3/ The Facebook Advertiser Backend Interface is a complete Disaster
The Facebook Advertiser Backend Interface is a complete Disaster. I cannot overstate how frustrating it is to navigate the backend of Facebook for advertisers trying to set up or run an ad campaign. There are different reporting sections from multiple URLs, with metrics that don’t agree with each other (see example above).
View some of the YouTube videos on ‘how to advertise on Facebook’, and you’ll start to get a picture of how confusing and ever-changing the advertiser interface is.
Conclusion
If you’re considering running Facebook ads for your business, I believe you’ll waste a lot of time and money.