Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The tide began turning against the duopoly late last year when the fake news epidemic illustrated for many the lack of brand safety on Facebook and Google. Brands found out that their ads were showing up next to hate speech or agenda-driven fake news and were understandably miffed. 

Fueling that anger, Facebook was caught drastically inflating its time-spent metrics for video by as much as 60-80%. More recently, Google was caught doing something similar with AMP, its mobile-based publishing platform. 

Though both have subsequently agreed to third-party analyses of their operations, for many marketers, that was cold comfort since (in Facebook’s case, at least), the abuses had been happening over a long period of time. 

In late January, the industry found a spokesman for their discontent with Marc Pritchard, Procter & Gamble’s global CMO, who chastised the industry for its lack of transparency. More recently, Havas pulled its buys on Google and YouTube for UK-based clients in the name of brand safety. ...

In January 2017, Small Business Trends released the results of a survey of over twenty-six-hundred small business owners, revealing that sixty-two percent of them believe Facebook ads are ineffective. With complaints of little-to-no ROI, these entrepreneurs say they will not use Facebook advertising again. Some experts, however, challenge this viewpoint, saying that properly targeted Facebook ads do indeed, provide results.

"When businesses don't see the results they hope for, it's usually because they haven't done enough testing on their ad copy, visuals, and the ideal combination of information to target the right audience," says Vitruvian Digital Advertising Founder, Kristie McDonald.

Jeanine Blackwell, Founder of The Launch Lab agrees, saying that marketers aren't asking themselves the right questions to determine an effective target market for their ad campaigns. "The problem is that most advertisers only use the simplest of criteria to let Facebook know who they want to see their ads, such as gender, age, and income," says Blackwell. "When you couple this information with more insights on the behaviors and unique interests of your audience, you can deliver your ads only to people likely to be interested in what you offer."

Both experts agree that a testing budget as small as five or ten dollars a day, focusing on different mixes, can tell you what you need to know before you begin to invest larger amounts in your campaign....