The effectiveness of advertising on Facebook has been called into question after the BBC set up a spoof firm and found many of ‘likes’ it received – the advertising currency – were from bogus visitors.
The service on offer was from “Virtual Bagel” and was described as “We send you bagels via the internet just download and enjoy”.
During the first 24 hours of advertising Virtual Bagel got over 1,600 likes, a figure which had reached 3,000 by the time the video report was filmed. All for an advertising spend of just over £30.
BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones targeted the ads at countries including the US, UK, India, Egypt, Malaysia and the Philippines. He found that nearly all the likes came from the last four countries in that list.
Significantly Egyptian teens aged 13 to 17 made up 75% of the likes Virtual Bagel garnered. The US and UK are among the most valuable markets to advertisers but were represented very thinly in the results. When the ad was adjusted to target just the UK, click-through rate fell to 10% of its previous level.
In the ad, users were chosen with interests in cooking, health and well-being and early adopters of technology. Facebook offered a tempting metric as he clicked through these options; the ad would appeal to 66 million of its users.
The BBC heard from a social media marketing consultant who ran Facebook campaigns for clients. He has received similar results to the BBC Virtual Bagel experiment.
Clients were initially pleased with the amount of likes the ads achieved but later they questioned the value of the likes as most of them were also from 13 to 17 year olds in the Philippines and Egypt. Also one client refused to pay after looking through the likes and seeing a lot of the names/identities were obviously made up.
Facebook claimed the lack of interest by the UK and US audience and the multitude of likes from East Asia teens was due to poor targeting. A spokesman said: “Facebook offers the most targeted advertising of any medium… The targeting tools are there for a reason, and they work.”
