Why Does Facebook Refuse To Support Its Advertisers?

Advertising on social media can be an extremely effective way to get your business in front of potential customers. Despite the recent popularity of TikTok, you might be surprised to discover that Facebook still has the largest market share of users in the United States, followed by YouTube and Twitter. This makes Facebook an ideal candidate when considering social media advertising.  TikTok has less than a 2% market share of US Based social media

Facebook’s sophisticated targeting capabilities and ability to advertise on Instagram are what make it an attractive social media platform to invest your advertising dollars. You can target your ads toward people of a certain age group, in specific locations, with common interests.

That said, Facebook’s advertising platform is very complex and can be confusing. It’s not uncommon for businesses to invest in Facebook ads and fail to see a positive return. Advertising on Facebook will not be effective for all business types, and it’s important to consider the aspects and risks before you decide to invest in Facebook advertising.

Here are some important considerations before advertising on Facebook, based on our agency’s experience:

User Account And Facebook Business Page

You cannot run ads on Facebook unless you have a Facebook Business page. This is a page similar to your personal profile page except it’s all about your business. Facebook uses your business page to create your ads, pulling in your logo and business description. If you haven’t created one yet, then you’ll need to do so before creating an advertising campaign.

Facebook’s Refusal To Support Advertisers

When considering spending your advertising dollars on Facebook, you must consider the platform’s non-existent advertiser support. Facebook provides zero help to advertisers, and it’s been this way for over a decade. There is no support phone number. They don’t have account reps assigned to agencies. The FAQ pages are often outdated, and there is no support email address. This should be taken into consideration.

Our agency’s Facebook login was hacked on October 19, 2022 and we were not able to access our business page, client business pages and client advertising accounts for over 3 months. We filed a support ticket immediately and were told it would be resolved in 48 hours. Three of our clients have since seen fraudulent charges on their credit cards and the hacker’s email address can still be seen in our Facebook business account. The hacker listed himself as an admin and demoted our user privileges. Facebook did nothing for over three months, while we communicated daily with oversees staff with fake American names to help restore our access. There is no phone number and no email address for support. Some of our client business pages had tens of thousands of followers.  We know several other agencies that have endured the same experience.

Facebook’s complete lack of advertising support is extremely important to consider when determining whether you want to advertise on its platform, especially given its most recent layoffs.  It wasn’t until we published this article and a similar article on Forbes that we saw some movement on our open ticket.

Measuring The Results Of Your Campaign

Once your campaign has been created, you want to be able to measure the results. It’s easy to get lost in all the statistics. Try to focus on what’s important for your business—new customers and sales. Facebook has a pixel you can create and put on your website, which allows you to determine who clicked on your ad and then completed a form or purchase on your website. This allows you to tell which customers are coming from your ad campaign.

You might also want to create a special landing page for your ad campaign. This way you know all the visitors to that page came from your Facebook ad. We often use Google Analytics to validate the data on a Facebook ad campaign. If your Facebook ad campaign says it sent 300 visitors to your website and you are only seeing 25 visitors on Google Analytics, then you have a problem. These discrepancies happen often and are important to consider when advertising on Facebook.

While there are a lot of potential benefits for advertising on Facebook, it’s also important to consider the whole picture.  Spending thousands of dollars per month on an ad platform that has zero support for its advertisers may not be a wise move for your organization.

Thank you for reading!