Facebook reported fake numbers to advertisers

I keep warning small time (ie most) FB page owners who advertise on FB to be very very careful as they are being subjected to a beefed up version of the psychological manipulation that regular users face as they, not the regular users, are the main customers.

Facebooks corporate incentive is to get you to FEEL like your getting good value out of advertising on Facebook and to get you addicted to doing it.

Not to actually deliver results.

So don't trust any metric they show you, because even if its not a total fabrication it's still presented in a way to deceive you to think its better than it is.

Always monitor your ROI and always calculate it using your truly end goal (sales, or in the case of civil society some sort engagement off Facebook that's tightly bound to you mission). Likes, shares, comments and reach should NEVER be the goal. Even if FBs interface is trying to convince you otherwise.

To make this worse - FB actively undermines your ability to validate their results!

They remove OrderId's because they deem them "PII" (what!?) and just report number of conversions and conversion dollar amounts.

This, coupled with the complexity of referral tracking, lookback windows, browsers clearing cookies, etc... it becomes nearly (or completely!) impossible to validate any results from FB's ad platform.

Added to that, FB's ad platform's goal seems to be to spend your entire daily budget... every single day... regardless of ROAS. That's just absurd.

Trust Us - they say...

Attribution adds another messy metric. I’ve had many transactions claimed by multiple advertising platforms. Yikes.

And ROAS is Google’s main measure of return, it’s a poor metric because it has nothing to do with profit.