In a word, no. There are many problems with Facebook’s advertising products, but the bottom line is that they simply don’t work particularly well.

The key advantage of Facebook from an advertiser’s perspective is the amount of data that they have about their users (i.e. you and me). This allows one to target adverts to people with specific interests, demographics, age groups, etc. Although Google Ads does offer some of these features, the data they have simply doesn’t compete.

However, the downside far outweighs the up – and that is that Facebook largely only offers interruptive adverts, and that these have a very poor click through rate. On top of that, if someone does click, data shows that they are much less likely to engage with your brand or to make a purchase than a visitor you receive through organic or paid search. The reason is simple – with search, you are targeting people at the very moment that they are making a purchasing decision, whereas Facebook adverts, as with traditional advertising models, rely on gaining attention by distraction. And that kind of attention is never going to last long! And let’s not even think about promoted posts…

As a caveat, in some situations, Facebook advertising can work well, but only when you have a very precise target demographic that you know are engaged with Facebook and whom you can target at very precise times – back to school offers for working parents, for example, or custom prom-tickets for schools.

Finally, we’ll leave you with these two excellent videos that go into more depth about the problems of advertising on Facebook. They are well worth 20 minutes of your time.