What difference does it make? If it’s profitable, it’s profitable.
> And are you able to demonstrate definitively that a visitor from FB concluded a sale? If so, how?
Through the variety of existing measurement solutions, or a custom solution.
Twitter: https://business.twitter.com/en/help/campaign-measurement-an...
Facebook: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-pixel/pixel-wi...
Google: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/1722054?hl=en
I don’t understand why you seem to think that companies are throwing tens of billions of dollars a year at Facebook (and Google, and Twitter) with not only no returns but also no ability to measure that lack of returns. It’s just such a ridiculous viewpoint to hold.
For some extremely simplistic e-commerce conversions, such as for referrals to SaaS, it is easy to measure. For entire swathes of consumer products, the game is brand recognition and other soft metrics that drive huge ad spends. You can pretend it’s a science, but the incentives are all upside down for a true end-to-end ROI determination.
The other half of the promise is that you can target exactly the 'right' people. And this seems sketchier to me, as the article kinda gets at: as targeting complexity increases, it's harder to tell whether problems are arising due to market fit or issues in the targeting algorithms. In the old world, you bought ads on content, and now you buy ads on eyeballs: my guess is that there's an unexplored happy medium between the two.
It's trivial easy to add a tracking id to this (in-fact I think it is on by default)
And are you able to demonstrate definitively that a visitor from FB concluded a sale? If so, how?
I think people are a little confused about if you are trolling or you genuinely don't know.
Anyway, https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-pixel/pixel-wi... (and plenty of other methods)
It's really, really easy. And that is why Facebook and Google are printing money - vendors know it works and can measure exactly how well, so they throw money at them.
There's hard, direct evidence involved in every step of the way.
