Not specifically with Facebook, however social media referrals have never converted for me. I run Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Google+ and have had a few things shared quite widely, to the point of being viral - however the incoming traffic never earns much. I'm not sure if it's because Google devalues this traffic or because they're hit-and-run viewers who don't click ads.

My best converting ad-clicking users have always been from Google, Bing and Yahoo organic traffic. Everything else (including Facebook and Twitter) is a way distant second or third.

I have ran several ad campaigns on Facebook, and they are ALWAYS terrible.

My last campaign was $3,000, targeting a specific region (the state where I live). The site was for a state-specific online (free) service, and the ads were clearly worded so as to appeal to people that were specifically looking for that type of service.

Analytics showed that 98% of the clicks bounced (meaning they came to the homepage and then left quickly). This compared to my "regular" user that would view an average of 10 pages per session.

Worse, very few actually came from the region that I selected. Most came from much farther away.

So even though I had 2,000 new visitors within a week, as far as I can tell, none of them ever returned to the site, and I didn't make a penny on the traffic.

Since I've had this same experience since the beginning, I have to blame Facebook. Either the clicks are robots, or fake users, or just flat out lies.

I've suspected for years that Facebook "embellishes" about their traffic, too. My local region has a population of 70,000, and the FB Ad Manager says that 10,000 of them have an account. But I ran a campaign for a month to target that area, with a very high click bid to ensure 100% penetration, and it only ended up being shown 800 times (and never came close to reaching my maximum bid). So while they may have 10,000 accounts registered (which would include fake accounts), there's no way that they're all active users.

They claim to have 1.3 billion users, but only 54.2 million pages. How do you become a user without creating a page? They also claim that 25% of their traffic comes from the US, even though 25% of 1.3 billion is more than the entire population of the US (and, as I showed before, they only claim to have 17% of my local population). It just doesn't add up.

I suspect that everyone with Messenger on their phone is considered a daily log in, just because the app logs in to see if you have a message. It doesn't matter whether you open the app, because it does the log in for you.

I also suspect that they count viruses, robots, and hackers as legitimate log ins.

* [statisticbrain.com...]

Both are CIA funded, so you know your answer.

FB, and most social media sites, are not truly geared for advertisers as the interaction is generally inbred (meaning FB only) and the users are there for that, not "surfing the net".

I've never had anything remotely satisfactory from FB's "billions".

Thank you for the info cssdude. I've never really understood facebook's place. That puts a lot about it in perspective for me.

Thanks for all the inputs, interesting.

I have high traffic intensive sites and I will try my own hypothesis soon, i.e. creating a proxy page so Adsense won't see FB as the referral.