Why not to advertise on social networks

Some time ago, we decided to run a test on several platforms and found too many inconsistencies in the marketing campaigns carried out on social media, and we discovered that, unfortunately, they are not reliable. Let's analyze a case where things don't go so well.

Let's study the case of X, formerly Twitter.

We decided to create a campaign to attract more users. The purpose of the campaign is to generate visits to the website. However, everything seems very strange when you begin to analyze the details of the information in the results.

Unfortunately, the results don't match, nor is the information displayed real. Since the main purpose is to attract users, it's very easy to manage this information using Google Analytics, because it shows you fairly accurate information about visits, both in real time and over time.

However, here we can see the following image of the advertising campaign's testing period.

Then we can see the results obtained for each click on the page.

And now we analyze Google Analytics, and the information is completely incorrect. Besides Google Analytics, there are other tracking systems, but the numbers also don't match. Now, based on the user information and the campaign's Target Persona type, when we look at the users who have interacted with the ad, it DOESN'T match either because it tells us that users from DIFFERENT COUNTRIES AND PROFESSIONS have interacted, users who have 1 follower, 1 post, and are relatively new to the X platform. Which doesn't make sense.

We ran several campaigns to test this behavior, and it's not an AD issue; it's merely a platform failure. First, the visit requirements aren't met, nor are user interactions. Furthermore, the AD analytics indicate that it has had over 100,000 views and over 200 clicks, which is NOT TRUE.

In conclusion, we assume that creating ads on social media isn't feasible. We've seen the same ad on other people's posts up to seven times in their comments.

Our recommendation is to generate content based on interactions on social media and not pay for advertising on them, unless you have a huge budget and are willing to pay large sums of money for something that isn't 100% secure.