If you didn’t know, until September 2010, Facebook actually had a very nice conversion tracking program. Yes, in the start of their program, when they actually liked affiliates, they had an entire affiliate team that dealt with their questions. Well, for those who follow Facebook, sometime last year they decided to completely stop supporting affiliates and doing all their best to prevent direct response programs from being promoted on Facebook. In fact, they’ve admitted that they’ve completely blocked the urls from several major affiliate networks.
So what is this about them coming back with Conversion Tracking, you say? Well, according to reports by several companies, Facebook actually has a conversion tracking program that allows special advertisers to track conversions from Facebook and optimize. Note that this is only allowed for “special advertisers” and the general public can’t use it. Why? Simply put, Facebook has been attempting to move away from being a ROI based platform like, Google and convince brands that they need to use it mainly for branding.
If they let everyone know that many agencies have access to this conversion tracking back-end, then people will start asking the real question about Facebook: What is its value, how good is it really for advertisers. With the average facebook user seeing hundreds if not thousands of ads a day, brands have to believe that the expensive prices they are getting for 100 likes to their page is worthwhile. Simply put, Facebook isn’t Google and the ad value is much much less than Google.
